Research at universities is political, a fact made all the more evident during times of increasing social and political polarisation when politicians denounce universities as »enemies«. Such external attacks intersect with debates in academia itself, where research structures, purposes, and approaches are increasingly brought into question. The XV International Bauhaus Colloquium critically examines the politics that underlie, shape, or result from research. The interdisciplinary academic event provides a platform for exploring how research operates within and across infrastructures, epistemologies, power, and publics. Research politics manifest both in specific research projects and in the procedures and frameworks that define academic work as such. In addition to issues of access, representation, and ethics, the Colloquium addresses critical practices and highlights the ways in which research may both reinforce and challenge dominant hierarchies.

The fifteenth edition of the International Bauhaus Colloquium moves beyond its traditional focus on architectural theory and history to understand architecture as part of an extended field in which the arts, media, technologies, and society interact. The architectural perspective is integrated into contemporary questions of knowledge production, as well as the infrastructural and political conditions that shape it. As research is transforming rapidly through the effects of digital infrastructures and AI-trained knowledge production, the processes that are shifting its epistemological and institutional frameworks will be examined.

The Colloquium investigates research as a political practice operating in a contested field of historically specific forms of situatedness and shifting epistemologies, with specific attention paid to the role of architectural and artistic practices. In line with the Bauhaus tradition, it combines theoretical, aesthetic, and technical/empirical approaches to analyse and develop research politics in response to urgent questions within international discourse. Discussions are structured into four thematic tracks, each of which offers specific insights into the politics of research:

Track I: Practices examines current approaches to practice-based research, discussing their particularity, their transformative potential, and the capacity to renegotiate the relationship between researchers and society.

Track II: Institutions analyses political, economic, and spatial conditions of knowledge production. It brings together current propositions of institutional critique to examine the boundaries and infrastructures of the university as formations that must be both defended and transformed.

Track III: Ecologies recognises the role of localities and milieus, such as exposed geographies, Indigenous sites and communities, or marginalized cultural topics that become constitutive of research. It explores how proximity to local places and ecologies reshapes conventional research approaches and the ethical shifts they entail.

Track IV: Epistemologies addresses the need to critically engage with and unlearn dominant frameworks, often based on privileged Western paradigms, through decolonial, queer, and feminist practices. It examines how disciplinary traditions, established canons, and knowledge regimes, as well as barriers between theoretical and practical approaches, can be opened up to multiple perspectives.