The museum, the prison, and the school have been traditionally theorized as institutional agents that form disciplined and loyal citizens—but they also carry within them the ability to create counter-narratives to the state, resisting and subverting the sources of power. This research traces three case studies in which institutions were mobilized in opposition to increasingly aggressive states: a counter-exhibition designed and curated by architect Lina Bo Bardi and playwright Martim Gonçalves in São Paulo, Brazil; the combined narratives of the Open City architecture school and the Ritoque concentration camp in early 1970s Chile, and the work of La Escuelita, an architecture school that operated during the Argentinian dictatorship. Together, these narratives reveal the possibilities of architecture to subvert the agency of power and participate in the production of pedagogies of freedom.

Ana María León's work traces spatial practices and transnational networks of power, resistance, and solidarity in the Americas. She is cofounder of several collaborations laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history, her work has been published widely, and she has edited journal issues on the topics of revolution, commodity cultures, and settler colonialism. Her books are Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires (University of Texas Press, 2021) and A Ruin in Reverse / Bones of the Nation (Ediciones ARQ, 2021), she's currently completing a book on spatial solidarities in 1970s Chile. León holds an architecture diploma from Universidad Católica de Santiago de Guayaquil, master’s degrees from Georgia Tech and Harvard University, and a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she is associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.