(be)coming home
Organizers: Barbara Maly-Bowie, Syntia Hasenöhrl, Sarah Heinz, Roman Kabelik, Monika Seidl
weekly, Tuesday, 6-8PM
Unterrichtsraum, Department of English and American Studies
This interdisciplinary lecture series addresses the many configurations and struggles of how "home" becomes meaningful, when it is approached in terms of mobilities: Voluntary or forced, physical or imaginative, there are strong relations and tensions between forms of motion, movement, flows, transport, travel, communication and home-making.
Migration, exile, refugees and post-colonial diaspora testify to how historical and geopolitical processes have always enforced mobility on a large scale and have thus troubled understandings of home as enrooted life and located safe space - an idea that the latest rise of nationalistic tendencies, border-walls and homeland-security, ironically, fiercely pursues and protects. A global economic system asks and responds to flexible employees and consumers working away from home, accelerating commuting, travel and circulation of goods, but also promotes home offices with cloud-based desktops and ready available products and information; governments using spyware to monitor citizens as much as "smart homes" make the right to non-interference with one’s home (as laid down in Article 12 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) urgently debated, while the real-estate bubble burst and the housing crisis displaces people, AirBnB and Uber commodify the private spheres of house and car. These are just a few examples that show that home is a symbolically and materially contested, permeable and mobile category of space, identity and belonging. In that sense, home may be best understood in terms of affective space- and placemaking practices, imbued with exclusionary logics and contingent on power relations. The question who is in- or outside home (be it the feeling, the private sphere, a residence, a family, a community or nation) then needs to be expanded with who (and what) can where, why and how move or stay.
With various case studies and points of departures, the guest speakers will discuss manifestations, experiences, imaginations and theories of home on ideological, socio-historical and cultural grounds.