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Writing Home: Nineteenth-Century Sailors’ Personal Logbooks

This blog post is written by Emily Cuming.

Emily Cuming is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom.

On the move

The imperative to “stay home” at a time of crisis is more problematic than it appears. Indeed, among the many things that the global pandemic exposed was how the ability to pivot to a home-centred life, including working from home, was linked to questions of class privilege (Weinar 2021). Beyond recent history, home for many workers, migrants and refugees, has had to be negotiated in transit, on the move, in conditions of flux, precarity and through a variety of practices (Ralph and Staeheli 2011).

My paper presented at the Stay Home conference focused on historical subjects whose working lives were defined precisely by a departure from home – British sailors of the “ordinary” rank who formed part of a floating global proletariat, servicing merchant ships on international journeys that could stretch from a matter of weeks to several years[i]. Many of the individuals who formed the merchant navy workforce signed on to ships not, as the popular phrase had it, to “see the world,” nor to join the ranks of those engaged in the Victorian “flight from domesticity,” but to earn a living wage that was often critical to the support of a family and homestead on shore[ii]. In the predominantly all-male space of the merchant ship, workers had to adapt to the “separate sphere” of their floating work-homes. There sailors worked, slept, fraternized (and sometimes fought) within the confines of the ship, in which principles of collectivity were key and privacy at a premium.

“Our Berth.” National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. JOD/64. Sketch from Account of a Voyage to China and New York in the Tamesa, by Robert Brown, 1874-1875.

The importance of home for sailors was not necessarily diminished by their departure from it (Cuming 2019). On voyages, sailors maintained their shore-based attachments through a variety of practices, including letter writing and craftwork (Wassell Smith 2018). Some devoted private leisure time to personal journals, logbooks and handwritten notebooks, a number of which have been conserved in museum archives or among family papers[iii]. While existing studies of this writing have tended to view them as providing useful evidence of shipboard work and the broader culture of the ship (Blum 2008; Cummings and Publicover 2021), my work demonstrates that these documents also have the potential to point to aspects of self-identity, kinship and emotional lives. This interpretation has sometimes necessitated reading against the grain of work-focused entries, to trace the personal within the writing.

At home on the waves

While sea-journals are often preoccupied with the rote details of shipboard life – nautical coordinates, weather, and work – like diaries, they can also offer glimpses of sailors’ personal lives. One seafaring carpenter, John Dand, for example, was thinking of his young daughter as he set sail from Swansea to Caldera in Chile on the barque Sir Henry Pottinger on March 18th 1858, noting on the first page of his “Private Journal” that it was his “dear little daughters birthday at 11 O clock this morning”. As Easter Sunday came round, he used the occasion to reflect on domestic pleasures: “My third Sunday on the sea. I am thinking of England and the happy youngsters with their new clothes, and wondering if my dear little daughter has got a new frock, I think its fond mother would get it one, at least its father would if he had been at home.” Adopting the generic trope of one type of diarist, his entries shifted to the second person voice as he directed his comments to his family as if writing an unsent letter: “Capt B[arnes] and I have had a long chat about home and friends,” he wrote in one entry, adding “we are wondering what you are all doing, and thinking about, no doubt you are all in your beds and most likely asleep as by you it will only want a few minutes till midnight.”[iv]

Some journals reveal the extent to which sailors suffered from that other well-known affliction at sea: homesickness. This formed the dominant note of the pages of 22-year-old George Mansfield’s sea journal, another ship’s carpenter who had worked at the profession since the age of fourteen. On a Sunday at sea, the day of relative rest even for sailors, he reflected: “Today can not help thinking about home & its comforts & fancying myself seated round a comfortable fireside of a winters Sunday afternoon. Far different here cold & wet & deprived of almost every comfort. Still the thought of Home & the Hope of meeting again, cheers us up a little.”[v] Neil Smith, a general sailor on board the Finisterre barque sailing from Cardiff to Java in 1876-1877, was also afflicted by the miseries of homesickness, as noted in the diary from the very moment the ship left port. While doggedly jotting details of the many jobs he performed around the ship, in a phonetic style that revealed his inexperience at writing, he seamlessly blended mundane tasks with intimations of family and home in Greenock: “I have finished the Lader. I am fixing [little jobs] about the deck. I wonder how my darling Jane is getting on and hir wee Boys. … The snow will begun to fal there now. They will not be much out now. The cold will keep them in the house. May God Bless and Keep them and take me safe back to them agane.​”[vi] Like Dand and Mansfield, he imagined home through visions of family togetherness and the perennial image of the Victorian hearth. Loneliness is a bodily emotion, experienced corporeally, and captured in writing through images of heat and comfort, as noted in Joanne Begiato’s blog for this series. In this way, sailors’ diaries evoked home-spun images of terrestrial routines and sentimental tropes of home. Of course, such figurations have to be evaluated in the context of the writers’ nostalgia and necessary detachment from mundane familial routines: absence from home may well have made the hearts of seafaring men fonder.

Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still. Boston, 1870. Lithographed sheet music. Photo credit: Courtesy the Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

The sea diary as property

Sea journals, or personal logbooks, could offer a multifunctional form for working sailors – a document into which they poured details of passing days, work performed, and a repository for thoughts of family, home and kinship stretching across oceans. Superficially, this writing can appear to be fairly generic and rote; the writers were mostly unprofessional or “amateur,” and a few may have been keeping journals for the first time. Yet it is important to recognize that this writing – ordinary as it might appear – was an intentional act within the context of shipboard life.  Given that physical space, including sleeping quarters, was shared, private writing would have necessitated at least temporary removal from the rest of the group. Notebooks would need to have been bought and packed in advance in order to form part of a sailor’s necessarily slim cache of possessions, and they required careful preservation in conditions of perpetual wetness. The paratextual elements of sea journals – details marking the front and back covers, including marginalia, inscriptions and doodles and signatures – reveal their significance as forms of personal property. Some flyleaves display not only the sailor’s name, but their dedication to family members, suggesting their intended readership and the role of the notebook as a potential souvenir to be returned home after the voyage. Sometimes diarists wrote out their home addresses on the front pages, confirming the diary’s status as personal property while also signaling how the journal logged space as well as time.

Maritime Museum, National Museums Liverpool. DX/871, Voyage Diary by J. William Archer, Crew on Board Ship Lizzie Bell, 1883.

As with the writings of the inmates of other non-domicile environments, such as institutions or workplaces, ordinary journals served a wider function than that indicated by their surface content. For as the historian Amanda Vickery suggests, throughout history, material objects of the most mundane or plain kind have enabled the poor and those enduring forms of deprivation to keep hold of a sense of self through possessions – from clothes, to locking boxes, mementoes, and small ornaments: ‘Access to a small place of privacy held out a promise of some autonomy and independence” (2010: 27). Viewed in this way, the diaries fulfilled not only a practical but also a symbolic function as private property.

Photo credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Four Sailors Relaxing on a Deck, One Reading. Drawing. 1820: https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-154255

This is not to imply, however, that diaries were a place into which sailors disclosed “private” or confessional thoughts. Indeed, life writing scholarship has shown that the idea of the diary as a receptacle for innermost feelings is anachronistic in relation to this period (Henderson 2018:165). Like diaries, logbooks might be written in full view of others, read by other individuals, and written with an intended readership in mind. Indeed, as Maya Jasanoff puts it, on a ship the sailor was in the paradoxical position of being “never alone… always isolated” (2017: 91).  Yet this does not diminish the significance of the personal logbook as a Victorian article of self or “ego document.” As an artefact and practice, the journal fulfilled an important role for these Victorian mobile workers. It was a “place” to return to at the end of a day or week, on the ocean, when there was nowhere else to go.  As a piece of private property, it also situated the writer as a social self, entangled in family and kinship relations that extended beyond the immediate society of the ship.

How do logbooks end?

In his well-known essay, the life writing theorist Philippe Lejeune reflected on the question: “How do diaries end?” (2001). We cannot know for sure how logbooks ended, whether, for example, sailor-authors morphed into more standard diary writers on their return from voyages. Nor can we know for sure how they were received by the loved ones they evoked in journals on their way home – celebrated as returning breadwinners, or received more indifferently by children who viewed them as strangers. In some cases, logbooks survived their authors, returning as personal property in the event of the writer’s death at sea. Yet a closer look at the journals as material cultural objects can offer clues about the return of the sailor-diary. In some cases, the inscription of family names, including dates of birth and death at the front of journals, suggests that they wound their way home to take up a place as family books: read, perhaps, by the sailor’s children, preserved and passed on as heirlooms. In this way, the personal logbook completed its journey into its new role as a form of family book.

Notes

[i] This research was supported by a Short-Term Caird Research Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, UK, and by the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. The blog is based on work from my forthcoming monograph, Maritime Relations: Sailors, Family and Writing Networks, c. 1850-1914.

[ii] On the “flight from domesticity,” see Tosh 2005: 330–42.

[iii] In archive catalogues, the terms range from “diary” to “journal” to “logbook,” with other variations in between. Using research methodologies drawn primarily from the field of life studies, my work suggests that sailors’ personal logbooks were hybrid forms, lying at the intersection of a number of other genres to create new documents of the Victorian self.

[iv] National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. JOD/278/1-2. Log and Journal Kept by John Dand, Carpenter on the Barque Sir Henry Pottinger, 1858.

[v] National Maritime Museum, London, Greenwich. MXX/75/007. A Transcription of the Journal of George William Mansfield on his Voyage from Liverpool to San Francisco and Back on the Lady Heathcote in 1868-69.

[vi] National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. MSS/84/052. Transcript of the Diary of Neil Smith, Carpenter on the Barque Cape Finisterre, 1876 to 1877.

References

Begiato, Joanne. “Close to Home. The Emotional Spaces of the Home in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain.” https://stayhome.hypotheses.org/404 (Accessed 26 June 2023).

Blum, Hester. The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Cuming, Emily. “At Home in the World? The Ornamental Life of Sailors in Victorian Sailortown,” Victorian Literature and Culture. 47, no. 3 (2019): 463–85. doi:10.1017/S1060150318001523.

Cumings, Eli, and Laurence Publicover. “Shipboard Diaries as Navigational Instruments.” In Shipboard Literary Cultures: Reading, Writing, and Performing at Sea, edited by Susann Liebich and Laurence Publicover, 107-29. Basingstoke: 2021.

Henderson, Desirée. “Reading Digitized Diaries: Privacy and the Digital Life-Writing Archive.” A/b: Auto/Biography Studies 33, no. 1 (2018): 157-74. doi: 10.1080/08989575.2018.1389845.

Jasanoff, Maya. The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. London, 2017.

Lejeune, Philippe. “How do Diaries End?” Biography 24, no. 1 (2001): 99- 112.

Moran, Joe. “Private Lives, Public Histories: The Diary in Twentieth-Century Britain.” Journal of British Studies. 54, no. 1 (2015): 138-62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24701728.

Ralph, David, and Lynn A. Staeheli. “Home and Migration: Mobilities, Belongings and Identities.” Geography Compass 5 (2011): 517-530. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00434.x

Tosh, John, “Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800–1914.” The Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 330–42. doi:10.1086/427129.

Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven. 2010.

Wassell Smith, Maya, “‘The Fancy Work What Sailors Make:’ Material and Emotional Creative Practice in Masculine Seafaring Communities.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 14, no. 2 (2018): https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue142/smith.html (Accessed 5 January 2023)

Weinar, Agnieszka. “The Privilege of Staying Home: COVID and the Highly Skilled Workforce.”  OpenDemocracy, 21 December 2021: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/pandemic-border/the-privilege-of-staying-home-covid-and-the-highly-skilled-workforce/ (Accessed 9th June 2023)

“Feeling at home” in out-of-home residential care

This blog post is written by Suzie Attiwill.

Suzie Attiwill is a designer, curator and Professor of Interior Design in the School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

We have invited selected scholars, who presented at our conference ‘STAY HOME: New Perspectives on the Home’ in November 2022 to publish on our blog in 2023. This blog post is based on the conference presentation by the author.

“Feeling at home” in out-of-home residential care

Every child or young person who is removed from their parents has the right to live somewhere that feels like home. For many of the children and young people the Commission spoke to in foster and kinship care, being in care felt safe, stable and homely. For the majority of those living in residential care, however, being in care felt unsafe, unstable and not at all like home. (Commission for Children and Young People CCYP, 2019: 25).

The juxtaposition of “feeling at home” and yet out of home embodies the complexity of the situation of residential care in relation to the idea of home as both a feeling and a physical location. In 2018-19, the Australian Government developed a nationally consistent definition of out-of-home care as:

“… overnight care for children aged under 18 who are unable to live with their families due to child safety concerns. … Children are placed in out-of-home care for many reasons, including: being the subjects of substantiations and needing a protective environment, having parents who are incapable of providing adequate care, needing alternative accommodation during times of conflict, having parents or carers who need respite. Consistent with the principle of keeping children with their families where it is safe and appropriate to do so, out-of-home care placements are considered as a last resort.” (AIHW 2023)

In Australia, there are five types of out-of-home care: home-based care, residential care, independent living, family group homes, and other. Home-based care is accommodation in the home of a nominated and approved carer such as a relative/kin or foster carer. Like family group homes, there is a sense of family in the way relationships work and how the environment is set up. In contrast, residential care is a different arrangement. Some houses are purpose-built, and some are existing domestic suburban houses which have been adapted. Residential care houses are usually group houses with up to 4 young people living together and staffed 24 hours by care workers on rotating shifts. The report In our own words. Systemic inquiry into the lived experience of children and young people living in the Victorian out-of-home care system by the Victorian Commission for Children and Young People documents that many young people living in residential care describe these houses as feeling “cold, an institutional living environment” (CCYP 2019: 131) and the “physical living environment was sterile, impersonal, dilapidated or ‘like a prison’” (CCYP 2019: 162).

The environment of residential care houses has been the focus of a series of undergraduate interior design studios and currently, a research project at RMIT University. In 2008, Gregory Nicolau, a consultant psychologist in the out-of-home sector and founder of Australian Childhood Trauma Group, approached me as head of RMIT Interior Design to see if students could become involved in offering design ideas to transform the environment of residential care units into a more therapeutic experience. The outcome was a series of interior design studios titled Beyond Building (Attiwill 2010; Attiwill 2012).

More recently in 2022, a research project engaged the potential of spatial design in relation to the expectation that out-of-home residential care should provide a sense of home. This project titled Developing spatial design know-how with and for young people living in residential care involved young people who have lived experience of residential care. It is a pilot project to explore the potential of bringing spatial design and lived experience of residential care together to focus on the environment of residential care in relation to questions of belonging and home.

Coming from a design background as distinct from social sciences, I was keen to explore a different approach to one of interviews and/or surveys. While the initial intent was to engage the young people in a design-led process through design charettes1, other practices also emerged and entwined with design techniques. For example, trauma-informed practice2, co-production defined as “inclusive convening to share knowledge and power” (Y-Change 2020, 6), and the process of gaining ethics approval3 influenced the way the design charettes were set-up and the way we worked. The design charrettes, which are usually intense periods of brainstorming and drawing, were slowed down and became more conversational as we shared our different expertise in and experiences of spatial awareness over plans and photographs of houses.

The charrettes were held at the Design Hub at RMIT University; a space dedicated to design teaching and research. The set-up of the space was important; three large generic suburban house plans were arranged on tables together with photographs taken during the Beyond Building studios. This enabled us to imagine moving through the environment, from the outside and street-views through doors and across thresholds, into rooms and around arrangements of furniture and decoration, projecting sightlines and recollecting atmospheres.

Following is a selection of comments made by the lived experience consultants during the charrettes. They are presented here – as quotes – to offer insight into specific details regarding the question of home and the physical living environment of residential care. In between these quotes, I have added some of my own observations that connect with and/or expand upon the points being made.4

“You can’t settle in as you can be moved anytime and without warning.”

“Resi care homes definitely feel impermanent. That’s the whole intent of them anyway. It’s not meant to be permanent. I feel like that’s the entire experience of a lot of spaces. Like no matter where I go, it’s where it feels very impermanent. Like this isn’t a space that you’re meant to stay.”

“I don’t unpack. Because I move so often.”

“Someone else has left their mark before you … like when you open a cupboard, you’ll see graffiti in the inside that people have left there. … It can also really indicate that it’s not a permanent space. Like it’s a place where you pass through. … So, it doesn’t really feel like a home.”

In residential care, a young person is placed, and this is referred to as a placement. While place and place-making in design have associated meanings of specificity and connection, placement in residential care has a negative inflection. Depending on the situation, a young person may stay for several months, even years or could be moved within days.

“You can tell a resi-care house from the street, it looks different.”

“Often the grass is a bit patchy and it doesn’t look like it’s been looked after.”

“They all look the same; not in terms of building style but other aspects, such as the grass is barely there, the windows are covered.”

“Like no-one lives there.”

Residential care houses are usually located in residential areas. Many of them are houses that have been previously lived in by families and have been adapted to residential care specifications such as including an office and overnight accommodation for workers; some are purpose-built.

“The problem with the purpose-built houses is that they are built for this purpose; whereas the adapted houses have a sense of a previous life; of being lived in.”

The interior atmosphere is described as institutional. The yellow-cream colour of walls is the same colour used in institutional spaces experienced by young people such as hospitals and government offices. The communal spaces such as living room, dining area, and kitchens are referred to by the young people living there as public spaces.

“Resi care is really clinical, like the common room spaces don’t look nice. You walk into the space and it just doesn’t feel like a home. … the tacky lino on floors and the furniture in general.”

“Safety is sort of over emphasized. And so, it’s just really institutionalized. That’s what institutionalizes them in lots of ways is to make everything safe. But it’s in a standard safe safety way.”

“The fact that every single wall is plaster board feels like you are living in a world of cardboard.”

“It doesn’t really give you any incentive to want to take care of things if it’s always cheap and nasty.”

“I remember plastic flowers like the $2 shop ones that are obviously plastic.”

“It’s not something you would choose for yourself.”

“I feel like people are less likely to value things if it’s not something that they personally had a choice. It feels like a stranger’s place essentially.”

“When I would go into a resi unit, they’d already have the bedroom set up with things that I didn’t resonate with. You know they would just consider if a female or a male is coming to a space. … I think they got it right to some extent with one of the resi because it was just black and white; and I was like, thank God it’s not pink. But it still had like butterflies and things on the bedding. It isn’t really my sort of space.”

“At least to be able to have your own belongings in a space where you can see them and have somewhere to hang things up and organize your space. Or even a space where you can go and take 10 minutes just for yourself. Like somewhere you can play musical instrument or read a book; somewhere where you don’t hear what’s going on in the next room.”

Following are two lists which outline expectations of the environment of residential care in relation to providing a sense of home. One written by the Victorian State Government, and one created by Ella, one of the young consultants bringing lived experience to the design charrette. The comparison of these lists clarifies that the need and desires of young people in residential care is not purely material, but also aesthetic, social, personal, and functional.

The Victorian State Government has a policy titled Program requirements for residential care in Victoria. In Section 3: Environment and material goods requirements, there is a “principle statement” that reads “Despite some children needing to live away from their home and families in residential care, Child Safety Officers must ensure where ever possible a home-like environment is created to ensure children receive nurturing and a positive care experience”; a summary of expectations states “The physical living environment will reflect community expectations of a ‘home’” and lists the requirements to ensure a “home-like environment”:

“Home environment:

    1. Each child will be provided with their own bed and linen.
    2. Each child will be provided with accommodation that reflects their need for privacy and space.
    3. Each child will be provided with a space in which they can safely store their personal belongings.
    4. Child Safety Officers will provide children with personal items, household provisions and educational items (including books and toys) that are culturally and developmentally appropriate.
    5. Children will be clothed in a manner that complies with reasonable community standards and expectations.
    6. Children will be provided with a diet that promotes good health and complies with reasonable community standards and expectations, as well as with their cultural and religious background. Children will have reasonable access to a variety of food while residing in placement.
    7. Children not already receiving an income will be provided with a weekly allowance that meets reasonable community standards.” (DFFH, 2023)

The following list is by Ella, one of the CREATE Young Consultants participating in the charrette:

“Residential unit interior design workshop (6 September 2022):

    1. Inbuilt cupboard with drawers and hanging space for clothes.
    2. Heavy duty door without it looking clinical.
    3. Windows with locks.
    4. Doors with locks.
    5. Mandatory for ALL rooms to have a desk (inbuilt or not) to do things that bring them joy or for practical reasons such as homework.
    6. Somewhere to display meaning items.
    7. Locked cabinet for personal items (photos, meaningful objects etc.).
    8. Neutral colour palette without looking clinical or like we are in an institution (hospital, jail cell).
    9. Separate living areas for young people and carers/workers that is open to both.
    10. Swing outside/inside – movement may help a young person feel less distressed.
    11. Fixing holes in the walls IMMEDIATELY – promote feelings of safety for other young people.
    12. Mould and interior design breakdown (pests, paint flaking, structural damage) to be addressed IMMEDIATELY.
    13. Dining room table is a must to promote a sense of unity.
    14. Enable young people to choose their own style – get allowance to go shopping for decorations etc.
    15. Space dividing rooms for privacy reasons.
    16. MAXIMUM of 3 young people in each residential unit.”

The difference between the two lists is poignant – the first list outlines minimum expectations of needs to make a “home-like environment” and Ella’s list outlines, as she said “what we’re really entitled to”: an ability to arrange and organise one’s surroundings; to feel secure – one’s self and personal items; to be able to display and do things which give a sense of joy; to be able to relax and settle; to have the ability to find privacy and to be private; to not live surrounded by evidence of neglect, damage and violence; to have choice in terms of one’s setting such as furniture and bedroom furnishings; to be able to freely access food and to engage in everyday rituals such as sharing a meal. Ella’s list expresses not only needs but also desires which are aesthetic and ethical as well as functional.

At the time of the STAY HOME conference and now writing this text, the research project is still in process and while there will be more to consider, environments that create feelings of comfort and the ability to settle have emerged as critical. The question of home shifts from one of how to make an environment “home-like” to a consideration of conditions that will support young people to make connections that enable them to settle, to feel secure and stable; to have a sense of being somewhere.

“Like home is a place where I do not have to deal with the rest of the day. Where you just relax.”

Illustration by Hayden Daniel

Thank you to the following for their support and contribution to the project: CREATE Foundation and to CREATE Young Consultants – Ella & Hayley – and to Berry Street Youth Exchange and the Y-Change Lived Experience Consultants – Natasha and others; and Gregory Nicolau, founder Australian Childhood Trauma Group and Ripple. Thank you to Dr Sheena Elwick, Charles Sturt University, for her insights. This project continues the work of the LIVEability project, a collaboration with Mary Featherston.

This research has been made possible with the assistance of the Alastair Swayn Foundation Design Thinking Grant. A report will be published on Alastair Swayn Foundation website in July 2023. https://alastairswaynfoundation.org/

Notes

  1. A design charette is like a co-design process where the solution to a problem is sought through a collective design process.
  2. Trauma-informed practice is not about the treatment of trauma but a recognition that anyone may have an experience of trauma. It is based around 5 principles: safety; trustworthiness; choice; collaboration; empowerment.
  3. Universities require academic researchers to gain ethics approval if their research involves human and/or animal participants. Key ethical considerations to be addressed in the application are respect, justice, beneficence, research merit and integrity.
  4. At this stage in the project, quotes have not been attributed to an individual. The reasons for this are that not everyone gave consent for their name to be used and, as the project is still in process, we have not yet discussed how best to process the full transcript of the recordings from the charrettes. Neither have acronyms nor numeric codes been used as the conversation roamed and often people would finish each other’s sentence or drop in and pull out a key point.

References

Attiwill, Suzie, ed. 2010. Beyond Building. Melbourne: RMIT Interior Design, viewed 10 June 2023, https://www.academia.edu/103031768/Beyond_Building_Design_Studio

Attiwill, Suzie. 2012. “Beyond Building: Interior Designs”. Interior: A State of Becoming, IDEA Symposium, viewed 10 June 2023, https://www.academia.edu/4758484/Beyond_Building_Interior_Designs

Australian Institute for Health and Welfare (AIHW). 2021, Young People in Out-of-Home Care 2021, viewed 10 June 2023, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/children-youth/young-people

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). 2023, Child protection Australia 2021–22, viewed 10 June 2023, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/child-protection/child-protection-australia-2021-22

Commission for Children and Young People (CCYP). 2019. In our own words: Systemic inquiry into the lived experience of children and young people in the Victorian out-of-home care system, viewed 10 June 2023, https://ccyp.vic.gov.au/assets/Publications-inquiries/CCYP-In-Our-Own-Words.pdf

CREATE Foundation https://create.org.au/ CREATE is the national consumer body representing the voices of children and young people with out-of-home care experience.

Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH), State Government of Victoria, 2023. Program requirements for residential care in Victoria, viewed 10 June 2023, https://providers.dffh.vic.gov.au/program-requirements-residential-care-victoria-oct-2016-word

Y-Change. 2020. “Beyond Giving Voice. Partnering with Young People with a Lived Experience to Imagine and Create Radical Change.” Y-Change’s Submission to the Victoria Youth Strategy, viewed 10 June 2023, https://www.berrystreet.org.au/uploads/main/Files/Y-Change-submission-to-the-Victorian-Youth-Strategy-December-2020-FINAL-01.07.21.pdf

Youth Engagement Y-Change https://www.berrystreet.org.au/what-we-do/young-people/youth-engagement-y-change Youth Engagement Y-Change, an advocacy group connected to Berry Street, one of Australia’s largest independent family service organisations (operating since 1877) and a service provider for “out-of-home” care.

Against the Romances of Belonging

This Blog Post is written by Hanna Reichel.

Hanna Reichel is a theologian and Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, USA.

We have invited selected scholars, who presented at our conference STAY HOME: New Perspectives on the Home in November 2022 to publish on our blog in 2023. This blog post is based on the keynote lecture of the author.

Two romances of the home

Home is a deeply romantic idea: the projected source of authentic, aesthetic experience for the individual in its social nucleus, an imbuing of the simple and every-day with an aura, a chase for fragments and glimpses of an impossible idea. Home, then, is an idea that galvanizes and directs emotion in powerful ways, in aspiration as much as in nostalgia, which we might interpret as two different variations of the romance of home, marked, as I want to argue, by two different theological orientations.

On the one hand, there is home as “heaven on earth” – the compensatory overdetermination of our earthly dwellings and relationships that is constantly evoked in commercials, in certain brands of religion, in patriotic celebrations. It shows red-cheeked children playing, perfect meals prepared by a loving homemaker, cozying up around an open fireplace, a wholesome vision of laughter and comfort. This home is not an ideal or a projected future, this home is always already filled with nostalgia and with the sense of looming threat. We know that the warm fuzzy feeling will not last, that the in-laws will not appreciate the lovingly prepared dinner. We know that we cannot buy the kid’s affection or secure their sheltered innocence as they grow up and turn into ungrateful brats. We know that the loving wife will leave us for a feminist lesbian witch, that immigrants will take our jobs, that the neighborhood will be gentrified to the point that it will look at us as less than respectable contenders for these holy grounds.

These threats, real or perceived, generate powerful emotive reactions: anxiety, envy, and resentment. We see them at work in our societies from the doubling down on the traditional family and its supposed values, to xenophobia and Christian nationalism. This vision of home quickly sprouts white picket fences and border walls, security cameras, neighborhood watches and “stand your ground” laws. “A gentleman’s home is his castle” and woe to those who dare invade this space — or change its interior decorations. “Home is where the heart is” – and woe to those who are unable or unwilling to fit the rosy vision, who are not always loving, self-sacrificial, community-oriented, useful, industrious, and productive of “good feelings” because they are, say, moody, strange, queer, disabled, old – or simply do not quite belong, because we do not own them, they never belong to us. The space of home turns into a territory to be defended, a shelter or bunker of the privileged, and people are turned into prized possessions or excised as disruptive, “anti-social” elements.

The home as “heaven on earth” is unachievable – fleeting at best and violent at worst. A different romance of the home ensues when one gives up trying to bring “heaven onto earth” and instead projects home into the beyond. Its theological orientation is that of Hebrews 14: “We have here no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” Other biblical accounts celebrate our status as merely guests in this world, as pilgrims toward heaven, our eternal home. If “home is where the heart is,” St. Augustine cries to God, “restless is our heart, until it finds rest in you.” Home is something that is always not (yet!) fully realized, something yet to come, something we can only keep moving toward in tireless pursuit.

Projecting home into a future (and ultimately into a beyond which we of course never reach), will keep your gaze fixed to the horizon rather than to a nostalgic vision of an imaginary past. This second romance of the home also generates powerful affective responses. Reveling in longing and yearning, restlessness, and zealousness can be very comforting amidst the necessary disillusionments with any actually existent home. It will allow us to survive the disappointment and keep going, it might prevent us from forming the strong attachments to a particular place and space that can so easily turn into violence when it slips from grasp. This romance might even engender some solidarity with other dwellers in our shared predicament. However, more often than not, it relativizes such bonds.

Throughout history and into the present day, people have critiqued such a transcendent theological orientation as relativizing our existence here and now in favor of a beyond, whether in the future or a full-blown afterlife, as making Christians indifferent towards suffering or even valorizing it as a prize to pay for an eternal reward. Karl Marx and Ludwig Feuerbach, or in our days, Martha Nussbaum or Martin Hägglund formulate versions of such a critique and claim that only by giving up the romantic idea of a “life to come” will we really be able to commit to the struggles of “this life” and truly seek the flourishing of earthly creatures, both ourselves and those around us.

Seek belonging and distrust it

Against the romantizations of the home, feminist, queer, and crip (critical disability) scholars have long pointed out the ambivalences of the home – with special attention to the entanglement of its material and its epistemic effects. Home, this supposedly universal necessity and universal desire, is even at its best a material, social, and emotional privilege that only few enjoy, and mostly temporarily. And even those who “have” it often do not feel that way.

The boundedness of the home generates force fields of control and formations of differential access. If the social and material bounds that constitute a home stand for shelter, protection, and safety, they also signify confinement and exclusion, often along lines of gender, age, ability, and employability. If the home invokes visions of belonging, we might also be reminded that belonging participates in the semantics of possession, of property, with territorial effects with regard to space and objectifying effects with regard to people. If the home stands for privacy and intimacy, it also stands for the terrors of intimacy. The shielding of domestic abuse and violence from outside view come to mind, as do many other ways in which homes trap and confine people into unhappy arrangements with little access to public participation, articulation, or recourse: prisoners under house arrest, stay-at-home moms, queer teenagers, and neglected elders might experience versions of these effects. To the restriction of movement and social isolation come added burdens of the hermeneutical effects of their invisibilization.

No wonder that “home” is most often invoked in its acutely perceived absence, in discourses of exile and diaspora, in talk of sin as estrangement and alienation, in eschatological visions of our “eternal home.” Home, then, is “not a place,” but it is also not “a people”: Its invocation is the feeling of longing for belonging, homelessness, restlessness, unsettledness – a perceived lack, and a negative affective response to it. In a time of as much upheaval and transformation as ours, whole societies are haunted by a longing for belonging.

Is our longing for belonging more than a private, is it a “public feeling”? Affect theorists have used this term not just to signal wide-spread sentiment, but symptoms of deep-structural societal malaise. Queer and crip scholars have insisted that, rather than being pathological and in need of correction, “bad feelings” like anxiety and depression are healthy responses to unhealthy structural conditions, and that we should appreciate them for their epistemological value as well as their potential in resisting the normative forces that direct our longings in “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) to shiny visions of “happiness” or “belonging” whose pursuit and achievement are directly detrimental to our flourishing.

Pandemic refractions

The “Stay at home” mandates of the Covid19 pandemic have further complicated any romance of the home. Staying at home did not create universal feelings of “being at home,” instead, added epidemics of loneliness, anxiety, and depression were quickly diagnosed and seem to persist just like the now endemic covid waves.

The privation of public space brought both a privation of public life as well as a large-scale privation of privacy: Personal space, routines, and moments became very publicly exposed as zoom cameras and social media pushed further into bedrooms and kitchens than ever before. Bringing us “closer to those far away,” it also left us too close to those who were already too close to us. For some, confinement to the home meant additional exposure to domestic violence and abuse, for some it meant that any precarious work-life balance they might have navigated previously now turned into double full-time expectation of “remote work” and care work.

As all equalizing shifts, this one too had highly unequal effects, often amplifying existing global, economic, and gendered inequalities. While “working from home” (as well as socializing and praying from home) afforded more access for those already previously homebound, it also highlighted the privilege of having a home (with the requisite technological infrastructure) and it exacerbated existent unequal distributions of labor (where those shouldering the lion’s share of care-taking and domestic responsibilities were now even less protected against the tentacles of remote work in double exploitation).

It also revealed the unequal distribution of risk, partly exacerbating, partly shifting it: For others, yet, their financial situation or qualification structure meant they never had the choice of “sheltering in place,” taking refuge in the relative safety of their home. Celebrating the contribution of “front line workers” in rhetoric of military sacrifice became a way of glossing over the societally unequal distribution of risk along class, racial, and gendered lines.

As the experience of its physical and social boundedness shifted from one of comfort to an experience of confinement on a global scale, the ambivalences of the home were experienced by much broader segments of our societies than ever before. Suddenly, everyone was acutely confronted with the vulnerability and exposure of one’s own body and mind to overwhelming health threats, with the risk of “being with others,” and experienced the insufficiency of public health approaches in mitigating individual risk that many disabled people navigate constantly. Suddenly many, if temporarily, were prevented by material, social, and legal barriers from public participation as much as from sociality and intimacy.

Experience affords insight. All embodiment comes with vulnerability and (inter)dependence, but those temporarily disabled by the pandemic were acutely confronted with their share in the universal predicament of fleshly existence long theorized by disability scholars. Talk of the “new normal” and calls to “return to normal” became regularly punctuated by the insight that the old “normal” had not been “heaven on earth,” either. Whatever else the pandemic did, it also became a catalyst for pinpointing the ableist, patriarchal, economic, and ecological entanglements of the “old normal.”

Living in the ruins

We are not living “after covid” but we are living after the epistemic rupture that it has effected. Our moment is therefore “post-apocalyptic” in the literal sense: The revelatory catastrophe has happened, but no rapture has ensued, we are left to live “in the ruins” of our romances, an ongoing, creeping disillusionment without a redemptive “fix” or cleansing purge.

As in any good postapocalyptic scenario, the disabled body is a fixture in this endemic state of unbelonging, and the boundaries between physical impairment and social disablement have once more become blurred. The post-pandemic crip might not be the disfigured inhabitant of a toxic wasteland at the remnants of civilization. The post-pandemic crip is instead the pale recluse sheltering, confined to, hidden away in the “home” from the risks of being with other people, the ongoing compromise of the immuno-compromised. The post-pandemic crip might not be the metastasizing body of those exposed to atomic radiation, but rather the person afflicted by the “long covid’s” ongoing toll on physical and mental health as well as social participation.

The post-pandemic crip comes in other forms as well. A few years into Covid19, the disablements of the “old normal” and the exclusions and debilitating effects of the “new normal” continue to exist in superimposed states without redemptive resolution, its fractal edges failing to accommodate ever more bodies. Disability, as scholars have long pointed out, is precisely what cannot be unified, describes nothing shared, has no family resemblance, “no one form of embodiment or orientation of being in the world” (Kuppers 2009, 233). If an epistemology of the home can teach us anything, it is that people are – different, they “misfit” the different romances of belonging on offer in various and never entirely foreseeable ways. A “misfit” occurs “when the environment does not sustain the shape and function of the body that enters it” (Garland-Thompson, 2011, 594). The notion picks up on an incongruence between persons and environments, it treats disability as a material reality, but rather than attributing it to the bodies, it investigates the failure of physical and social structures to accommodate them.

There is no “universal design” for belonging – neither architecturally nor socially nor politically. Aspirations to create it will only double down on violent normalization of misfitting bodies. The desire to effect belonging might thus say more about the ongoing “redemptive fix/ation[s]” of our society than about the potentials of overcoming unbelonging (Betcher 2016, 102). Rather than romantically pursuing our longing for belonging, negative “public feelings” might gainfully direct our attention to specific sites, shapes, and experiences of unbelonging.

“Those who are not quite at home,” muses queer feminist theorist Sarah Ahmed, “have much to teach us about the way things are built” (Ahmed 2019:19). Those who are “not-quite-at-home” in the new and old visions of belonging might have much to teach us about the romances of home and about keeping faith with “damaged life,” about inhabiting a world in which the “wholeness” that marks any of our romances with the home is at best a fleeting experience, which requires force, coercion, and ultimately violence if we try to fix and sustain it. They can teach us that pain is not an “argument against existence” or a form of materialized lack or guilt that must be isolated and excised, but that pain is a signal, it is that which “puts us on notice” to the corporeal reality of interdependence and vulnerability that we all share, even as they appear always in highly unequal distribution. Instead of focusing on fixing the bodies and souls of those who do not quite belong, we might insist on “changing the shape of the world,” of our material and social environments to accommodate their existence and their insights (Garland-Thomson 2011, 597).

References

Ahmed, Sara. What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2019.

Augustine. Confessions. Penguin Classics, 1961.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Betcher, Sharon V. “Crip/Tography: Disability Theology in the Ruins of God.” JCRT 15, no. 2 (2016): 98–115.

Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Milestones of Thought in the History of Ideas. New York: Ungar, 1957.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia 26, no. 3 (2011): 591–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01206.x

Hägglund, Martin. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. Reprint edition. New York (N.Y.): Anchor, 2020.

Kuppers, Petra. “Toward a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 3 (December 1, 2009): 221–40. https://doi.org/10.1353/jlc.0.0022

Marx, Karl. “Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 1844.” Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher 7 & 10 (February 1844). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. 1st edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

 

Revealing Wickedness of Home

This blog post is written by Johan Liekens.

Johan Liekens is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Architecture at KU Leuven, Belgium.

We have invited selected scholars, who presented at our conference STAY HOME: New Perspectives on the Home in November 2022 to publish on our blog in 2023. This blog post is based on the conference presentation by the author.

Revealing Wickedness of Home

On the moist, bare soil within the belly of the Drongenhof Chapel, itself tucked away in one of the city of Ghent’s remnant medieval neighborhoods, a particular interior setting was temporarily grafted. As in George Perec’s interpretation of Antonello Da Messina’s painting Saint Jerome in His Study, that setting as a study inquired and mediated ideas on habitation. This time though such mediation would not merely connect to a spatial inscription in what Perec (1974) has identified as the bare and glacial surroundings constituted by a chapel’s empty belly. On the contrary, and venturing from an architectural perspective, the mediation would reveal aspects of (in-)(co-)habitation in a post-anthropocentric world; an era of climatological emergency wherein New Materialism perspectives encourage an engagement and entanglement with matter conceived as vital and vibrant (Bennet 2010), a parliament of things (Latour 1991), and a multi-species community (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 2020) such as the conglomerate matter of the living soil on which the setting rested1. More than mediating home, the setting thus revealed wicked but inherent and fully real aspects of home.

The Wicked Home has been a transdisciplinary academic design office (ADO) set up by Nel Janssens, Rachel Armstrong, Rolf Hughes, Laurens Luyten, Annelies De Smet and myself, running from 2019 until 2022. ADOs at our Faculty2 are conceived as vehicles oriented on contemporary challenges raised to the disciplines of architecture, interior-architecture, and urbanism approaching these through a combination of research-, design-, and educational practices. With ADOs, our Faculty wants to create new formats and possibilities for research outputs in Architecture.

Pairing the seemingly contradictory aspects of home and wickedness, home — (in-)(co-)habitation — in all its complexity has been the recurrent focus of our ADO. While the aspect of wickedness, with etymological ties to the old English Wicca and so to the notion of witchcraft, refers to more daring ways of exploring, we interpret it also as relating to the notion of wicked problems. Problems that are, as the home is, challenges with an irreducible complexity. In our ADO we thus examined the irreducible complexity of forms of home, one aspect of this being the entanglement with more-and-other-than-human matters, actants, and worlds. Six research-by-design master studios have been developed as part of our ADO investigation, all of them having been affected by the pandemic situation, which compelled us to stay home and work in the ADO became thinking from within that home.

S for Soil Times

The setting, which we grafted in and on the Chapel’s soil, and on which we would serve food for thought as well as food for more literal digestion at the occasion of the academic seminar and public event titled Revelations: Wicked Home, drew on an artefact – reforesting and composting cabin – produced as part of a research line titled 26 Toilets to Re-figure Habitation (De Smet et al. 2022). This research line had been set up in the research group Architecture & Wicked Matters. The research line would ultimately assemble as a wicked alphabet, in its set-up inspired by Peter Greenaway’s Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms (1985). Venturing from the architectural element toilet, an element that as AMO’s3 publication Elements of Architecture (Koolhaas 2018) has stipulated never founded any architectural treatise; the method would be to counteract that ascertainment through a research-by-design approach, ultimately spawning 26 intertwining architectural artefacts that intend to refigure architecture. The artefact (ab-)used for the setting was S for Soil Times (Figure 1), its name referring to the eponymous chapter in Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care (2017). That chapter calls for involvements with soil and with the soil communities we are inherently but unconsciously part of, explaining also our affiliation with the Chapel’s specific characteristics lacking its original floor tiling and hence opening up its soils.

Drawings of the project 'S for Soil Times': a reforesting and composting tower.
Figure 1: The reforesting and composting tower S for Soil Times, drawing: Johan Liekens.

On route to its ultimate destination —a prairie in the Semois valley— where the artefact will perform as a reforesting and composting cabin, S for Soil Times will travel through and connect to a variety of events and contexts. The ADO ending-event Revelations: Wicked Home served as a first halt. As a design, S for Soil Times substantiated during the recent period of lockdowns, in which one was compelled to stay home. In exile on a prairie close to the Semois river, functioning as an extension to the crammed city life at that time, I spent time scything grass worlds and taking care of soil and trees. Gradually the idea developed to construct a minimal place of sojourn allowing me to stay on the prairie for longer periods. Thinking about what was minimally necessary, the architectural element toilet came to structure the intervention, covering an ultimately concrete and basal need. Beyond function, the idea was to reorient, through the artefact’s agency, the idea of human presence as a burden on the landscape and steer it towards a mutual relationship of caretaking.

Populated by majestic but dying Ash trees, a species typical of streamlet valleys that in the nearby future will become extinct due to a particular sickness, which along globalist movements of building materials spreads across Europe, to me the prairie itself increasingly became a matter of care. My human presence needed to be not one of occupation and burden only but of mutual collaboration and cohabitation with the more-than-human ecology of prairie and valley. A reforesting and composting tower gained shape. In it, two small interior rooms —one containing a dry compost toilet, the other that I call a library of composting mattersare connected by a central passage volume, with doors on each side that fold open onto the landscape. When opened up, passing through that volume visitors or passers-by can traverse the streamlet and reach the other sloping side of the valley. The two interior rooms are sites of soil production. Asides toilet literature such as Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care (2017) and Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016), the so-called library of composting matters will contain maturing night soil from the compost toilet. Becoming soil over time, this matter will be used to nurture newly planted tree seedlings, as part of the planned small reforestation project. Over these two interior rooms, a dim and dancing light will hover, propelled by the rhythm of the irregular flowing streamlet with its own will from which it harvests its energy. In the middle of the tower, when closed, one finds a place to spend the night: one human captured in an unexpected cohabitation with the community of biota vitalizing the composting process. Having large ventilation hatches that mimic typologies of tobacco drying towers typical of the valley, and with a balcony reminiscent of observation towers found close by and allowing for vistas on the dying as well as vital landscape, the reforesting and composting tower blends in in the valley’s ecology.

Figure 2: Mock-up of S for Soil Times on scale 1/1, grafting on the soil of the Drongenhof Chapel, moments before commencing the academic seminar Revelations; Wicked Home.
Figure 2: Mock-up of S for Soil Times on scale 1/1, grafting on the soil of the Drongenhof Chapel, moments before commencing the academic seminar Revelations; Wicked Home. Image: Stijn Bollaert.

Revelations

Figure 3: Image taken during the academic seminar Revelations: Wicked Home. Image: Carl Bourgeois.
Figure 3: Image taken during the academic seminar ‘Revelations: Wicked Home’. Image: Carl Bourgeois.

A mock-up on scale one to one of S for Soil Times was as said ab-used to present the ADO vernissage event Revelations: Wicked Home (Figure 2,3). On its folding doors tilted in a horizontal position, matters as food and more figuratively food for thought and discussion with peers were served in the context of an academic seminar, and later on presented in a broader public event. Around and on the horizontally tilted door-tables Annelies De Smet developed an intriguing performance, first carefully serving fragments of student work produced within the ADO, mingling them with food substances and raising ambiguity between architecture and food by serving edible architectural model elements, which were re-composed on site by one of the ADO students Liese Mortreu. With the architectural element of the toilet nearby, serving food and food for thought on that table was in a wicked but natural proximity with aspects of digesting and composting, tampering with usual and accepted distinctions between proper and improper; between being valuable and waste or dirt. Rolf Hughes and Rachel Armstrong would recite sets of revelations, each of them connecting to an aspect of the ADO, the space we found ourselves in, or the work produced by the students. One of these revelations, Revelation 14:15, advanced the chapel floor’s vital materiality as a biological city that in ongoing circular processes produces soil.

In the space of this blog post only three student projects, which were served, are shortly presented to give an idea of the spectrum of home that was addressed in the ADO.

Figure 4: A drawing from Liese Mortreu’s work Kitchen Stories. Drawing: Liese Mortreu.
Figure 4: A drawing from Liese Mortreu’s work Kitchen Stories. Drawing: Liese Mortreu.

In her design project that ran in the pandemic era of lockdowns and isolation, Liese Mortreu ventured from the identification of the kitchens in the homes of the Anthropocene as isolated clean and capsular entities (Figure 4). Connections to the home’s environment are usually consciously hidden in them, tucking away infrastructures in the home’s periphery, further connecting them to hidden gargantuan collective networks, which weigh on our environment and soils. Many other infrastructures are hidden in the home as well; as the production of food in unknown places connecting to the home only by schemes of global transportation. This conscious hiding of relationships, according to Mortreu, renders the ecological consequences of our everyday choices and practices hard to grasp, and as such obstructs our understanding of their impact. Venturing from her own kitchen in which she found herself isolated during the design work, by drawing, making models, and diving into related literature, a speculative and projective design trajectory was developed. The design trajectory reconsiders those relationships between home/kitchen and environment. Moving away from the concept of the Modern kitchen, she advances the kitchen more as a construction, a system, which (re)relates elements and agents within an expanded landscape. The kitchen becomes advanced as a metabolism that is reconstructed both in its physical, social, and psychological dimensions. A metabolism that is able to create its own space with its own sets of values. In Mortreu’s project, the kitchen is constructed through specific and real acts of food making: purifying the water, making fire from food scraps, making smoked fish, ginger tea, and pickled cucumbers. Intensively observed relationships, choreographies, and movement patterns in and between these acts of food making, as well as the kitchen’s retrofitted and re-related elements such as water, fire, and garden feed new kitchen dialogues. They compose new concentrations as well as conflicts. What really sets the kitchen apart from the Modern idea of kitchen, Mortreu emphasizes, are the values its inhabitants handle, situating these values in social and natural wealth rather than efficiency or economy and manifesting more in the form of authentic relations, as they can only exist in the intimate context of a real home. Through a set of compelling kitchen stories, inspired by the structure of Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, these values reveal themselves in accumulation, expanding as such the realm of kitchen imaginaries. They do so, to give one example, by introducing to that realm also other-and-more-than-human perspectives. Agencies such as that of a cohabitant cat and bird or the living matter of the composting pile of food waste that, as a multispecies community of biota, is cared for and in turn cares for life within the home. This by growing herbs and producing for example small voltages of electricity.  The kitchen as such becomes a speculative and projective platform for a desired ecological change, ecology here referring also to the substantiation of a web of relations, in which small changes in the inhabitant’s everyday practices relate to and resonate with the whole system.

Figure 5: Image from Jade Goossens’ research instrument chair/ladder/pier/pond. Image: Jade Goossens.
Figure 5: Image from Jade Goossens’ research instrument chair/ladder/pier/pond. Image: Jade Goossens.

A second work by Jade Goossens (Figure 5) addressed a similar complexity and wickedness of habitation. Isolated in a home that is part of an industrial compound, embedded in a vast intermediate natural landscape of unplanned trees, plants, grasses, and ponds. From early on in the project, Jade started to devise instruments that endeavor to approach other-and-more-than-human entities with which humans cohabit and collaborate in making home home. She created an unfinished series of interior-architectural artefacts that, due to the lockdown situation, were made from materials found on site. A sofa to embed oneself in the multispecies community of a compost heap; a mixture of ladder and seat allowing her to become acquainted with the biotope of a tree’s crown. Her most compelling instrument though was the chair/ladder/pier assemblage, with a built in bell jar that can provide home for water surface insects, the overall structure allowing her to balance over and into a pond. Seated on this instrument, and carefully moving forward while seeking balance on and with the pond’s vital matter, limits between human and more-than-human become explored as well as stretched, the human feet fusing with the lively matter from the pond, always in risk of completely tipping over into that vital and vibrant, other and yet unknown materiality.

A third work by Laurens Decoster, brought to the table accompanied by the penetrating smell of sea, presented an experiment of producing sets of large concrete pillars, ultimately evolving in the design project towards a pavilion on sea. Laurens’ work ventures from the fact that many of our human-made sea-structures, often executed in heavy and little porous concrete, are structures that fundamentally hamper colonies of marine biological life to settle. Inscribing himself in a multidisciplinary team including marine biologists, Laurens experimented with concrete masses and textures, part of the work also being the leaving to the sea of these structures, the monitoring of them, and as a result of his actions, the entering into conversation with specialists as well as passers-by on what is home and (in-)(co-)habitation in a context of multispecies communities.

Serving to our guests substantial fragments of projects and concepts that had been developed in the ADO, we wrapped up four years of collaborating on The Wicked Home. A matter of serving diverse and deviant senses of home within a home within a home. Senses of home produced by young (interior-)architects, served on the tilted table-doors and within the small interior rooms of S for Soil Times, served itself on the lively soil over which the Drongenhof Chapel seems to hover.

Notes

 [1] These interpretations of matter as being vibrant and having a —political— voice and action potential within congregations of human and non-human “matters” relate to the contemporary currents of New Materialism, Post-Humanism, and Post-Anthropocentrism. These share an understanding of reality that repositions or de-centralizes the human among nonhuman matters beyond traditional humanist boundaries. They all qualify questions of vitality, agency, and generative capability as being appropriate for human and nonhuman matter alike.

[2] The Academic Design Office (ADO) is a vehicle developed at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas (BE). Our particular ADO The Wicked Home has been initially formulated from the research group Material Narratives, subgroup Architecture & Wicked Matters, and has been co-run by members of the Regenerative Architecture, Arts & Design research group.

[3] AMO is the research section of the architectural office OMA led by Rem Koolhaas.

References

Bennet, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

De Smet, A., Johan Liekens, Nel Janssens, and Manon Persoone. 2022. “Architecting Twenty-six Toilets to Re-figure Inhabitation: J for Jewel, S for Soil Times, T for Thigmophilia”. In: CA²RE 2: Evaluation of Design-Driven Research, (288-301).

Greenaway, P., 1985. Inside Rooms, 26 bathrooms. London & Oxfordshire (movie).

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Koolhaas, R. and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. 2018. Elements of Architecture. Cologne, Germany: Taschen GmbH.

Latour, Bruno. 1991. We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Perec, G.. 1974. Espèces d’espaces. Paris: Galilée.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M.. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More-than-human Worlds. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M.. 2020. “Soil Times : The Pace of Ecological Care.” Solitude Journal 1: Collective Care & Response-ability: 98-107.

Close to Home. The emotional Spaces of the Home in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain

This blog post is written by Joanne Begiato.

Joanne Begiato is Associate Dean and Professor at the School of History at Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom.

We have invited selected scholars, who presented at our conference STAY HOME: New Perspectives on the Home in November 2022 to publish on our blog in 2023. This blog post is based on the keynote lecture by the author.

Drawing of a room with things and furniture scattered all over the floor. A woman sitting on a chair with the back to a man standing behind her.
John Leech, ‘Affectionate Husband’. Punch, 11 Nov 1848, p. 204.

Close to Home. The emotional Spaces of the Home in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain

The crisis of lockdown in 2020/2021 changed our real and imagined relationships with home. As a historian of the home, I am struck by the ways in which crises also shaped ideas and experiences of home in the past. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, for example, war and rapid social and economic change, and the dislocation they caused, placed the home at the heart of personal and cultural reflection.

It is the emotional associations of the home that especially interest me. In the centuries I study, homes were freighted with feelings. They were often used as sentimental prompts to elicit emotional responses that bound people to family, locality, region, or nation, or to generate gendered notions of duty, patriotism, and sacrifice in the service of the state. People from all social groups also used the home and the emotions it produced to make meaning of their life trajectories and construct a sense of self and a public persona. Furthermore, as sites of emotional expression, love, desire, anger, fear, despair, and hope, homes were agentic emotionalised spaces that shaped and influenced behaviour, activities, and actions. This blog post focuses on just a few of these themes through men’s relationship with the home and through the themes of distant homes, men’s absence from the home, and men’s presence within the home.

Distant Homes

People often used spatial and temporal distance from home, and the emotions that this stirred, to assess their sense of self, understand their feelings, and construct selfhood and personal identities. My work (2023) on the emotions cluster of loneliness, itself a by-product of modernity, offers evidence of this. The writings of two young Scotsmen who left home to embark on their careers show that both the sense of a ‘distant’ home and encountering distance within other people’s homes contributed to loneliness and its physical and mental problems. At around the age of twenty-two, though separated by two decades, Henry Robert Oswald Senior (1790–1862) and John Dunlop (1823–1867), each spent several months writing a journal as they embarked on the early stages of their careers. Oswald wrote between 1812–13, describing his first six months as Government Surgeon to John Murray (1755–1830), 4th duke of Atholl, Governor General of the Isle of Man, and Dunlop recorded his experiences from 21 October 1845 to 8 August 1846, first as a medical student in Paris and then on his voyage to India after he secured the post of Assistant Surgeon to the 32nd (Cornwall) Regiment of Foot.

At the end of 1845, John Dunlop recorded that he was leaving Paris, where he was a medical student, and would be ‘gazetted to an assistant Surgery in her Majesty’s service’.  While he ‘rejoiced’ about this, he was uneasy about its implications:

“I was also not ignorant that this summons to London would sever that delightful tie of domestic life, which I had so long enjoyed, that it would launch me forth into the world, and into the uncertain and adventurous life of a military surgeon, where separated from home and all its endearing connections I would require to form a home within my own circle, and in the narrow confines of a small quarter in a barrack, where I must live, all independent and isolated amidst the vicissitudes of a foreign climate and perhaps a foreign war.”

Dunlop understood his professional future to be ‘uncertain’, a state that causes anxiety and was compounded by his separation from domestic family life. He deployed happy, loving domesticity to envisage his potential loneliness, a pervasive cultural motif, which John Tosh has shown, shaped many middle-class men’s sense of self.

It was the emotional and physical distance that Henry Oswald encountered when obliged to board at his patrons’ homes, which led to his feelings of social isolation, physical and mental discomfort, and alienation. When living in their homes, he assessed them according to the patrons’ kindness but also through the provision of food and space. As scholars of loneliness have observed, loneliness is felt in the body and, thus, metaphors of heat are often invoked to capture or convey its impact. Home was crucial in these metaphors too. Oswald associated coldness with indifference, the opposite of the warmth of domestic comforts. Thus the family of his master George Bell showed him a cold heart in 1810, while the Farmer family were ‘coldly polite’ in March 1813, which left him feeling ‘indifferent or rather displeased’. After some months, Oswald took up his own lodgings and was reunited with his trunk that had gone missing on his journey to the Isle of Man. He discussed this good fortune through the tropes of home comfort, signalling the waning of his acute feelings of loneliness:

27th January spent the day as usual, walking & got my trunk, which has been long waiting, safely, the packet containing books – & dined at Home on beef steaks & ale & spent the eve in reading & noting & arranging accounts & expenditures with much comfort & satisfaction.”

Being reunited with his possessions soothed Oswald, acting as ‘emotional objects’ to convey the sense of home and comfort that he had hitherto lacked (Begiato 2018a).

Like many other people in a similar situation, Dunlop found solace in nostalgia, both for his family home and its inhabitants. He consoled himself on his long voyage by recognising that after an absence he could ‘return and enjoy the society of my dear parents, and as a melancholy solace, shall look back as on a pleasant dream, on the happy days of childhood, and a youth spent under the tender care of an affectionate mother and the careful guidance of a kind Father’. Indeed, nostalgia was a tool that was often used to manage the spatial, but also the temporal, distance from home, a way to navigate modernity’s temporal disruption and spatial dislocation. In its early, medicalised form, the condition was a response to spatial displacement and was thus diagnosed in soldiers and migrants who were unable to access their homes. The second type of nostalgia was temporal, where the sense of disruption was due to time passing and the yearning directed to a past lost in time.

Remembering a happy childhood home was fundamental in this latter version of nostalgia, and for memoirists writing in old age or at the end of their lives, the material, emotional, and sensory memories of the happy childhood home were central to constructions of the self and to articulating national and personal identities in the face of accelerating migration and mobility. For the generations writing in the first decades of the nineteenth century, it was the natal or childhood home and its natural environs that was most evocative and reassuring (Begiato 2019).

Thomas Bewick (1753-1823) offers one example. The son of a tenant farmer and collier in Northumberland, this celebrated naturalist and engraver, whose works were widely read by children and adults, began his memoir in 1822. He lovingly evoked his parental home at Cherryburn, Mickley, in the South Tyne Valley: “Cherryburn House the place of my nativity, and which for many years my eyes beheld with cherished delight”. When he left home, and until his parents died when he was in his early thirties, he walked every week from his workshop to visit them. As a nationally successful engraver, his happy natal home was part of his regional, Northumbrian ‘natural’ sense of self, which was constructed as a rejection of a metropolitan identity.

These writers used the term ‘happy’ home, projecting onto it their anxieties and taking solace in it when separated by space and time. But what did society consider made a home happy or unhappy? Unsurprisingly, women’s actions were deemed enormously significant through their upkeep of the home, and they were held responsible for their husbands’ encounters with it and subsequent behaviour in it. But it was frequently men who were seen as the primary catalyst for the home’s emotional register, forging ‘happy’ homes not only through their economic provision and frugality, but also through kindness and displays of love and affection.

Absent from Home

For all their cultural centrality to the happy home, representations often imagined men as physically absent from it, working and providing for it, or defending it and fighting for it (Begiato 2015; Brown and Begiato 2019). As such, it was often their absence that society and culture imagined, depicting them leaving and returning home, dreaming and yearning for it, forever on the peripheries of the happy home. Labouring men and military men were most often depicted leaving home, the former standing on their cottage doorstep, the latter the subject of countless Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Farewells. In most of these, happy homes were only glimpsed, functioning as spaces of emotion and sentiment. This sentimental trope of the home and its absent master was especially valorised during periods of war, a response to unsettled times and crisis. When the idealised military man left his home and family to serve the nation, his sentimental manly form stirred patriotism through his self-sacrifice (Begiato 2020).

Absent men were also expected to yearn and long for home, to be psychologically and emotionally inseparable from it. This is seen in the cultural figure of the homesick soldier, where nostalgia was at first a medical condition and then by the mid nineteenth century an expression of patriotic manly self-sacrifice. Such men were intended to retain, moreover, what we can call an ‘absent presence’ in their home. Visual and material culture entreated men’s loved ones to ‘forget me not’ and ‘remember me’. These pleas were often printed on decorative objects in the home. One common verse on vessels variously dated from the 1830s through to the 1860s, was taken from Bernard Barton’s (1784–1849) poem ‘The Heart’s Motto: “Forget Me Not”’ (1820s).

Men’s Presence in the Home

While men were often envisaged away from home, depictions of their presence within the home were ambivalent. For all that working-class men were urged, as the British Workman declared in 1861 ‘to make “home” the happiest spot on earth’, their presence within the home was often characterised as disruptive, even violent. Indeed, ‘Unhappy Home’ was a typical title for reports of marital violence. Like the happy home, it was imagined through the material culture of the home, with pictures and cartoons from the mid-nineteenth century showing the violent husband as a large figure dominating the domestic environment, destroying its comfort, shattering ornaments, and turning over furniture. Men’s presence in the home in these accounts represented a threat, especially in those with a moral message about alcohol consumption, where the drunk husband was the most disruptive force (Begiato 2018b, 2006).

This is because the spaces of home, whatever the scale of that dwelling, were imbued with and directed by patriarchy, which structured both household forms and relationships. Homes could become sites of tension that encouraged spouses, particularly husbands, to assert physical and metaphorical dominance. As geographers have shown us, the space of the home was transformed by domestic violence and by the presence of the abuser, from a haven to a place of terror. Indeed, the home itself – when a man was present – acted as an agentic force, since its spaces and objects shaped marital violence as an act and an idea. This is seen acutely in the ways in which men were able to eject wives from homes and attack and confine them in specific rooms, as well as through the spaces of refuge which wives sought out.

Beds and stairs featured regularly in court cases as spaces in which abusive husbands attacked their wives. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the bed was not a private space in any social class, due to its centrality to several life cycle functions related to childbed, sickbed, and deathbed. The convergence within the bed of various activities, emotions, and symbolic meanings could be toxic. Indeed, the bed was a space over which spouses sought to exert marital control. The descriptions of Joseph Bentley’s violence reveal that it was often enacted around or upon the bed. On 6 April 1844, Mary Bentley and her cousin gave up waiting for Mary’s husband, Joseph, to return home, and each retired to her bed. When the drunken Joseph came to Mary’s bedside in the early hours, swearing and insisting she rose, she fled to her cousin’s bed. Joseph followed, threatening to pull her out of bed and tear-off the hangings if she did not get up and then punched her with ‘clenched or doubled fist’. On another occasion in the presence of a servant, he slapped Mary in the face and dragged her from the bed by the feet. Joseph Bentley used extreme violence not only to subordinate his wife, but to reassert his power over the home and its servants, which he perceived Mary to threaten.

Court cases also show that men of all social ranks attacked wives on stairs, throwing them down, dragging them up, or pursuing them as they tried to escape. Violence spilled over into these spaces of the home, transforming them into a place of fear, because they were points of communication between rooms, and, in multi-resident buildings, they were points of egress. Thus, stairs spatially symbolised wives’ potential for independence from their husbands and seem to have been sites that especially antagonised controlling men. Such men were exerting their dominance not only physically, but metaphorically too: the stairs were shaping their thoughts and actions.

The home’s contents took on similar power and court cases frequently detail men’s destruction of an array of domestic objects in the home. One example will suffice. In 1842, Margaret Doolen took Sarah Williamson to the doctor after Sarah’s husband, Robert, hit her with a poker. On Sarah’s departure, neighbours ‘overheard a noise like the breaking of crockery’ from the Williamsons’ room along with Robert declaring: “I will let them see who is master in this house”. Robert used domestic objects to commit his violence, but they were not simply an extension of Sarah’s body, or a substitute upon which Robert took out his anger; they were also the target of his violence and way he asserted his dominance. Like the spaces of the home, objects marked out individuals, relationships, and emotions and thus provoked actions as well as thoughts. As symbols they also helped construct discourses about class, violence, and gender. As things they catalysed violent men’s emotions and acts.

As we realised during Covid lockdowns, homes are profoundly defined by emotions, as well as through our willing, or enforced, presence in, or absence and distance from them. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes were also conceived of and experienced through emotions and spaces. Just as now, unfortunately, this was structurally unequal, determined by wealth, social class, gender, and ethnicity. History and recent experience converge, it seems to me, to show that the home is the most significant physical and conceptual phenomenon shaping human behaviour.

References

Begiato (Bailey), Joanne. 2006. “’I dye [sic] by Inches’: locating wife beating in the concept of a privatization of marriage and violence in eighteenth-century England.” Social History 31 (3): 273-294. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03071020600763615?queryID=%24%7BresultBean.queryID%7D

Begiato, Joanne. 2015. “Tears and the Manly Sailor in England c. 1760-1860.” Journal for Maritime Research 17 (2): 117-133. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21533369.2015.1094981

Begiato, Joanne. 2018a. “Afterword. Moving Objects: Emotional Transformation, Tangibility, and Time-Travel.” In Feeling Things, edited by Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, Sally Randles, 229-242. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://academic.oup.com/book/6801/chapter-abstract/150957684?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Begiato, Joanne. 2018b. “Beyond the rule of thumb: the materiality of marital violence in England, c.1700-1857.” Cultural and Social History 15 (1): 39-59. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14780038.2018.1427353

Begiato, Joanne. 2019. “Selfhood and ‘Nostalgia’: Sensory and Material Memories of the Childhood Home in Late Georgian Britain.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2): 229-246. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1754-0208.12617

Begiato, Joanne. 2020. Manliness in Britain 1760-1900: Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526128577/

Begiato, Joanne. 2023. “’Small uneasinesses & petty fears’: Life-cycle, Masculinity and Loneliness.” In The Routledge History of Loneliness, edited by Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus, and Deborah Simonton, 359-373. London: Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429331848-28/small-uneasinesses-petty-fears-joanne-begiato

Brown, Michael and Begiato, Joanne. 2019. “Visualising the aged veteran in nineteenth-century Britain: Memory, masculinity and nation.” In Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Brown, Anna-Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato, 102-138. Manchester: Manchester University Press. https://www.manchesterhive.com/view/9781526135636/9781526135636.00012.xml

STAY HOME Conference

The STAY HOME project will host the international conference STAY HOME: New perspectives on the home on the 10th-11th of November 2022 at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. We invite speakers to deliver research and design perspectives on the home as a physical, social, digital, and existential place in past, present, and future.

Call for Papers

What is home and how do we relate to, inhabit, shape, experience, and use it? Home is described in terms of shape, space, and scale, but also in terms of experiences, relationships, and emotions. During the corona crisis home became a central yet contested term. What does it mean to stay at home? What makes a home? What about those without a home? The pandemic might be a catalyst for thinking about home in new ways – not only as a safe or as a private space, but maybe also as an unsafe space or a space that is sometimes public or professional. We invite scholars to think with us about the home.

The aim of the conference is to share and discuss new perspectives on the home – in particular perspectives that emerge during crises and may inform future conceptualizations of human dwelling. We invite speakers to deliver research and design perspectives on the home as a physical, social, digital, and existential place in past, present, and future.

STAY HOME: New perspectives on the home is an interdisciplinary conference on the home hosted by the Danish research project STAY HOME: the home during the corona crisis – and after funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (2020-24).  The project investigates practices, experiences, and uses of the home during the corona crisis and afterwards, and includes subprojects on existential experiences, domestic violence, the digitalized home, and the spatial organization of the home. STAY HOME is conducted by an interdisciplinary team from the faculties of Theology and Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, The Royal Danish Academy: School of Architecture, and the IT University of Copenhagen. Read more about the project in English or Danish.

Keynote speakers

Professor Joanne Begiato, School of History, Philosophy and Culture, Oxford Brookes University. Preliminary title: Making the [un]happy home: emotions, bodies, and spaces in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture Beatriz Colomina, Princeton University School of Architecture.

Chancellor’s Professor Paul Dourish, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine.

Associate Professor Hanna Reichel, Princeton Theological Seminary. Preliminary title: Home/alone? – Technologies of haunting and belonging.

Topics of interest

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • Feeling at home
  • Sharing home
  • Domestic claustrophobia
  • Missing home
  • Absent homes
  • Home and mobility
  • Dwelling and belonging
  • Home as an existential place
  • Forced home
  • Vulnerable safety
  • Home without a house
  • Sense of home
  • Boundaries and thresholds of the home
  • Hybrid homes
  • Imagining home
  • Smart or invasive home

Date and location

The conference takes place on the 10th -11th of November 2022 at The Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen.

Types of presentations

It is possible to apply with a proposal for a paper presentation, a presentation by a research group or a poster. The conference language is English.

  • Paper presentations are 15-minute presentations based on original research.
  • Research group presentations are 20-minute presentations by a group of researchers working together.
  • Poster-presentations are graphic one-page posters (A2) exhibited throughout the conference and presented in a session dedicated to Q/A and discussion of individual posters.

Application process

The application must include the following:

  • Title of the presentation
  • Indication of type of presentation (paper, group or poster)
  • Full name, affiliation, country of residence, and email address of corresponding presenter
  • Indication of all presenters’ disciplinary backgrounds and affiliations
  • CV of all presenters (pdf)
  • Research abstract (150-300 words) indicating: research objectives, methodology, findings, future scope, and 3-5 key words(pdf)

Please submit your application here no later than April 15 2022 at 12.00 pm CEST/UTC+2.

The proposals will go through peer-review and answers will be sent out appx. 6 weeks after the application deadline. The abstracts are evaluated on the basis of:

  • Originality
  • Scholarly quality
  • Relevance to the conference themes and topics
  • Disciplinary and geographical variation among presentations

We might want to publish selected papers with hitherto unpublished research after the conference.

Practical information

There is no conference fee. The conference includes refreshments during breaks, and it is possible to buy lunch on-site.

We welcome geographical breadth. Non-European scholars may choose to present online if preferred. If you prefer to present online please state this in the application form.

A few travel bursaries up to 400 euros will be available as reimbursements after the conference. Depending on funding, we hope to be able to offer additional bursaries reimbursing travel expenses up to 940 euros.

The travel bursary application must include the following:

  • Motivation for attendance of the conference (max 150 words)
  • Budget showing travel expenses related to the conference
  • Indication of whether you will still be joining the conference or would like to present online if your travel expenses are not fully reimbursed

Please submit your travel bursary application together with your academic application.

Contact

Academic questions should be addressed to PI of STAY HOME, Professor Mette Birkedal Bruun: mbb@teol.ku.dk

Practical questions or questions regarding the application process should be addressed to editor of STAY HOME, Emma Klakk: emma.klakk@teol.ku.dk