Dwelling with Crisis: Home at Spaces of Chronic Violence (HOMCRI)

HOMCRI is a European Research Council (ERC) funded project that explores formation of home and everyday spaces in prolonged conflict/crisis situations. It aims to rethink current ways of approaching politics of materiality, affects, and dwelling through fieldwork conducted at sites located to Middle East. It traverses through various landscapes in Lebanon, West Bank, and Gaza to look at ways in which people make home in spaces that are familiar, yet disruptive, incapacitating and negating in nature. Such landscapes reflect various forms of crises engendered around economic collapse, infrastructural shortage, protracted conflict-situation and/or continuation of war by other means. 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?

Aims

HOMCRI project aims to generate 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. The project aims to do so by developing negativity as a methodological tool for approaching dwelling as a tension between home-making and spaces of exposure. Finally, by focusing on ways in which negative material and affective bindings align with incapacitating political conditions in prolonged crisis and conflict situations, the project further aims to offer a novel conceptual elaboration that can be used to rethink some of the paradigmatic notions around materiality, affect and dwelling in current posthuman and new materialist thought.