Guest Editor: Miodrag Mitrašinović, Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York City

The “CounterPublic(s)” issue of Khōrein explores the multivalent relationship between architecture and counter-publics, specifically in the context of architecture understood as a material praxis engaged in the disruption and critique of dominant power relations. Architecture has for too long been employed as part of the reproduction of hegemonic orders by naturalizing the authority of dominant social groups through material, spatial and institutional arrangements, and by regulating modes of visibility, modalities of mobility and rights of access.

In the spirit of Gayatri Spivak’s question of whether the subaltern can speak, Rita Felski’s feminist counter-public sphere, and Nancy Fraser’s notion of subaltern counter-publics—as discursive arenas where subordinated groups elaborate alternative identities, develop new collectivities, and challenge dominant meanings of the common world—we ask under what conditions do counter-publics perceive architecture as both a constitutive medium of counter-hegemony and the vehicle for  constructing corresponding counter-forms? By counter-forms we mean spatial and material configurations which are designed to sustain dissent, foster assembly, and enable the articulation of difference. Through counter-forms, counter-publics resist the hegemonic ordering of space while producing environments that make room for diverse publics to appear, gather, and act together. We also ask, can architecture recognize the significance of counter-publics and perceive itself as an indispensable means in the process of producing counter-forms?

Attempts to theorize counter-forms vis-à-vis the mainstream architectural production have been made in the past. For instance, Kenneth Frampton has long argued that it is architects’ responsibility to envision counter-forms capable of standing against the placelessness of global capital, the spectacularization of cultural practices, and the degradation of the environment. For Frampton, the politically charged, critical counter-form is indeed capable of resisting the pressures inherent in global modernization and universal technological civilization while articulating the public realm in specific, bounded domains. In this sense, counter-forms call for a tectonic and ethical grounding of architecture in its social, material, and ecological conditions. Might we therefore argue that architecture bears responsibility for contributing to the making of public worlds in which counter-publics are not merely occupants, but authors of their own spatial and political presence through architecture? Just as counter-publics articulate other discourses under conditions of structural constraint, counter-forms embody alternative spatial and material grammars, architectures that represent other discursive and cultural forms.

In the 21st century, the urgency of revisiting the relationship between architecture and counter-publics has accelerated. Planetary crises of climate change, mass migrations, the global turn towards authoritarianism, and systemic inequality intersect with the proliferation of digital and algorithmic publics which reconfigure visibility and exclusion at unmatched scales. Practices of spatial resistance—whether decolonial, feminist, environmental, or abolitionist—demand that architects reconceive their role beyond formal authorship toward infrastructural, relational, and collective modes of making. How might architecture contribute to counter-publics’ prefigurative capacities in cultivating spaces of care, repair, solidarity and cooperation amid conditions of planetary emergency?

We invite contributions that examine these entanglements and explore how the expanded field of architecture—both as material and spatial practice and as scholarly discourses—can engage with counter-publics and counter-forms in the 21st century.

Submissions should be emailed to khorein@ifdt.bg.ac.rs.

Submission deadline: October 01, 2026