International Conference on the Home
What is home and how do we relate to, inhabit, shape, experience, and use it? Home is described in terms of shape, space, and scale, but also in terms of experiences, relationships, and emotions. During the corona, crisis home became a central yet contested term. What does it mean to stay at home? What makes a home? What about those without a home? The pandemic might be a catalyst for thinking about home in new ways – not only as a safe or a private space but maybe also as an unsafe space or a space that is sometimes public or professional.
The conference aims to share and discuss new perspectives on the home – in particular perspectives that emerge during crises and may inform future conceptualizations of human dwelling. Speakers will deliver research and design perspectives on the home as a physical, social, digital, and existential place in past, present, and future.
STAY HOME: New perspectives on the home is an interdisciplinary conference on the home hosted by the Danish research project STAY HOME: the home during the corona crisis – and after funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (2020-24).
The project investigates practices, experiences, and uses of the home during the corona crisis and afterwards, and includes subprojects on existential experiences, domestic violence, the digitalized home, and the spatial organization of the home. STAY HOME is conducted by an interdisciplinary team from the faculties of Theology and Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Academy: School of Architecture, and the IT University of Copenhagen. Read more about the project in English and Danish.
Date and location
The conference takes place on Thursday, 10 November and Friday, 11 November 2022 at The Royal Danish Academy: Architecture, Design, Conservation, Philip De Langes Allé 10, 1435 Copenhagen.
Keynote speakers
Professor Joanne Begiato, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University.
Title of keynote lecture: Making the (un)happy Home: Emotions, Bodies, and Spaces in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.
Professor Joanne Begiato is a historian of early modern, Georgian and Victorian Britain, with particular expertise in the history of emotions, the family, marriage, masculinities, material culture, and law. She has a special interest in the ways in which people encountered their material and emotional worlds e.g. the role of space and material culture in constructing domestic violence. At the conference STAY HOME: New perspectives on the home, Prof. Begiato will give a keynote lecture on the ways in which the concept and experience of the home, its spaces and objects, and the emotions it generated, shaped intimate relationships and gendered ideals in the past.
Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture Beatriz Colomina, Princeton University School of Architecture.
Title of keynote lecture: The 24/7 Bed
Professor Beatriz Colomina is an architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on questions of architecture, art, technology, sexuality, and media. She has done research on the domestic built environment, privacy, and gender studies. Her research on the bed as an acute example of an emerging multifunctional place within the domestic realm has shown to become relevant once again during the pandemic. At the conference STAY HOME: New perspectives on the home, Prof. Colomina will give a keynote lecture on the shifting role of the bed in a time when Smartphones are the first and last things we touch every day. How does the convergence of Smartphone technology, flexible working conditions, the rise of the gig economy, and young professionals’ nomadic lifestyles impact the significance of the bed as a site of labour, leisure, and surveillance?
Professor Paul Dourish, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine.
The title of the keynote lecture is Homes, Canny and Uncanny: Evolving Strains in Moral Laboratories.
Professor Paul Dourish examines the social and cultural dimensions of data and digital practice, drawing on disciplines such as human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, media studies, and communication. His research focuses primarily on understanding information technology as a site of social and cultural production, and previous research projects have focused on the production of privacy as a social phenomenon, spatiality as social and cultural production, and transnational and trans-cultural contexts of information technology use. At the conference STAY HOME: New perspectives on the home, Prof. Dourish will give a keynote lecture on how contemporary homes can be understood as sites of moral development. With inspiration from Carol Mattingly’s writings on home as the key site in the development and sustenance of public and private morality, Dourish will investigate what new strains homes are under as they continue to evolve.
Associate Professor Hanna Reichel, Princeton Theological Seminary.
Title of keynote lecture: Home/alone? – Technologies of Haunting and Belonging.
Associate Professor Hanna Reichel is a researcher within the field of reformed theology. They specialise in theological methods, epistemic justice, political theology, digital theology, and queer theology. They are currently doing research on contemporary surveillance cultures through a doctrinal lens, developing a typology of disciplining, performing, controlling, and replicating surveillance in conversation with debates on divine omniscience relating to eschatology, election, providence, and creation.
Conference Program
See the Conference Program here.
Registration
Registration is now open. Follow this link to register. Registration closes on Monday, 17 October 2022.
There is no conference fee. The conference includes refreshments during breaks and a sandwich for the lunch break. Please sign up for lunch on the registration page.
It is possible to sign up for either Thursday, Friday or both days.
It is also possible to sign up to follow the conference online via live streaming.
Contact
Academic questions should be addressed to PI of STAY HOME, Professor Mette Birkedal Bruun: mbb@teol.ku.dk
Practical questions or questions regarding registration should be addressed to the editor of STAY HOME, Emma Klakk.