Call for papers for session at RGS-IBG 2016
Housing is a verb:
Exploring how mobile people dwell in multilocal / multitemporal home
Organizer: Lauren Wagner (Maastricht University)
Taking housing as a
verb (Turner 1972), this session will explore the vibrant materiality of
making, inhabiting, and perpetuating a home – all together defined as dwelling,
for short - as it can take place topologically across time and space. Participants are invited who are investigating how practices of construction, care, and maintenance, requiring
individuals to invest their time and energy into housing, go hand in hand with
accumulative layering and texturing of affective attachment that makes ‘home’.
Papers in this session illustrate how this domestication of space (Koch and
Latham 2013) is not necessarily fixed in place: it can be spatially dispersed,
as in constructing a home at a distance, or maintaining homes in multiple
places; it can be temporally skewed, by impending instability of ownership (il)legality, ever-extending completion dates, or
expectations of physical impermanence; or it can involve patterns of repetition
or iterative dwelling, creating stability through circular mobility. Each of
these modes falls outside of a normative imagining of housing practice, taking
place in a single structure, or single cartographical space, over linear time. These topological meshworks (DeLanda 2001; Ingold 2015) of dwelling, rather, illustrate how
people house themselves across time or across space, maintaining some kind of
stability through far-from-equilibrium dynamics.
To investigate how
dwelling works as a dynamic process, these papers analyse moments when such
dynamics encounter a disruptive event. These events might range from sudden
demolitions, to the slow onset of an impending foreclosure – both of which
materially and affectively resonate within housing as a vital and active process.
Please submit abstracts of max 250 words to Lauren Wagner ([log in to unmask]) by 16 February 2016. Please also indicate your willingness to participate in a session structured as 'Works in progress' or short interactive papers. http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Call+for+sessions+papers+and+posters/Conference+session+formats.htm