PhD position - Urban Pedagogies for the Digital Age

On this PhD project you examine how digital literacy can produce a form of urban literacy, and how lack of knowledge on the relation between architecture and digital technologies also leads to an impediment in understanding how urban life is influenced by both. To counter this, you will explore and propose novel pedagogical methods that can incorporate different educational levels and domains in a transdisciplinary manner. You will explore a broad field of research that includes (among others) architecture and urban theory, pedagogy, philosophy and philosophy of technology, cognitive sciences, digital media and artistic research. Through your research, you will develop an extended and inclusive overview of current methods in teaching and practising architecture digitally, as well as set the foundations for novel urban pedagogies for the digital age. Your research will form a comprehensive body that manages to initiate an in-depth discussion and re-evaluation of our pedagogies, aiming to enhance our (architectural) power over (digital) power through new forms of acquiring and disseminating knowledge.

You will be part of the Architecture Theory (AT) academic group and of the Ecologies of Architecture (EoA) research group of the Department of Architecture. The AT focuses on developing and teaching courses of architecture theory, from theory theses to lecture series and from reading seminars to design studios. Next to the AT, the EoA promotes a transdisciplinary research approach by insisting on the entanglement and irreducibility between the environment, the individual and the collective. As such, the EoA understands architecture as being capable of actively producing both diverse cultures and heterogeneous collectives, both the norms and values of our everyday life, as well as the material equipment that supports and differentiates us.