Please see below the CfP for the AAA annual meeting panel "Multiple Meanings and Current Engagements of ‘Home’", taking place in Chicago, 20-24th of November 2013. 

Abstracts of 250 words, including title, keywords, name of author (s) and name of institution (s) to be sent no later than Friday the 29th of March, to: 

Carin Tunaker - [log in to unmask]
and
Rachel Scicluna - [log in to unmask]


Many thanks, 

Carin and Rachel



Multiple Meanings and Current Engagements of ‘Home’

This panel aims to explore the multiple meanings of home from a cross-cultural perspective. Within contemporary societies, the ‘idea’ of home emerges as a space of ontological certainty and financial stability. Furthermore, a ‘home’ may be a marker of class power relations. This understanding mainly stems from the dominant discourse on the family unit as the building block of society. However, as most queer and feminist literature has illustrated, this ideal representation of ‘home’ may be problematic; it excludes and otherises any other form of living arrangements, such as single parents, same-sex couples, queer homes, and so on. Additionally, it privileges a sedentary approach to the way we conceptualise societies as neatly bounded and demarcated settlements that fall within the orderly ‘a-political’ geographical lines of the map. In short, it naturalises the association of ‘culture’ with place and creates the assumption of a ‘localised culture’. 

Through this panel, we aim to engage with the multiple realities of different groups of people who do not abide to this lifestyle. The understanding of home as both mobile and localised brings out the various power relations that dwell within the space of home. It also captures the tension between the public and the private, and the symbolic and the real. This approach seeks to put light on the meaning of home as having multiple realities, and how its meaning is constructed through the collective experiences of different groups of people. The aim of this panel is to demonstrate how the interweaving of home, social and political issues constructs alternative meanings of homeliness, such as homelessness, migration, borders, genocide, war and refugees. Hence, the aim is to explore the everyday in relation to the domestic, but also to look at how different ideological and political relations flow through domestic space such as, gender and sexuality; kin and non-kin relations, urbanism, poverty, religion, ethnicity, race and class. This cross-cultural comparison aims to first, bring out an alternative understanding of home through everyday experiences and second, to explore how individuals engage and resist dominant ideologies at home. Possible topics of debate include, but are not restricted to: 

•	Home as a spatial imaginary, which is both located and mobile
•	LGBT Homelessness  
•	Youth Homelessness
•	Home Loss through Economic crisis, Natural disaster, War
•	Home, Heteronormativity and Sexualities
•	Home as a Space of Resistance
•	Domestic Space, Objects and Memories
•	House Form and Social change
•	Policy and Home
•	Queer Homes and Neighbourhoods
•	The intersection of Class and Gender within Domestic space
•	The Domestic Kitchen as a space of sociality and politics
•	Consumption, gender and power relations
•	Feminism and Domestic Space
•	Domestic Space and Children
•	Bachelor Homes
•	Home as a space of Care-work
•	Love life and Home life