Space and Temporalities

The Sense of 'Home’: An Interdisciplinary Workshop

Tuesday 29 June

What makes a home? How have our understandings of home changed across space and time? What can we learn from an interdisciplinary approach to conceptualising home?

This workshop explored these questions across a broad geographical and chronological range, employing methodologies from the humanities and social sciences. We considered the forces which shape the space and temporalities of the home, as well as the processes by which individuals attempt to make themselves at home in new urban or rural environments. Drawing on examples of voluntary and forced migration and movement, work and worship, family and food, punishment and enslavement, through the lens of gender, class, race, sexuality, and their interconnections, we considered the physical and emotional impact of the destruction and construction of homes. Much attention has been paid to the way in which identities have been forged in opposition to others, particularly through global cultural encounters. This project built upon work done on the domestic and public spheres across diverse spaces and times and encouraged a focus upon the ways in which identities are created, projected, shaped and retained through the space of the home, or its absence. A full video of the workshop is available below... 

In the aftermath of the 2008 crash, pop-up culture - a trend for temporary and nomadic places - emerged as a 'compensatory' urbanism; designed to keep life going in crisis conditions by filling vacant sites and providing amenities and work opportunities without capital. However, having begun as a second best solution, pop-up became a celebrated format for activities including cultural events, restaurants, work-spaces and even welfare provision. 

This talk argues that pop-up normalised and glamorised precarious ways of living and working in the post-crash era. Specifically, I suggest that pop-up rebranded precarity by reimagining the spatial and temporal characteristics of crisis, replacing, for example, instability with 'flexibility' or diminishment with 'the micro.' Exploring varied case-studies within London, I illuminate the spatiotemporal logics of pop-up and their role in rebranding precarity. 

The seminar will trace the dynamic formation of Global Care Chains (GCCs) from local settings in urban India, demonstrating how ayahs/caregivers’ movements stretch across different geopolitical locales. Their movements obfuscate the South-North, South-South and North-North migration divide. 

My seminar will demarcate the localisation of globalisation; how do female domestic workers in India’s Capital become highly transnational and mobile? I offer a substantial ethnography of GCCs through the eyes off an all-rounder ayah Mary, with her work trajectory having spanned three decades of intimate service with diplomats and global elites. Mary’s journeys raise pertinent questions around, aging, futurity, precarity and the devaluation of social reproduction. Through the aging process, Mary begins to scrutinise embellished employer narratives (a stark continuity of colonial sentiments), while her deep-seated (and silenced) vulnerabilities were equally unveiled. How do ayahs like Mary view their relationships with employers when they are young and how do they view servitude as they rapidly age? The life-cycle approach allows us to prioritise the interconnectedness of Mary’s movements and the critical disjuncture’s between youth and ageing.

Richard researches and teaches human rights in the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice in the School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. He is also editor of the Journal of Human Rights Practice (Oxford). Richard’s research focuses on the institutional protection of human rights, in particular the rights of people deprived of liberty. 

Does Torture Prevention Work? (with Lisa Handley, Liverpool University Press, 2016) was a pioneering multi-country study of the effectiveness of the torture prevention methods advocated by international legal authorities and anti-torture campaigners. The research found that although many recommended preventive steps had a positive impact, some did not. It also found that the preventive measures most strongly embedded in international law were not necessarily those that worked best in reducing the risk of torture.