Homemaking in Fragile Environments

We witness genocidal wars that not only destroy homes but seemingly aim to eradicate any possibility of making home. The so-called migration crisis has led to a proliferation of carceral facilities where illegalised people on the move are accommodated, places where making a home is arduous at best. Migrant workers precariously dwell in informal camps attached to agricultural fields, in low-income neighbourhoods, or in highly regimented dormitories—spaces produced by the meshes of coloniality, by the violence of racialized capitalist valorisation, and by processes of organised abandonment. In these fragile and hostile environments, even en route, migrants and displaced populations vigorously seek to transform their often temporary living spaces into meaningful places where individual and collective life projects can be pursued. 

In this thematic seminar series, speakers explore processes of homemaking, broadly understood as a material and affective process of production of spaces and forms of life. We want to discuss practices of resistance, amelioration and/or the prefigurative politics, as well as the spaces of freedom, loss, devastation and alienation, that emerge from the protracted process of making and unmaking home.

Speakers:

10 October

Emilio Distretti, Royal College of Art – Burnout

14 November

Sana Murrani, Plymouth – Mapping Homing Practices Between Rupture and Refuge

5 December

Sarah El-Kazaz, SOAS – Politics in the Crevices: Urban Transformation, the Battle for Home and (Un)Making Markets in Cairo and Istanbul

12 December

Sanaa Alimia, Aga Khan University – Afghan Precarity in Pakistan: From legal exclusion to ethnic cleansing