Dwelling Practices and Built Environments

Migrating - Remitting -‘Building’- Dwelling: House-making as proxy presence in postsocialist Albania. in JRAI vol.16

by Dimitris Dalakoglou

This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants’ house-making projects in their... more This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants’ house-making projects in their countries of birth. In particular, it examines the houses built or refurbished by Albanians in their home-country, which is no longer their place of permanent residence. This is a widespread phenomenon in Albania, but it is also a frequently appearing practice amongst other international migrants. Why do migrants living outside their home-countries build houses there even though they do not plan to return? I seek to answer this question in the case of Albania by focusing empirically on the process of constructing these houses, rather than merely on the material entity of the house
as such. I propose that such ‘house-making’ by Albanian migrants is not only a simple house-building process; it also ensures a constant dwelling and dynamic ‘proxy’ presence for
migrants in their community of origin. These ethnographic observations have further significance for the anthropological study of both houses and international migration.

About being-two in an architectural perspective: interview with Luce Irigaray

by Andrea Wheeler

About being-two in an architectural perspective

by Andrea Wheeler

Love in Architecture

by Andrea Wheeler

Mind the Gap: The Tempo Rubato of Dwelling in Lineups

by Phillip Vannini

Published in Mobilities (2011)

Despite their prominence in everyday life lineups are of peripheral concern to mobility scholars. Aiming to contribute... more Despite their prominence in everyday life lineups are of peripheral concern to mobility scholars. Aiming to contribute to our existing knowledge on lineups and the transitory places of everyday life writ large, this paper attempts to investigate lineups at small island ferry terminals. Lineups are portrayed as complex orchestrations of rest and movement weaved through relational performances of mobility and relative immobility. As neither a place in the sedentarist nor nomadic sense, lineups defeat facile, dichotomous conceptualizations of spatialities and temporalities. Neither still nor flowing, neither public nor private, lineups are animated by idiosyncratic practices of dwelling whereby multiple and unique forms of livelihood are performed. Ferry lineups are ephemeral moorings: places where communities form and dissolve in temporary zones, as if suspended from the regular rhythms of the rest of the day and the week. On small islands lineups exist as stolen time-spaces – an original concept that draws inspiration from the musical idea of tempo rubato and from Michel de Certeau’s (1984) treatment of tactics.

Agoraphobia and Hypochondria as Disorders of Dwelling

by Kirsten Jacobson

Published in _International Studies in Philosophy_, 36:2 (2004), 31-44.

Influenced by the works of Merleau-Ponty and of Heidegger, I argue that our spatial experience is rooted in the way we... more Influenced by the works of Merleau-Ponty and of Heidegger, I argue that our spatial experience is rooted in the way we are engaged with and in our world. Space is not a predetermined and uniform geometrical grid, but the network of engagement and alienation that provides one's orientation in the inter-human world. Drawing on this phenomenological conception of space, I show that the neuroses of agoraphobia and, more unexpectedly, hypochondria must not be understood as mere "psychological" problems, but rather as problems of one's overall way of spatial being-in-the-world, that is, of "dwelling." With respect to both neuroses, I argue that subjects experience a sense of spatial contraction that mirrors a contraction in their abilities to engage with the people, the environment, and the situations that surround them.

A Developed Nature: A Phenomenological Account of the Experience of Home

by Kirsten Jacobson

Continental Philosophy Review, 2009, Volume 42, Number 3, 355-373, DOI: 10.1007/s11007-009-9113-1

Though "dwelling" is more commonly associated with Heidegger's philosophy than with that of Merleau-Ponty,... more Though "dwelling" is more commonly associated with Heidegger's philosophy than with that of Merleau-Ponty, "being-at-home" is in fact integral to Merleau-Ponty's thinking. I consider the notion of home as it relates to Merleau-Ponty's more familiar notions of the "lived body" and the "level," and, in particular, I consider how the unique intertwining of activity and passivity that characterizes our being-at-home is essential to our nature as free beings. I argue that while being-at-home is essentially an experience of passivity—i.e., one that rests in the background of our experience and provides a support and structure for our life that goes largely unnoticed and that is significantly beyond our "conscious" control—being-at-home is also a way of being to which we attain. This analysis of home reveals important psychological insights into the nature of our freedom as well as into the nature of the development of our adult ways of coping and behaving.

Eremophilia and the beyond: the place of solitude in early urban lived experience

by Joe Williams

NB: This is an outline/abstract of a paper presented it at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in Bristol, in the session entitled "Theorising city landscapes: boundaries and place in urban space". I will upload a fully referenced version of the paper when I have had time to work on it further.

This paper represents the preliminary stages of an attempt to investigate changing relationships between ‘individual’... more This paper represents the preliminary stages of an attempt to investigate changing relationships between ‘individual’ and ‘community’ in the context of early urbanism. A widely accepted view holds that urban life isolates or alienates the individual human being, but archaeological attempts to evaluate the validity of such a view in relation to early urban societies have been rare. Writings on solitude, particularly psychological and sociological works, have often presented it as a malady. To distinguish the solitude examined here from such a perceived ill, the term ‘eremophilia’ – love of solitude, or of deserted places - is used.

Application of a variety of methods of spatial analysis should enable the investigation of eremophilia as an embodied, socio-spatial phenomenon. Consideration of eremophilia as an aspect of human interaction with an urban world is likely to entail analyses on meso- and macro-spatial levels. While household worlds should not be forgotten, we cannot impose present-day cultural norms, together with ideas of progress and globalisation, upon the archaeological remains. Berdyaev’s proposed correlation between humankind’s ‘expanding horizons’ and the individual’s increasing sense of isolation and abandonment is illustrative of this, relying upon the assumption that ‘living’ in the past took place solely within household spheres, and only recently began to occur in ‘the world’ as a whole. It is proposed here that, on the contrary, experiences of solitude are influenced to a greater degree by sensory stimuli, particularly those leading to awareness of activity outside one’s control and beyond one’s immediate surroundings, than by social factors.

De la vida de las cajas a las cajas de la vida

by Tomás Sánchez Criado

Draft chapter for a book edited by F. Blanco & R. Sánchez Viedma on epistemology and psychology, 2009

Dwelling the Telecare Home: Place, Location and Habitality

by Tomás Sánchez Criado

D. López & T. Sánchez-Criado (2009). In Space & Culture, 12(3), 343-358

Home has become a newly fostered place for care giving in what might be called an aging in place paradigm. As a... more Home has become a newly fostered place for care giving in what might be called an aging in place paradigm. As a result, thinking about how the home's spatialities are configured and how they might transform caring has become an important issue for the social sciences. This article is a contribution to this line of thought and looks at being-at-home from a non-anthropocentric point of view. By focusing on the telecare cases of an ongoing ethnographic project and drawing on Heideggerian insights on dwelling and place, we coin the term habitality. We think this term is useful for two purposes: (1) to think about the home as a materially heterogeneous set of spatialities and subjectivities and (2) to understand being-at-home not as a way of living in an enclosed and protected shelter of routine activities, but as a way of combining those spatialities and subjectivities and the differences (and oddities) they might bring.