Dwelling with Crisis: Home at Spaces of Chronic Violence

ongoing

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-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? The project responds to this research challenge via ground-breaking research that goes beyond the state-of-art on three fronts. Firstly, 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. Secondly, it does so by developing negativity as a novel methodological tool for approaching dwelling as a tension between ‘home-making’ and ‘spaces of exposure’. Thirdly, 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. 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 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.