Feminist Positionality: Renegade Architecture in a Certain Ambiguity

Abstract

I am an Asante woman; who was born in London, raised in Nairobi and Accra, studied in Cape Coast, London and Los Angeles, and now works in Doha, after employment stints in Kabul, Herat, and the South Caucasus (based out of Tbilisi). For these and many other reasons, I suffer a contradictory crisis of being placeless and yet simultaneously filled with knowledge and ownership of different languages of urban space. This may well account for my obsession with deciphering the politics of urban space and what my role—as an African woman—is in that place of quintessential social struggle. Simply because I also believe that it is especially in these urban geohistorical landscapes that women like myself experience the tension between the global pull away from the push of “traditional” cultural practices, which are fast becoming nostalgic memories. Nowadays, we live in diasporic conditions even when ensconced in our homelands.