The Winter School of Middle East is launching an intensive programme (full day/daily workshop) from 20-30th of January, in which the participants will be spread to three panels:

1. Becoming-Lives of Diwaniyah:
Tutors: Patricia Reed & Deema Alghunaim
We will explore the particular situation of Diwaniyah in both theory and material experimentation through the analytical triad of the lived, perceived and conceived (Henri Lefebvre). Through this field-based research and discussion, a spatio-political understanding of Diwaniyah can be mapped, perhaps only partially so. A lived map of the plight of Diwaniyah includes not only physical and spatial frameworks, but also the choreography and modes of sociality/speech acts it engenders. Diwaniya, as such, will be examined as an aesthetic phenomenon, a site of and for experience. We shall complicate our ‘lived map’ with the juxtaposition of another triad of hospitality, dissensus and potentiality, in order to arrive at speculative scenarios of Diwaniyah, mapping not only the lived, but also the becoming-life/lives of its future articulations.
2. Spatial Agency: Situating the Political:
Tutors: Kenny Cupers & Hussa Alsuwaidan
What is and can be the space of politics in our contemporary urban world? This research studio focuses on the spatial agency of the Diwaniyah in the transformation of Kuwaiti urban life. As a designated locus of political life, the Diwaniyah is often portrayed as the traditional backbone of Kuwaiti society. How then could this age-old architectural type serve as an instrument of the rapid modernization Kuwait witnessed over the past century? To understand its particular spatial agency, we will 1) begin by mapping the Diwaniyah as a concrete architectural space in relation to the changing urban fabric of Kuwait; 2) examine its role in the construction and transformation of other social and spatial institutions such as the family and the local government; 3) outline the spatial strategies that have shaped its success in the face of social change.
3. Studio Diwaniyah.
Tutors: Ralf Pflugfelder, Magnus Nilsson & Batool Ashoor
This spatial design studio will literally take on the format and physicality of a Diwaniyah. Within this discursive, social and relational environment, the students will be asked to design, build and implement an enabler and/or disabler of communication. It is the explicit intent that these interventions should stand in an intense reciprocal relationship to each other. Studio Diwaniyah will be conceived as a 1:1 experimental laboratory.

Each of these panels will be studying The Diwaniyah as a spatio-political phenomenon and will be submitting a presentation of their work at the end of the workshop. In addition, there will be daily evening lectures during the time of the event within the field of this topic in which will be open for public.

The workshop should attract architects, artists, students of variety of ages and also would welcome researchers from different fields of humanities, politics or economy. It is mainly an architectural programme but it aspires an interdisciplinary platform. 

I wish this would be a better overview of the subject.

best regards,