Tag: Home

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Idea(l)s of home disentangled – A podcast

In this podcast episode, Eva Korte (PhD candidate, TU Berlin), Judith Keller (postdoctoral researcher, HU Berlin), and Khushboo Jain (PhD candidate, FAU Nürnberg-Erlangen) are in conversation with me, exploring my idea of a “liberatory politics of home,” which I outlined in my latest book.

The episode was recorded as part of a workshop on different ideas and ideal of home, which explored the spatial politics and practices surrounding home research. Reflecting on the intricacies and the emotional labor involved in doing home research, the conversation helps to work through and reflect on issues such as research practice, fieldwork, positionality, and the political implications of our work.

You can find the podcast here: https://sfb1265.de/einblicke/space-oddity/#space-oddity-28-ideals-of-home-disentangled

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PhD seminar at UniCal – home and anti-militarism

Last week I spent some time at the University of Calabria, near Cosenza. I had a wonderful experience thanks to my real generous host, Carmelo Buscema. The level of debate was quite amazing, and the level of critical inquiry was also deep, honest and generous.

I also had the privilege of spending some time with my friend Antonio Mazzeo – one of the few in Italy who has spent real energy and time in investigating the relationships between the military and our Schools and Universities.

Below, some random pictures from the sea at Paola, near Cosenza.

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Keynote in Berlin at the Re-Figuration of Spaces research centre

Tomorrow, I will be in Berlin to participate in the “Idea(l)s of Home. Disentangled Spatial politics and practices encountered in home research” workshop. I will deliver a keynote on my book For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke University Press, 2023).

The event will take place online and in person at the Collaborative Research Centre “Re-figuration of Spaces”, Technische Universität Berlin.

I am very thankful to my comrade Judith Keller from the Radical Housing Journal for inviting me and to all her colleagues for their organization.

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Keynote in Geneva at the Swiss Collaboratory City Network

Today, Friday 23rd May 2025, I will take part in the Swiss Collaboratory City Network event at the University of Geneva. I will give a keynote entitled “The Colonies of Home“.

I would like to thank Armelle Choplin and Blaise Dupuis, the Urban Hub, and the organizing team in Geneva for having me.

The colonies of home 

What does it mean to be at ‘home’, when ‘home’ is the expression of structural forms of violence, at the intersection of anthropocentrism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and racial capitalism? As the COVID-19 pandemic showed, home can be read as a juncture where many of the inequalities of our time come and are held together structurally; yet, at the same time, home maintains an attractive lure to itself, as a place one is called to defend or to work toward, in order to be freed from subjections that seem to render home impossible in the first place. In this talk, my aim is to stay close to this only apparent contradiction, which I would like to name the “impossible possibility of home.” With this notion, I interpret the unjust and violent foundations of home not as opposite to, but as foundational to, its capacity to allude to one’s own betterment in terms of belonging, security, and care. This means to say that the lure of home as a space of belonging is emerging from the foundations of home itself, rather than being a means toward salvation from its violence. The impossible possibility of home lies in home’s capacity to sell a diagram of liberation as a line of flight, a breakthrough from its unjust underpinnings, while in immanent, lived, and felt terms, that diagram is a very powerful function of those. 

Keywords: Home, Homelessness, Expulsion, Extraction, Housing Justice

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Starting my visiting time at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China

I arrived yesterday in Shanghai and I look forward to being based here and in Suzhou for the next five weeks, as part of my visiting time at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU).

I will spend time with colleagues at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Urban & Culture research group, to discuss our shared interests in homing, housing and urbanity. I am thankful to Liu Cao for the invitation and to Lei Yuan for the help in putting this visiting together.

For now, just a view from the balcony in Putuo.

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Presenting For a Liberatory Politics of Home at the Radical Urban Lab, St Andrews

I look forward to joining the Radical Urban Lab at the University of St Andrews on Monday 5th, February, as part of their week of events.

I will take part in the VIVA discussion of Rowan Milligan’s wonderful PhD thesis, and then present an excerpt of my Duke University Press book For a #Liberatory #Politics of #Home to the Lab.

Thanks to my comrade Antonis Vradis for organising!

Here some details of the event: https://rul.st-andrews.ac.uk/for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home/

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For a Liberatory Politics of Home | Out now with Duke University Press

After many years of work, For a Liberatory Politics of Home is now officially out at Duke University Press.

Can we imagine a ‘home’ that does not require the constitution & colonization of an alterity to stand?

In violent times, a text to question violent binaries, looking for a language of radical affirmations.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home

Thanks to Ananya and Raquel for the generous endorsements.

“Michele Lancione has given us a tremendous gift with this pathbreaking and brilliant book. His arguments will be of immense meaning for social movements concerned with housing justice, many of which are grappling with regimes of property and the affective politics of home. The study of housing and homelessness will not be the same.” — Ananya Roy, author of Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development

“By mobilizing a new methodological, conceptual, and political grammar in which home and homelessness are not opposite but coherent expressions of a wider function of patriarchal and racialized processes of expulsions and extractions, this book offers a whole new perspective to imagine housing futures toward housing justice in which ‘housing precarity’ is not only a site for deprivation and relegation or a ‘problem to be fixed’ but can also perform a new politics of inhabitation.” — Raquel Rolnik, author of Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance

And thanks, among many, to Courtney Berger at Duke for helping, Katherine Brickell for the close reading, Kiera Chapman for the boost, the Urban Institute and the Beyond Inhabitation Lab for nurturing, ERC Research for supporting, Colin McFarlane for cheering and supporting, AbdouMaliq Simone & Eleonora Leo Mignoli for inhabiting it with me.

Avanti!

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Keynote at ECRs Urban Studies Lisbon on the violence of the colonies of home

The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing is right: settler #housing practice in #Palestine amounts to #domicide.

Yet, the destruction of the Palestinian homely by the hand of Israel is not just an aberration, but it is a foundation. Violence is not the ‘other’ of ‘home’, but it becomes the prime vehicle through which the ‘other’ necessary for the constitution of the colonisers’ home is created, in total destruction. Violence here, as Kotef would have it, becomes the object of the homely: the intimate function grounding the colonial home.

Today, I will open ECRs #urbanstudies #Lisbon on the impossible possibility of such homes, and many others.

Thanks Simone Tulumello and colleagues, for having me – https://tinyurl.com/mr3vu94w

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Proofs of my forthcoming book with Duke – For a Liberatory Politics of Home – out Nov 23

I am now concluding the editing of the proofs of my forthcoming book, For a Liberatory Politics of Home, out with Duke University Press in November 2023.

I worked on this text on and off for more than ten years, from my Ph.D. to a number of other entanglements. In the book, I develop an argument around the impossible possibility of ‘home’ and the colonies of the homely, in order to construct a way of thinking beyond the violent epistemic and material entrapments of the binary home/homelessness. I work with processual, feminist, and autonomous thinking, and I ground the argument in my Italian ethnographic research but also in years of engagement with debates and struggles around housing justice across the Atlantic.

If you want to know more, a preliminary page is available here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home

The book will be out in November 2023. I am extremely grateful to the people at Duke for their incredible editorial steer and dedication, to Ananya Roy and Katheryne Brickell for unparalleled insights, to my brother AbdouMaliq Simone and to Leo for pushing me to write this thing, and to many others, whom I thank in the volume itself.