5 May 2026
11:00 AM EDT / 5:00 PM CEST
11:00 AM EDT / 5:00 PM CEST
Swiss Safe Space Imaginaries: Spatial Archetypes of Stability,
Abundance, and Racialized Complicity
Abundance, and Racialized Complicity
KHENSANI JURCZOK-DE KLERK
ETH Zürich
Respondent: Sarah Moses, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
ETH Zürich
Respondent: Sarah Moses, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk, Yearnings for Homeplace, from Within the Nuclear Family House, 2024, collage.
This sub-chapter interrogates the production of “safe space” in Switzerland, examining how safety is spatially constructed through national imaginaries of stability, neutrality, and abundance. While the notion of safe space emerges from social movements as a demand for protection and recognition, in the Swiss context it is recast as a cultural and spatial ideal embedded in everyday environments. This ideal is sustained not only through political discourse, but through recurring spatial archetypes tha render safety visible, legible, and seemingly self-evident. Focusing on two such archetypes–the countryside and the domestic kitchen cupboard – the sub-chapter traces how safety is socially and materially staged across territorial and domestic scales. The countryside, often imagined as pastoral, orderly, and self-contained, operates as a site of regulated visibility and social normativity, where belonging is structured through racialized and gendered expectations. The kitchen cupboard, emblematic of domestic abundance, extends this logic through practices of consumption, embedding global histories of extraction, racialized representation, and economic inequality within the intimate routines of everyday life.
Drawing on oral histories of Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli, the founder of the Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen (1993–2010), the analysis foregrounds Black feminist perspectives as a form of situated knowledge through which these spatial conditions become critically legible. Her accounts reveal how spaces that signify safety at a national level can simultaneously produce isolation, invisibility, and conditional belonging. Rather than treating safety as a neutral or universally accessible condition, the sub-chapter positions it as a spatial project structured through processes of selection, normalization, and exclusion. In so doing, it unsettles the myth of Swiss safe space and advances a socio-spatial
understanding of safety that recognizes its uneven distribution and its entanglement with racialized and gendered forms of violence.
Drawing on oral histories of Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli, the founder of the Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen (1993–2010), the analysis foregrounds Black feminist perspectives as a form of situated knowledge through which these spatial conditions become critically legible. Her accounts reveal how spaces that signify safety at a national level can simultaneously produce isolation, invisibility, and conditional belonging. Rather than treating safety as a neutral or universally accessible condition, the sub-chapter positions it as a spatial project structured through processes of selection, normalization, and exclusion. In so doing, it unsettles the myth of Swiss safe space and advances a socio-spatial
understanding of safety that recognizes its uneven distribution and its entanglement with racialized and gendered forms of violence.
***
Unsettling the Typology:
Mappila Muslim Women’s Reimaginings of Gendered Domestic Space
(Kerala, India)
AKMA NAZAR
University of Westminster
University of Westminster
Respondent: Mehwish Abid, McGill University
Routine scene in a Mappila home (author’s house) - the father casually occupies the veranda, while the mother cautiously retreats behind a wall, negotiating privacy and visibility from the street beyond - a subtle demonstration of tensions and conflicts between gender and space.
This research examines how gender is embedded in the contemporary (1980s-present) domestic typology of Mappila Muslim homes in Malabar, Kerala, focusing on the production and negotiation of domestic space through women’s perspectives. Architectural historiography on the Mappila community has overwhelmingly privileged the sacred or monumental (particularly mosque architecture) while leaving the architectures of everyday life underexplored. Where domesticity is addressed, scholarship has tended to emphasise traditional aristocratic residences, overlooking proletarian and contemporary homes that constitute the majority experience. This neglect reflects a broader tendency in architectural discourse to privilege the public realm over the private, rendering ordinary domestic environments analytically marginal.
My project responds to this gap by exploring how Mappila women, particularly homemakers, tactically and subversively exercise spatial agency within contemporary homes shaped by Islamic design principles, regional syncretic spatial practices and modernist architectural ideals. It unpacks ways in which these domestic spaces respond, or fail to respond, to women’s personal, social, cultural, spiritual, and religious needs.
Methodologically, the project adopts a relational autoethnographic approach combining family research and ‘friendship as method’, using spatial analysis guided by oral histories from women in my family and personal network as critical entry points into wider architectural questions. By foregrounding orality as an architectural research method, it challenges masculinist narratives of the ‘home as haven’ and instead situates women as active repositories of architectural knowledge. A feminist psychoanalytic lens enables me to map women’s affective and spatial desires, thei negotiations of domestic spaces/boundaries, and the ‘leftover’ or unarticulated dimensions of dwelling absent from typological discourse.
Through one case study, my presentation will demonstrate the gendered spatial framework of these homes (authorship, spatial layout and use, homemaking practices, etc.) and how Mappila women, through everyday practices and performances, interrupt and reimagine their prevailing domestic typology. In doing so, it reconceptualises domestic typology not as a static cultural form, but as a contested terrain of spatial agency, contributing to broader debates in architectural historiography and feminist spatial theory.
My project responds to this gap by exploring how Mappila women, particularly homemakers, tactically and subversively exercise spatial agency within contemporary homes shaped by Islamic design principles, regional syncretic spatial practices and modernist architectural ideals. It unpacks ways in which these domestic spaces respond, or fail to respond, to women’s personal, social, cultural, spiritual, and religious needs.
Methodologically, the project adopts a relational autoethnographic approach combining family research and ‘friendship as method’, using spatial analysis guided by oral histories from women in my family and personal network as critical entry points into wider architectural questions. By foregrounding orality as an architectural research method, it challenges masculinist narratives of the ‘home as haven’ and instead situates women as active repositories of architectural knowledge. A feminist psychoanalytic lens enables me to map women’s affective and spatial desires, thei negotiations of domestic spaces/boundaries, and the ‘leftover’ or unarticulated dimensions of dwelling absent from typological discourse.
Through one case study, my presentation will demonstrate the gendered spatial framework of these homes (authorship, spatial layout and use, homemaking practices, etc.) and how Mappila women, through everyday practices and performances, interrupt and reimagine their prevailing domestic typology. In doing so, it reconceptualises domestic typology not as a static cultural form, but as a contested terrain of spatial agency, contributing to broader debates in architectural historiography and feminist spatial theory.