Dwelling with Crisis: Home at Spaces of Chronic Violence

Introduction

This project elaborates ways of making home among those dwelling in societies facing protracted crises. It traverses through various landscapes to look at ways in which people make home in spaces that are familiar, yet repelling, incapacitating, and altogether negating in nature. Such landscapes, notably in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, reflect various forms of crises engendered around economic collapse, infrastructural shortage, prolonged conflict situations, and/or continuation of war by other means.

Key Questions

These crises force us to pose a key question on what it means to stay and make a home in spaces that constantly expose life to disruptions, incapacitations, and material negations. How does one dwell in crisis?

Research Challenge

The project responds to this research challenge via ground-breaking research that goes beyond the state-of-the-art on three fronts:

1. Empirical Knowledge: It generates vast empirical knowledge on what it takes to dwell in crisis and conflict areas, and with the political conditions they establish, by focusing on spaces that violently separate, distance, and amputate people from their familiar everyday spaces through constant affective disruptions, material deprivations, and conditions of incapacitation.

2. Methodological Tool: It develops negativity as a novel methodological tool for approaching dwelling as a tension between ‘home-making’ and ‘spaces of exposure’.

3. Conceptual Elaboration: It offers a novel conceptual elaboration of negativity as a worldly condition, which challenges the paradigmatic notions of materiality, affect, and dwelling in current posthuman thought.

Project Goals

Designed for high-gain outputs, the project takes a high risk in offering ground-breaking research that aims to fundamentally rethink the negative foundations of the human-world relationship by focusing on ways in which negative material and affective bindings align with incapacitating political conditions in prolonged crisis and conflict situations.