Thematic calls
The Journal of Architecture welcomes contributions to a series of thematic calls that mark a strategic shift in how the journal curates and sustains scholarly conversations. These thematic calls are designed to support ongoing engagement with key questions in architectural research that cut across architectural theory, design, history, and practice, while also drawing from and contributing to debates in allied disciplines such as design, urban studies, anthropology, political ecology, and science and technology studies.
Unlike conventional special issues, which are typically defined by a one-off publication cycle and coordinated by guest editors, thematic calls at The Journal of Architecture are open-ended. They form part of the journal’s regular editorial process, allowing contributions to be submitted, reviewed, and published on a rolling basis. This structure enables the journal to respond dynamically to emerging intellectual concerns while offering authors the flexibility to submit work in alignment with their own research trajectories, rather than to a fixed deadline.
Current calls:
Architectures of extraction and repair
The architecture of borders
Rural (re)configurations
Beyond the human
Post-architectures
Design as method
(Re)Learning architecture
Appropriating architecture
Each thematic call centres on a carefully defined concern that reflects the evolving priorities of architectural scholarship, such as ecological crisis, decoloniality, infrastructures of repair, post-disciplinary practice, or more-than-human design. These themes are not narrow or prescriptive. Rather, they are invitations to explore architecture’s conceptual boundaries, methodological possibilities, and socio-ecological responsibilities. The journal seeks work that not only reflects on existing conditions but reimagines how architecture might be understood, studied, and practiced in relation to the complex realities of the world.
Submissions to these calls may take the form of theoretical inquiry, historical analysis, empirical research, or practice-based reflection. We are especially interested in work that challenges disciplinary assumptions, draws from under-represented contexts, or engages architecture through relational and critical perspectives. Thematic calls are open to both established and emerging scholars, and contributions will be reviewed and published as part of the journal’s regular issues, while remaining clearly indexed under the relevant theme.
Thematic calls also reflect the journal’s commitment to long-term intellectual stewardship. They are curated and maintained by the editorial team rather than being tied to specific guest editors or institutional projects. This approach ensures that The Journal of Architecture remains consistent in its editorial vision while continuing to evolve in dialogue with the broader field. We welcome contributions that treat architecture as a process, relation, and proposition.
Architectures of extraction and repair: material politics, planetary crisis, and the ethics of making
Leads: Deljana Iossifova and Christoph Lueder
By consolidating extraction and repair within a single thematic frame, this call interrogates architecture’s material and ethical obligations in a world of limits. It challenges the discipline to move beyond narratives of innovation and growth, offering instead a space for critical reflection on (architectural) survival, endurance, and transformation. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on planetary urbanism, post-growth futures, and the politics of infrastructural life. Read more.
The architecture of borders: infrastructures, relations, and everyday practices
Leads: Deljana Iossifova and Debapriya Chakrabarti
This thematic call seeks to reposition architecture as a critical site in the making and unmaking of borders. Drawing attention to the spatialised mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, it challenges the discipline to account for the fine-grained, often invisible ways in which borders are produced and sustained across multiple and nested scales. It also foregrounds architecture’s potential to disrupt and reimagine bordering practices, contributing to broader debates on spatial justice, planetary urbanisation, and the politics of difference. Read more.
Rural (re)configurations: architecture beyond the urban imaginary
Lead: Weijie Hu and Deljana Iossifova
Architectural discourse has long privileged the urban as its primary site of inquiry, reinforcing an implicit hierarchy in which the city is seen as the locus of architectural innovation, economic dynamism, and cultural production. The rural, by contrast, is frequently framed as peripheral – either a space of nostalgia, loss, and stagnation or a passive site for resource extraction and urban expansion. Yet, contemporary transformations in rural regions – shaped by shifting economies, climate change, migration, infrastructural developments, and technological interventions – demand a fundamental reconsideration of architecture’s relationship with the rural. How might architecture engage with these processes in ways that do not simply reproduce urban-centric logics? What alternative spatial imaginaries emerge when rural landscapes are understood as generative spaces for architectural thought and practice? Read more.
Beyond the human: multispecies and more-than-human architectures
Lead: Deljana Iossifova and Debapriya Chakrabarti
This thematic collection challenges architecture to confront the exclusions embedded in its human-centred paradigms and to imagine alternative futures grounded in interspecies responsibility, ecological interdependence, and spatial justice. By extending architecture’s methodological and conceptual reach, it contributes to urgent cross-disciplinary efforts to reconfigure life in a more-than-human world. Read more.
Post-architectures: rethinking the discipline’s limits
Lead: Debapriya Chakrabarti and Deljana Iossifova
This collection seeks to problematise architecture’s disciplinary coherence and to foreground alternative modes of thinking and practising architecture in a world marked by instability, exclusion, and infrastructural complexity. In doing so, it contributes to wider efforts to provincialise dominant architectural epistemologies and to explore what forms of spatial intelligence are necessary and possible in the face of ecological, political, and ontological transformation. Read more.
Design as method: rethinking architectural research through practice
Leads: Deljana Iossifova and Christoph Lueder
This thematic collection seeks to reposition methodology as a critical concern in architectural research, opening space for reflexivity, experimentation, and theoretical rigour in the study and practice of design. It contributes to ongoing debates about the status of practice-based research, the politics of knowledge production, and the possibilities of design as a critical, situated, and relational mode of inquiry. Read more.
(Re)Learning architecture: in search of consistency
Lead: Pari Riahi and Doreen Bernath
This thematic call invites critical reflection on the conditions, commitments, and contradictions of teaching and learning architecture in a time of intersecting crises. Amid disillusionment with entrenched pedagogies and growing pressures to instrumentalise education, we ask how architectural training might sustain a sense of consistency – understood as an enduring orientation toward curiosity, ethical responsibility, and transformative possibility. Contributors are encouraged to interrogate the pedagogical structures, epistemologies, and practices that shape architectural education across diverse contexts, and to explore how modes of teaching and learning might be reconfigured to respond meaningfully to shifting social, environmental, and disciplinary horizons. Read more.
Appropriating architecture: owning, commoning, and curating
Lead: Christoph Lueder and Debapriya Chakrabarti
By highlighting culturally bound concepts of belonging, this thematic collection challenges the politics of commodification and makes space for discourse about emergent architectures and multiplayer ecologies of owning, commoning and curating. Read more.