Call for Papers: Home Unmaking
RGS-IBG Conference, Edinburgh 3rd – 5th July 2012
Sponsored by: Social and Cultural Geography Research Group
Organisers: Katherine Brickell (Royal Holloway University of London) katherine.brickell@rhul.ac.uk; Richard Baxter (Queen Mary University of London) r.baxter@qmul.ac.uk
Recent months have been dominated by news stories and visual images of home and its ‘unmaking’. From the state-enforced violent eviction of travellers living at Dale Farm in the United Kingdom to the signalling of regime change through the ransacking of Gaddafi family mansions in Libya, home is not separated from public and political worlds but is constituted, threatened or dissolved, through them. These events follow a series of years in which home has met the hard edge of the global economy with house repossession, resulting from Western debt over-reach, again pointing to the fragility of dwelling. Moving beyond the once celebratory hailing of home as an apolitical, ‘inward-looking’ and secure space, this session approaches home as a physical, immaterial and symbolic site that is ‘outward-looking’, insecure, and subject to deliberate or unintentional disruption and destruction. Aiming to develop the now established literature on home making practices, it seeks to uncover new theoretical and empirical work on the politics, processes and everyday experiences of home unmaking at different spatial scales. It also encourages work that offers imaginative and practical engagements and guidelines for ‘doing’ something to address these domestic injustices.
Themes could include, but are not limited to, home unmaking and:
- Eviction and repossession
- Demolition
- Dereliction
- War and conflict
- Disasters and climate change
- Mobility
- Marital breakdown
- Lifecourse transitions
- Divestment
- Domicide
- Homelessness
- Activism
- Art and artistic practice
- Policy