Topics: There's No Place Like Home

Catalog description

Housing is a form of shelter, providing protection from the elements. Home, on the other hand, is something much more complex for humans around the world. Home is a space of kin relations and primary attachments, an affective space of memory and emotion, and a repository of material objects that do affective work. At the same time, “home” as a literal and metaphoric space can likewise be absented or fragmented, through eviction or migration, or pose a threat like domestic abuse or other violence. Using the tactics of art, ethnography, film and design, this course will offer a cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary perspective on the meanings and materiality of home and home-making. This topic is not only omnipresent - everyone has some relation to home, even if it is a lack thereof - but also timely. The Covid-19 pandemic, which made home variously a refuge or a prison, was/is a historical moment in which we have been forced to think in new ways about who we make a home with and how to keep it safe. At the same time, evictions and homelessness are on the rise, as is global migration, which forces us to grapple with the economic and social forces that constrain people’s abilities to retain attachments to people, places and things, and to find refuge in a rapidly changing world. Students in this class will engage in creative expression and auto-ethnography, in conjunction with cross-cultural and comparative analysis, to consider their own and others’ affective ties and displacements that manifest through this resonant space.