ISRF Book Launches in June 2026: The Matter of Architecture & Taming Egg Donors
Join us in June to celebrate the latest works from ISRF Fellows Paul Dobraszczyk & Anna Molas.
What might architects do with or learn from the resources our planet creates? Can critical architecture recover a more equitable relationship to the mineral world? Or are we destined to continue to exploit the planet’s lithosphere as a resource for our consumption?
Architectural Association Bookshop, London | 6:15pm BST, 3rd June 2026 | Click Here to Register
In his important new book, The Matter of Architecture (Reaktion, 2026), Paul Dobraszczyk approaches geology as the architecture of our planet, arguing that what we build has always been dependent on what Earth has already made. Yet, what we produce now will also become the geology of the future: billions of tonnes of concrete, plastic, brick, metals and other fabricated materials that are quickly piling up to eventually become new geological strata.
From caves and crystals to volcanoes and earthquakes, The Matter of Architecture mines geology to find a more sympathetic way of building.
Paul Dobraszczyk is an architectural writer, photographer and artist based in Manchester, UK, and a lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture, London. He was an ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow 2016 for the project Dead Cities: Urban Ruins and the Imagination of Disaster.
Paul will be joined by Nishat Awan, Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture at the UCL Urban Laboratory, whose research focuses on the intersection of geopolitics and space, including questions related to diasporas, migration and border regimes; and Adam Walls, Lecturer of History & Theory of Architecture at UCL, a historian of fire, light and atmosphere working at the intersection of queer theory, critical whiteness studies and new materialisms.
A Q&A will follow, moderated by Lars Cornelissen, ISRF Academic Coordinator.
Join us from 6:15pm BST on Wednesday 3rd June 2026 at the Architectural Association Bookshop, London. Register Now.
How do those involved in Spain’s egg donation industry—donors, clinicians, and clinic staff—experience its pressures, medical interventions, and moral codes? Which complex power dynamics underlie this fertility market? And what can the Spanish case tell us about reproductive and fertility markets more widely?
Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona & Online | 6:30pm CEST, 17th June 2026 | Click Here to Register
In her important new book, Taming Egg Donors: The Egg Donation Reproductive Market in Spain, Dr Anna Molas offers a fresh perspective on Europe’s largest egg donation industry.
Drawing on rich ethnographic work and adopting a feminist lens, Molas shifts attention away from donors’ intentions towards the lived experiences of donors and practitioners alike. The result is a subtle but powerful account of the gendered, racialised, and classed power dynamics that cut across this industry and that, combined, serve to ‘tame’ women’s bodies in service of logics of extraction.
Anna Molas, Lecturer in Anthropology at Monash University, is a social anthropologist and ethnographer whose work focuses on reproduction, health, and society. She was an ISRF First Book Fellow 2023.
Anna will be joined by Chandra Kala Clemente-Martínez, President of the Associació de Persones Adoptades a Catalunya, author of Volver a los orígenes (Bellaterra Edicions, 2022); and Laura Perler, postdoctoral researcher in the Social and Cultural Geography research group at the University of Bern, author of Selektioniertes Leben(Edition Assemblage, 2022).
A Q&A will follow, moderated by Chris Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.