Precarious Homes – Narratives and Practices of Home-Making in Turbulent Times (Reading Group 2)
- Event type
- Reading Group
- Address
- Online
- Event dates
- Contact
- cathy.collins@sas.ac.uk 020 7862 8738
Precarious Homes – Narratives and Practices of Home-Making in Turbulent Times
This event series takes its cue from the CCWW Conference "'Where are you from?' to 'Where shall we go together?' Re-imagining Home and Belonging in 21st-Century Women's Writing", hosted at the IMLR in September 2020. Dedicated to further exploration of literary and theoretical conceptualisations of home-making, the series considers women’s writing in context, using various formats - reading groups, a symposium, and an author/translator conversation.
Programme of events (pdf)
Reading Group
Friday 16 April & 21 May 2021, 15:00-16:00 BST (Online)
Organisers: Annette Bühler-Dietrich (Stuttgart) and Maria Roca Lizarazu (Birmingham)
In this first bloc of events on “Precarious Homes”, organised as a Reading Group, we will consider questions of home-making in settings that appear antithetical to the very notion of home: displacement, statelessness and the environment of the camp.
Recent research in the realm of sociology suggests that camps can produce their own forms of political membership (see Sigona on “campzenship”, 2013). One question that will interest us therefore relates to what – if any – forms of belonging, membership and home-making are possible in settings of displacement and encampment and what corresponding forms of agency might be imaginable particularly, but not solely, in the realm of the arts.
Precarious Homes 2, 21 May 2021, 15:00-16:00 BST
For the second session, we will read Hannah Arendt’s famous essay “We Refugees” alongside Giorgio Agamben’s response to Arendt in his short essay “Beyond Human Rights”. Both Arendt and Agamben argue that the figure of the refugee necessitates a re-thinking of established notions of citizenship and sovereignty.
Essential Reading for 21 May
Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, available online here: https://www.jus.uio.no/smr/om/aktuelt/arrangementer/2015/arendt-we-refugees.pdf
Giorgio Agamben, ‘Beyond Human Rights’, in: P. Virno and M. Hardt, eds. Radical Politics in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), available online here: https://novact.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Beyond-Human-Rights-by-Giorgio-Agamben.pdf
Further Reading (for both sessions)
Sigona, Nando, ‘Campzenship: Reimagining the Camp as a Social and Political Space’, Citizenship Studies, 19.1 (2015), 1–15.
Lyndsey Stonebridge, Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
The first Reading Group in this series will take place on 16 April 2021
All are welcome to attend this free online event, starting at 15:00 BST. You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link. Please click on the Book Now button below to register
