After successful completion of the course, students are able to understand the concept of scientific work. They are able to write an independent seminar paper on a self-defined issue according to scientific criteria. This includes the critical examination of the set work topic, gender competence in architecture and planning faculties. They have knowledge of dealing with relevant literature, narrowing down the topic and formulating their own research question, structuring the material and the seminar paper, scientific articulation as well as layout and design.
The elective seminar is situated in the following thematic context and activities at the TU Vienna: Claiming*Spaces, a collective active at TU Vienna since 2019, critically addresses, among other things, issues of gender equality in architectural studies. In the Claiming*Spaces 2019 conference, intersectional_feminist positions and tools for a different kind of architectural creation and spatial planning were developed. The thirteenth issue of future.lab magazine March 2020 is dedicated to the themes and outcomes of the conference under the title Feminist Approaches for Academic and Practice Architecture and Planning Contexts. In 2020, two courses Women in Architecture and Spatial Planning - Data, Information, Communication elaborated and highlighted the situation, challenges and best-practice examples of, among others, the study of architecture. These will be published in the form of a website in the course of the Claiming*Spaces Festival at the beginning of March. The elective seminar will subsequently contribute to awareness raising and gender equality processes in the knowledge repository of the collective.
In architectural education and in academia, there is a gender imbalance in terms of structure and content, despite the fact that the study of architecture has been open to women for over 100 years and they now make up the majority of architecture students. According to field reports, female students experience discrimination; moreover, women often do not receive the same attention as their male colleagues. In teaching, projects by female architects are rarely mentioned as references in lectures and there is no addressing of gender-specific teaching content. There is a lack of female role models, which is exacerbated by the decreasing percentage of women as the seniority of the teaching staff increases. In research, women are underrepresented in positions of responsibility and there is a lack of gender-specific research orientation.
Divided into the four thematic areas "Students", "Teaching", "Lecturers" and "Research", the international situation as well as best-practice examples of solutions or successful implementations for improvement are to be surveyed and prepared in detail. With the help of the knowledge gained from this, parts of a future handbook will be developed, which will show an inclusive educational and scientific context in architecture
In the group sessions, the context of the work topic will be developed. The seminar leader provides impulse lectures and reading texts. Students acquire knowledge and discuss and reflect on it in group work. This is followed by short presentations on self-selected topics in individual work. From these, exposés with a defined research question are prepared as a preliminary stage of the seminar papers. Further instruction on the scientific writing of the papers includes literature research, finding a title, content framework, writing in chapters, correct citation, layouting, and the creation of a bibliography and list of figures. Finally, the seminar papers will be presented and discussed.
