After successful completion of the course, students are able to understand the concept of scientific work.
They are able to write an independent seminar paper on a self-defined topic according to scientific criteria.
This includes the critical examination of the set work topic, the gender inclusivity of the educational and scientific context in architecture.
They have knowledge of dealing with relevant literature, narrowing down the topic and formulating their own research question, structuring the material and the seminar paper, scientific articulation as well as layout and design.
Architecture represents an important discipline in the design of the built environment.
This should be gender- and diversity-responsive to enable inclusive economic and social development.
This requires gender-inclusive planning and decision-making processes.
In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations commits to the implementation of sustainable inclusive cities and communities as well as gender equality, full participation of women and equal opportunities in decision-making and leadership roles.
Therefore, structural and substantive issues of equality and inclusion are already highly relevant in architectural education and also in the academic context.
Awareness of existing inequalities and exclusion is highly important.
The collective Claiming*Spaces at the Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Planning at TU Wien has been making contributions to this since 2019, including in diverse courses.
Everyone at the faculty can and should contribute to improving the situation.
Successful measures to make compulsory courses and research projects more gender-inclusive and to reduce discrimination against students, teachers, researchers are known from international best-practice examples.
Aim of the course
After an initial theoretical approach to the topic, the following four set of questions concerning teaching at the Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Planning at the Vienna University of Technology will be examined:
- How diverse is the faculty's teaching and research staff? Who studies architecture? (WHO.)
- How gender-inclusive-feminist-intersectional is the content of the compulsory courses in the bachelor's and master's programs and what research content is included? (WHAT.)
- How gender-sensitive is the interaction of teachers with students and of students with each other? (HOW)
- How gender-inclusive-feminist-intersectional are the premises of the faculty or are framework conditions of online teaching? (WHERE)
How does the respective situation present itself and which inequalities, discriminations and exclusions need to be remedied?
Which already successful international improvement measures can and should institutes and research areas of our faculty establish?
Significant interim results are to be presented on December 11th at the Claiming*Spaces Conference #2 at AzW Architekturzentrum Wien.
Final results are to be incorporated into a manual for gender-inclusive feminist-transsectional architectural teaching, which will be developed through several courses within the Claiming*Spaces collective.
In the first group sessions, the context of the work topic is established and the seminar leader provides impulses and reading texts.
Students acquire knowledge and discuss and reflect on it in the four thematic groups.
Within the groups, individual work is done, starting with a short presentation on the topic of their choice.
This is followed by the preparation of an exposé with a defined question as a preliminary stage of the seminar paper.
The writing of the scientific work is explained and important aspects such as literature research, finding a title, content framework, writing in chapters, correct citation, the layout as well as the creation of bibliography and list of figures are discussed.
At each meeting, the respective status of the seminar paper is discussed individually, and all participants also learn from feedback on other papers.
At the end of the semester, the seminar papers will be presented and discussed.
