The Committee on Globalization and Social Change’s annual theme for 2024-2025 will be Home.
How should we understand “home” in an era of displacement, disaffection, and alienation? What are the risks of reaffirming home as a lost or absent ideal when notions and ideologies of home often fuel the very processes that lead to mass violence, displacement, and exclusion (racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, statism, militarism, imperialism, extractivism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, transphobia)? Homeland may at once serve as a justification for settler colonialism and a powerful standpoint from which dispossessed people can critique and resist settler-colonialism. But do anti-colonial claims about indigeneity risk reproducing an invidious exclusionary logic of home? What does the historical experience of long-term displaced peoples invite us to think about this concept (consider New World Black communities for whom the West is irreducibly home and irreducibly alien and alienating)? How might “diaspora” reaffirm, cut across, or point beyond such dilemmas?
Why do we so often assume that locality, familiarity, proximity, and resemblance are likely to create conditions of safety, security and trust? How might we think the antinomy between home as site of refuge, care, and love with home as locus of threat, danger, and harm? Insofar as home entails the webs of sociality, mutuality, and interdependence that compose concrete life-worlds and political communities it may serve as a condition of possibility, solidarity, and democracy. On the one hand, home may nourish a process of open-ended becoming, but, on the other, insofar as it reaffirms provincial notions of place, people, culture, and/or presupposes essentialist notions of originality, purity, and exclusivity, home may obstruct solidarity and democracy.
Throughout the modern period, home has been a metonym for domesticity. It signals family, biological reproduction, and normative gender relations. Home conveys property and ownership (of things by humans, of women by men, of children by families and the state). It marks the nexus of capitalism and patriarchy. In its idealized form, home conjures a sphere of love, care, and sociality that is free from the instrumental rationalities and utilitarian calculations that define the atomized and alienating public sphere (i.e., states, bureaucracies, professions, markets). This same idealization presupposes and reproduces patriarchy, heteronormativity, and transphobia. It is a functional instrument of capitalist social reproduction. It suppresses wages and maintains a gendered wage gap. It is a sphere of repression, regulation, and disenfranchisement. It is the thinly veiled scene of domestic violence.
Such questions open onto a consideration of the relation between home and work. The Covid-19 pandemic illuminated the usually obscured gender and class relations that allow for a neat division between home and work as separate spheres. It also created critical distance from a workplace ideology that treats five days a week forty hours a day office-work as some kind of natural axiom necessary for economic productivity and social order. Does the post-pandemic increase in working from home open the possibility of reconsidering the public-private division in emancipatory ways? Conversely, do new digital technologies that enable more work from home simply mark the further conquest of everyday life and private time by economic, professional, and work-place demands such that even more of life is reduced to work? The unevenness between the kinds of jobs that allow work from home, and the kind of workers able to do so, also underscores often obscured class divisions and a societal digital divide.
The very notion of home invites us to displace conventional distinctions between public and private, the political and the personal, the affective and the rational, everyday interactions and overarching logics, structures, and systems. Home reminds us that intersecting forms of domination operate at and through the smallest and deepest levels of subjectivity and relationality. Conversely, home reminds us that societal transformation – emancipation -- must also operate at and through these everyday subjectivities, practices, and arrangements.
Home suggests that the pathway to freedom, equality, and justice – beyond capitalism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy – may need to pass through alternatives to the bourgeois “home” (i.e., dissident sexualities, queer families, intentional communities, collective labor, communal property). Home may enable or constrain individual and collective attachments, desires, and fantasies, in ways that are enabling or disabling. Likewise, it may require us to imagine novel political forms and forms of sociality – alternative notions of home and tradition -- that are not grounded in nativist, nationalist, culturalist, or imperialist notions of heimat or homeland. We might ask whether notions of uncanniness (i.e., unhomeliness) and hospitality (along with wandering, transversality, internationalism) may help to rework and elevate our inherited notions of home, homeland, lifeworld, community, demos, polis. Conversely, we might ask whether a reworked notion of home may help us ground abstract notions like world, globe, planet, and universe in concrete webs of sociality, affect, interdependence, and mutuality.
All of these issues concerning home have also been represented, staged, addressed, and reworked aesthetically. The iconography of home runs through literature, art, and film. So too does the phenomenon and experience of estrangement by familiarity signaled by the term uncanniness (unhomeliness). How have iconographies of the home and an aesthetics of the (un)homely been mobilized to reframe or reinforce the questions and dilemmas here discussed?
These are only preliminary questions and reflections on home as site, sphere, location, metaphor. They are meant to indicate some of the many vectors of inquiry that a broadly defined notion of home might open. We welcome applications from scholars whose work invites us to think more deeply about some aspect of home in relation to the world.
Graduate Center students whose research engages or illuminates some aspect of home, whatever the historical period or geographical region, are encouraged to apply by indicating their interest in the CGSC on the Graduate Center’s Dissertation Fellowship Competition application form, due January 16, 2024.
Information about the CGSC’s Mid-Career CUNY Faculty Fellowships will be circulated soon.
