Dwelling / Homing

Home, in common sense, has typically to do with origin, nativeness, continuity or fixedness. However, none of these conditions matches the actual dwelling arrangements, and perhaps the aspirations, of an increasing number of people, including migrant newcomers and those in protracted displacement. What do provisional and ‘unhomely’ forms of dwelling suggest about home, belonging, and the interplay between the two? How does belonging play out differently across divides such as native vs alien, or well-housed vs precarious dwellers, over time? What are the (dis)advantages of applying the categories of belonging to those in transition or recently arrived, and what do their ways of homemaking tell about “belonging in a mobile world”?

Sphere Curator: Paolo Boccagni

Sessions, researchers and papers (in progress):

1.From dwelling to homing

• Emily Shin-Jie Lee – Dwelling Elsewhere : Art Residency. Practices as Home-ing Infrastructures at Werkplaats Molenwijk
• Yi-Neumann – Homing, Class and Forced Migration or on the Means to Move and Belong
• Joma Edward Ronden – Home is where I belong: caring for remittance houses in Ghana

2.(Un)belonging and dwelling

• Lieke Wissink – Homemaking against non-belonging. Daily life in a shelter for undocumented youth in locked-down Amsterdam
• Niels Weidtmann – Belonging and belongings: The case of dwelling
• Jesse Amelsvoort – Apartment Homes: History, Trauma, and the Gothic
• Rahla Rahat – No place to call home: Belongingness and notion of home of live-in child domestic workers in Lahore, Pakistan

3.Dwelling on the move

• Laura Brody – (Re)building Home: Experiences of Return Migration to Imvros
• Nithila Kanagasabai – Going home to do fieldwork
• Hee Eun Kwon – Performance of Cosmopolitanism: Temporary Migrants and their Sense of Belonging in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

4.Urban dwelling

• Miguel Avalos – Limitrophic dwellings: Towards a queer understanding of mobility and belonging
• Willy Sier – Mobility and Identity: Negotiating Dutchness in Volendam, the Netherlands
• Subhasree Ghosh – Belonging/(un)belonging: the process of ‘othering’ in post-partition Calcutta Metropolis

5.Digital belonging and homing

• Sara Amadasi – Narratives of belonging. Creating a podcast with children about the places that populate their lives.
• Yuhan Wang – Homemaking on digital platforms: Chinese immigrants and their portable homeland
• Zeena Feldman – The SIM Project: Illuminating Networked Belonging

6. Exploring relationalities in narratives of dwelling and home-ing from international biographical research perspectives: everyday objects, memories and methodological innovations

• Prieto Blanco and Tanja Kovacic – Remembered, immediate and aspired home: reflections on mobility and belonging
• Elham Amini – Conditional Belonging and Gendered Practice at Home
• Gayle Letherby – On ‘Being Alone’: challenging dominant understandings of belonging
• Lyudmila Nurse – Interrupted belonging: life narratives of displaced families in Ukraine