Season 2: Architecture X Media Studies
Ep. 29: The Listening Frame, Soumya Dasgupta
Part two of the continuing conversation shifts from architectural media’s narratives to how criticality is (and isn’t) cultivated through academia, especially in India. The episode argues that professional architectural education prioritizes technical and problem-solving skills while sidelining critical thinking. Critique is inherently marginal, political, and often mistaken for complaining. Critical thinkers need critical listeners, and professional architectural education must provide the pedagogical infrastructure to support this. Soumya contends this is a global issue, but more intense in India because institutions and the profession are structured to keep architecture technocratic, apolitical, and aligned with capital and state power, making the “visionary architect” largely a marketing myth and most graduates “architectural workers”. The episode also discusses building critical listening through sustained conversation and exposure to humanities beyond architecture, debating multilingualism and translation as access barriers, and cautioning that formal organizations for discourse can quickly become bureaucratic and uncritical.
Guest: Soumya Dasgupta
Designation: Architectural Scholar
Bio: Soumya is a Ph.D. Candidate in Architecture (History and Theory) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is a recipient of the Humanities Research Institute Graduate Fellowship and the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship. He holds a certificate from the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University. He holds a Master's in Urban Design from SPA Delhi and a B.Arch. from IIEST Shibpur (Erstwhile BESU Shibpur).
His scholarly interests include neoliberal developmentalism, digital technocracy, the Global South, and South Asia, and his Ph.D. dissertation broadly explores the contested systems of architectural production in the rapidly transforming context of 21st-century urban India.
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