About Mania Taher
Biography
Through studying commodities, buildings, and landscapes, Mania Taher’s research discusses the cultural histories of objects, places, and people manifested in their everyday practices. Everyday vernacular objects play a primary role in her research investigating the cultural landscapes of new immigrants with inquiries of displacement, gender, and race. As an interdisciplinary researcher and designer, Mania Taher explores human-centered design principles through ethnographic studies— she visits, documents, analyzes the built environment, and hears the user’s voices to draw a holistic experience of the larger social, cultural, historical, and ecological landscape. Her pedagogical principles directly address racial and ethnic inequalities in the background of an anti-feminist framework and environmental injustices, which informed her teaching practices for the last twelve years in the United States and Bangladesh.
Taher’s academic background lies at the intersection of architecture and urban design, and currently, she is a Ph.D. Candidate of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her dissertation research highlights the place construction of first-generation immigrant Bangladeshi women living in New York, mainly by examining their dwellings and a network of locations within their residential environments. Taher analyzes her research participants’ physical and sensory ways of reconstructing spatial memories and their bodily experiences of transnational displacement. She also visits local newspaper archives to comprehend their resettlement histories in New York City. Taher’s broader research interest also focuses on the material and spatial histories of South Asia. In recent years, Taher’s research projects have been supported by The American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS), The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), and The Graduate School of UW-Milwaukee.
Mania Taher collaborated with BNMO Architects towards an invited micro-exhibit at the Time Space Existence exhibition, organized by the European Cultural Center (ECC) and the 2023 Venice Biennial. The exhibit highlights the transition of immigrants living in the United States and their engagement in the existing built landscape within the historic Devon Avenue neighborhood of Chicago. Taher authored several book chapters and journals and contributed essays to various international publications and newspapers. Before arriving at the UIUC, Taher taught undergraduate and graduate architecture programs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and American International University- Bangladesh (AIUB).
Education
Ph.D. in Architecture, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), Milwaukee, USA. (Ongoing)
M.S. in Architecture and Urban Design, Columbia University, New York, USA.
B.ARCH (Bachelor in Architecture), Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Research and publications
Ongoing and upcoming research
Collage image from Ph.D. dissertation “Shifting Dwellings: Place, Culture, and Identity of Bangladeshi Immigrant Women in New York, USA, 2000-Present.”
Exhibition image from “The Mediation Slice: Exploring Immigrant Placemaking in Chicago’s Devon Avenue,” 2023 Time-Space-Existence Exhibition in Venice, Italy; organized by ECC-Italy and Venice Biennial.
Selected publications
Mapping Spatial Behaviors and Narratives of Women Experiencing the COVID-19 Pandemic: From an Architecture School in the Midwest USA. In the book COVID-19 and a World of Ad Hoc Geographies, eds. Stanley D. Brunn and Donna Gilbreath, Springer Publications. ISBN: 978-3-030-94349-3.
River as Lived Place in South Asian Urbanism: A Study of Buriganga Riverbank, Dhaka. (co-author Rahman M.). In the book, A Handbook of Waterfront Development and Urbanism, ed. Mohammed Mahbubur Rahman, Ph.D., Routledge Publications. ISBN: 9781032067513.
The Mediation Slice: Exploring Immigrant Placemaking in Chicago’s Devon Avenue. (co-author: Negin Moayer). In the exhibition catalogue Time Space Existence 2023.
(Upcoming) Bangladeshi Immigrant Women’s Memories from past-lived Homes: Their Ways of Knowing Spaces. In the book, Next50: Collective Futures— Critical-creative Perspectives on the Built Environment in Bangladesh, a joint book project by ContextBD and Open Studio. https://www.next50bangladesh.com/
(Upcoming) Rohingya Refugees in a Segregated Geography: Case Study Milwaukee, The United States. In the book, Rohingya Refugees: Identity, Citizenship, and Human Rights, ed. Dr. Sajaudeen Chaparban, Routledge Publications.