Through studying commodities, buildings, and landscapes, Mania Taher’s research discusses the cultural histories of places and people manifested in their everyday place-making. Her research interests focus on intersectional identities to foreground the current histories of marginalized people and their spatial agencies to transform their occupied spaces. Taher’s academic background lies at the intersection of architecture and urban design, and currently, she is a Visiting Faculty at the School of Art and Design. Her current 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 through ethnographic studies. 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.
