Othering marks perceived differences so as to establish a divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’, which is materialised in and by built space. Our study expands prevailing understandings of this materialisation by highlighting how architectural design can counter othering.

To this end, we introduce Danielle Koplitz, an American young woman who was born deaf and, at the time of the study, was studying architecture. The design approach of an architecture student who is deaf represents a unique combination of (deaf) experiences and (architectural) knowledge. Based on interviews with Danielle and design documents, we analyse how and what she designed during her architecture studies.

Our analysis highlights how Danielle seeks to design-out othering while designing in difference without negative connotation. We show how personal experiences with othering motivate her to design spaces that avoid environmental barriers and convey positive messages to make people thrive and accept their identity. It is in this way that she believes architectural design can promote equity, diversity, and inclusion. Moreover, on top of designing out othering, she designs in others, by involving different people’s input as a resource in her designs.

Danielle’s approach and designs are inspiring in several ways: from their spatial qualities to her capacity to build on and go beyond DeafSpace in architectural terms, already from her twenties. As such, her lived experiences and the way she captures and expresses her own connection with her sociospatial context are profoundly significant in pedagogical terms. At the same time, her trajectory, like that of other architects with disability experience, points to another process of othering: the cycle that architectural education fosters towards able-bodied and privileged mindsets. It is high time that educators not only teach students about the importance of designing in others, but also start learning from their students how to do so.

This article analyses the life and career of Olof Hanson (1862-1933), the earliest known deaf architect to practice in the United States. Drawing on Hanson’s unpublished papers in Gallaudet University Archives, the article provides the first comprehensive account of his innovative architectural design for deaf people and communities, intended to optimise manual communication, such as American Sign Language (ASL), in residences, schools, dormitories, and community buildings. These innovations included maximising natural light, designing electric light systems to highlight the hands and faces of speakers, and optimising sight lines to optimise manual communication. Hanson explicitly used this approach in his designs, notably for Kendall Hall at Gallaudet University, which used beveled windowsills in the basement, and at Charles Thompson Memorial Hall in Saint Paul, MN, which included numerous full to over-sized windows from the basement to the top floor. The hall also included a widened staircase and entryway designs that emphasised an open view between floor levels, allowing unimpeded manual communication as deaf people moved between floors and rooms. Hanson provided previews of space using interior glass partitions in community buildings and spindlework in residences. Three decades of architectural practice in Minnesota, Washington State, and elsewhere, along with a lifetime of personal experience, offered Hanson numerous opportunities to centre deaf people in his architectural designs. His design innovations were built upon and advanced by other deaf and hard-of-hearing architects who modified standard building plans to meet the needs of deaf clients. In turn, Hanson’s designs foreshadowed the late twentieth-century concept of DeafSpace. This article is accompanied by ‘Olof Hanson’s Architectural Legacy’, ArcGIS StoryMap that traces Hanson’s life and career.

This essay argues that emerging scholar and artist Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78) disseminated her 1633 engraved self-portrait as a bid to enter the Republic of Letters and add her voice to the Europe-wide debate on women’s intellectual equality. To assess the portrait’s significance, I examine its sociocultural and artistic complexities, as well as its effect on two elite viewers, poet and diplomat Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) and Neo-Latin poet Caspar Barlaeus (1584–1648). I conclude that although Van Schurman was unable to control the responses to her self-portraiture, its circulation afforded a crucial inflection point in her life’s journey, both outward and inward.

This article provides a new framework for understanding sexuality in Erasmus. It examines his correspondence with the monk Servaas Rogerszoon and with other familiars, making a critique of the use of letters for life writing before and after P. S. Allen’s edition. It discusses monastic contexts, especially within the Augustinian order, and humanist knowledge of same-sex values in Greek and Latin philology. Moving beyond biography, it recreates discourses of same-sex practice in the “Adagia.” In placing the letters and adages within a domain of queer studies, it demonstrates for the first time the existence in Erasmus of a private coterie language of sex.

In this article, I consider the planning, construction, and operation of Donaldson’s Hospital, an early purpose-built residential school for deaf (and hearing) children in Edinburgh. I propose that, from the initial concerted efforts to provide formal deaf education, space was at the centre of debates about what it meant to be a child who does not hear. I show that the architecture of deaf teaching was fiercely contested by educators, legislators, government organisations, financial donors - in other words by those who had the power to organise bodies in space. In doing so, I highlight the shifting cultural understandings of deafness in the second half of the nineteenth century and trace how these became spatial determinants of building designs and architectural discourse. As such, I argue that architecture was not merely a reactionary receptor of ideological currents but that individual buildings actively produced, expressed, and opposed cultural understandings of deafness at the time.