Please send an abstract of up to 300 words and a bio of up to 250 words to jean_amato@fitnyc.edu by October 14, 2024. We welcome papers that reflect on the diverse, layered, and fluid representations of homemaking for a seminar focused on three key thematic units: Homemaking: Spaces, Architecture, and Urban Geographies; Mapping the Everyday: Visual Arts, Objects, and Media; Gendered Spatial Configurations. We explore the intricate relationships between domestic spaces, cultural geography, urban studies, object studies, intersectional studies, queer domestic space, and gendered spatial configurations. Homes are overlapping public and private realms that continually define and shape each other in time and space. Beyond a material reality, a home is a flux of personal and collective ideas, feelings, desires, and imaginings. As a spatial imaginary, integral to identity formation, our ideas of ourselves and affiliations are re-experienced daily in our homes– through the often-overlooked routines, rituals, objects, designs, structures, tactile sensations, and boundaries of our domestic worlds. Homemaking studies reshape our understanding of material and imaginative geographies, both locally and globally, and increase spatial literacy.
Presentations might focus on: Homemaking in diaspora as intricately linked to migration and place-making; Mapping urban geographies and visual cultures to explore expressions of belonging; Daily routines involved in homemaking as identity formation; Community and homemaking practices in queer urban spaces that redefine rigid public/private binaries; Migrations of homemaking practices between rural and urban; Investigations into the sounds, design, structures, interiors, movements, and tactile sensations of everyday rituals; How domestic objects create a sense of home; Contested experiences of belonging, amidst economic, political, and climate-driven migrations; The injustices, erasures, displacements, and demolitions associated with spaces we call home; Unwelcoming domestic spaces for women and LGBTQIA individuals; Depictions of gender norms in domestic spaces and architecture; Transplanted patriarchal divisions between the 'outer' and 'inner' realms of traditional society concerning sexualities, gender roles, and binaries; Standard practices of mapping homes in terms of nativism, Orientalism, racism, imperialism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, zoning restrictions, redlining, racist housing, and immigration policies; Discrepancies between public history and private memories, inclusion and exclusion, gendered binaries, and heteronormative givens that limit representations of homemaking; Interrogations of class-based narratives of privilege that overlook refugee, displaced, and low-income rural/urban domestic spatial configurations.
Presentations might focus on: Homemaking in diaspora as intricately linked to migration and place-making; Mapping urban geographies and visual cultures to explore expressions of belonging; Daily routines involved in homemaking as identity formation; Community and homemaking practices in queer urban spaces that redefine rigid public/private binaries; Migrations of homemaking practices between rural and urban; Investigations into the sounds, design, structures, interiors, movements, and tactile sensations of everyday rituals; How domestic objects create a sense of home; Contested experiences of belonging, amidst economic, political, and climate-driven migrations; The injustices, erasures, displacements, and demolitions associated with spaces we call home; Unwelcoming domestic spaces for women and LGBTQIA individuals; Depictions of gender norms in domestic spaces and architecture; Transplanted patriarchal divisions between the 'outer' and 'inner' realms of traditional society concerning sexualities, gender roles, and binaries; Standard practices of mapping homes in terms of nativism, Orientalism, racism, imperialism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, zoning restrictions, redlining, racist housing, and immigration policies; Discrepancies between public history and private memories, inclusion and exclusion, gendered binaries, and heteronormative givens that limit representations of homemaking; Interrogations of class-based narratives of privilege that overlook refugee, displaced, and low-income rural/urban domestic spatial configurations.