Aya Musmar is an assistant professor of humanities in architecture in The American University in Cairo (AUC). She is a transdisciplinary scholar, pedagogue, and writer of architecture. Her PhD thesis, Witnessing the Refugee Camp: Feminist Positions, Practices, and Pedagogies, was shortlisted for RIBA President’s Awards. She is interested in rethinking the concepts and artistic methods by which architecture bears testimony to spatial and material manifestations of injustice. Her research looks beyond the materiality given in a space and textualizes the meticulous cosmic, environmental, and social intimacies of everyday life residing within minor spaces to address complex power structures. Working across the realms of teaching and research, her scholarship explores how an understanding of forced displacement indexes architecture with new subversive vocabularies that transgress the disciplinary definitions of the aesthetic. During her time as an assistant professor at the University of Petra in Amman (2020-2023), Musmar co-led several international research projects that addressed mobility, conflict, climate change, and heritage among displaced populations in Jordan. In 2022, she was a visiting fellow in the Urban Lab at University College London (UCL) and the Story Lab at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). In 2023, the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) announced Aya as a JAE Fellow for her research ‘The Refugee Camp as an Apolitical Space (?)’.