Hi, I'm Alan Dunyo Avorgbedor. I'm a Ghanaian-Jamaican-American architectural historian, critical theorist, artist & analog texturizer, and attorney admitted to practice law in Washington D.C. I’m currently an Assistant Professor at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. I hold a B.A. in English Literature from The Ohio State University and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law. I briefly attended the Knowlton School of Architecture as a M.Arch candidate before transitioning to an Individualized Doctoral program at Concordia University in Montreal, QC, where I successfully defended my dissertation “African Technicity and Architectures of Being” (December 2021). During my Ph.D, I was awarded and completed a Doctoral Residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal as part of their 2018 Doctoral Residency program. I write, film, record, and compose poetry. See below, for more about my current doctoral Research, Courses & Curricula, and personal aesthetics.

Individualized/Interdisciplinary Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec

My research has generally been trained on the legibility of tectonic and/or compositional systems as they relate to aesthetic expression. I have been specifically interested in architectural frameworks and modes of figuration that complicate the affective legislation of subject and object in an aesthetic composition. Consequently, my research generally explores the constitution of subjectivity through affective productions and aesthetic legacies, either imported or indigenous, in architectural, design, and planning environments.

Currently, my research interrogates some of the philosophical, legal, architectural, and aesthetic norms that guide and at the same time complicate the mobilities of postcolonial urban development in West Africa. To the extent that my research explores architecture and its relationship to pragmatic, aesthetic, and social mobilities, I am engaged in critical and philosophical readings regarding the mediation and mobility of the body in commodity driven spaces and narratives. I seek to develop an understanding of architecture as a kind of socio-technical complexity that at once defines and normalizes access to "architecture" but also affords interstitial movements and negotiations through the margins of informality, unauthorized derivative settlements, and culturally specific mediations of performance and tradition. Ultimately, I’m interested in the ways that these modes of social organisation and African embodied relations to natural and built environments project meaningful decolonial imperatives that subvert aesthetic, institutional, and governmental norms in postcolonial spaces.

Undergraduate Courses that I have designed and taught:

(McGill University)
ARCH 355 ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 4: Africa. Architecture. Modernity.

This course serves as a critical introduction to the complexities and possibilities of African architectural expression and its relationship to the project of "modern architecture." I’ve designed the course in a manner that will focus student attention on a selection of West African aesthetic norms and sensibilities to develop an understanding of how conventional notions of architecture and modernity are mediated, challenged, or displaced in West African contexts. Significantly, the course embraces discourses from African architects, artists, writers, thinkers, and curators, to engage the dynamics of an African aesthetic and to provide a deeper cultural framework from which to complicate notions of Africa, Architecture, and Modernity. The course is organized around readings, class discussions, presentations and papers that develop critical tools to analyze and address the sociocultural, political, economic, and aesthetic imaginaries that position or nuance an African relationship to architecture and modernity.

Undergraduate courses in which I've served as Teaching Assistant:
CART 255 New Media Theory
This course serves as a critical introduction to new media theory focusing on issues of interaction, inscription, representation, code, reproduction, spectacle, control, body and resistance. It is a required course for students in the Design and Computation Arts department at Concordia University in Montreal. Students develop tools to undertake a critical analysis of media and technology and their social, political, economic, and cultural ramifications. As a Teaching Assistant to my primary supervisor, Christopher Salter, I was responsible for the critical contextualization of historical and philosophical engagements with technology and their social implications. An important part of this contextualization involved a careful curation, through textual and media analysis, of the ways in which technology mediates social and artistic engagement. I personally led lectures covering a wide range of topics including Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media and The Medium is the Message/Massage as well as critical analyses of Michel Foucault’s Disciplinary Society and Gilles Deleuze’s Control Society within a socio-technological context.

I’m an artist, academic, and attorney that experiments with analog media to compose abstract and poetic audiovisual presentations. Sonically, I compose a blend of acoustic and electronic noise as DUNYO. I’m also a film photographer and have exhibited at Z Arts Space in Montreal. I capture quotidian phenomena using film or analog media and generally meditate upon the function of the transport mechanism in extended audiovisual work.

If the medium complicates the affective legislation of subject and object in an aesthetic composition, I’m usually there. Consequently, these interests also figure into my academic research in critical ways, particularly within African and diasporic contexts.

Much of what I do in the arts space is a vehicle for ephemera. Selections of my writing, film photography, and experiments in music/sound can be found on this website.