IMAMUR HOSSAIN
IMAMUR HOSSAIN
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Critical Heritage & Built Environment | UNESCO WHIPIC Fellow | Commonwealth Scholar
My research examines how critical heritage theory, architectural inquiry, and digital spatial methods can be brought together to develop more polyphonic, community-situated forms of heritage interpretation.
Research and Practice Focus
Polyphonic Heritage Interpretation and Community-Situated Meaning-Making
Contested Built Environments, Dissonant Memory, and Spatial Politics
Critical Digital Heritage and Spatial Narrative Methodologies
Urban Heritage, Power, and Interpretive Justice in the Global South
Heritage Ethics, Temporalities, and Futures of Built Environment Practice
Current Appointments
Coordinator, Early Career Researchers Network (ECRN), Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS)
Coordinator, International Centre for Development and Environmental Studies (ICDES)
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Sonargaon University
Managing Editor, Journal of Built Environments in the Global South (JBEGS)
About Me
I work at the intersection of critical heritage studies, the built environment and spatial interpretation. My research examines the gap between heritage as an institutionally regulated narrative and heritage as lived, inhabited and negotiated community space, particularly in postcolonial Global South contexts. At the centre of this work is the uneven distribution of interpretive authority: who can name significance, whose knowledge enters the record, and whose knowledge remains peripheral.
My research asks how heritage interpretation can accommodate plurality while retaining the tensions between different accounts. Rather than reconciling dissonant and underrepresented perspectives within a single authorised story, I examine how difference, contradiction and unequal authority shape the heritage environment and its interpretation.
Across research, teaching, editorial work and collaborative initiatives, I bring community-engaged inquiry into relation with architectural spatial analysis, documentation, digital heritage practice and heritage governance. This has led me to examine what different recording systems make visible, how knowledge changes when it enters them, and what remains excluded from the resulting record. My scholarship is grounded in Bangladesh and South Asia while engaging wider debates across the Global South. Although the sites, institutions and technologies have varied across my work, one question has persisted: how can heritage and architectural records accommodate plural understandings of place while retaining their sources, contexts and differences?
Featured Research: Fellowship Research at UNESCO WHIPIC
Working methodology for integrating polyphonic, community-situated narratives within digitally documented heritage environments
Contemporary heritage interpretation increasingly recognises plurality, co-creation and the relational character of significance. Within this broader shift, a more specific methodological question remains: how can spatially situated community knowledge be integrated systematically into digital documentation while retaining attribution, difference and interpretive complexity?
Developed during my 2025 UNESCO WHIPIC Fellowship, SNIP responds to this question through a seven-phase methodology linking community-sourced spatial narratives with 3D-documented architectural environments. It brings institutional, community and contested accounts into a parallel interpretive structure, allowing different forms of knowledge to remain legible in relation to one another rather than requiring their resolution into a single narrative.
The methodology was pilot-tested at two Catholic gongso sites in Korea’s Naepo region through spatial narrative elicitation, photogrammetric documentation and a functional web-based prototype. The pilot established methodological feasibility within this context while also defining the need for broader testing and refinement across different heritage settings.
The pilot established a proof of concept. Wider validation and the relationship between narrative records and institutional judgement remain part of my continuing research inquiry.
Latest Publications (Books)
Decolonising South Asian Built Environment: Exploring Contemporary Practices, Pedagogies and Dichotomous Socio-political Implications
2026 · Edited journal volume · JBEGS, Volume 1, Issue 1 (inaugural issue)
Developed from our 2025 workshop on architectural practice and pedagogy, this volume examines how coloniality persists through the production and transmission of architectural knowledge. It asks how particular buildings, methods and histories acquire professional authority while others become difficult to recognise. Attending to adaptation, exchange and hybridity, the inquiry locates decolonisation within the institutional practices through which knowledge becomes authoritative.
Published by Academic Press and Publishers Library (APPL).
Between Chaos and Cohesion: An Explosive Re-emergence of Dhaka
2026 · Edited scholarly volume · South Asian Cultural Studies, 20th Anniversary Special Volume
Developed from our January 2025 international workshop, this volume examines how memory, power and everyday spatial practice continually produce Dhaka. Across political rupture, displacement, marginal subcultures and urban placemaking, it considers how what is often described as the city’s chaos can conceal forms of social and spatial organisation that formal planning and dominant narratives struggle to recognise. Cohesion emerges as negotiated, uneven and continually remade.
Published by South Asian Cultural Studies, in collaboration with Academic Press and Publishers Library (APPL).
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