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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.

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Infrastructure, Inequality and the Neo-Apartheid City – USF seminar series @Newcastle

I am very happy to take part in the third and last event in the “Infrastructure, Inequality and the Neo-Apartheid City” series, organised by Dr Mori Ram, Dr Charlotte Lemanski, and Prof. Haim Yacobi with the support of the Urban Studies Foundation. Info about the whole series, here.

The third event, entitled “Mobility and Movement beyond Apartheid” will take place online on 09 December 2021, from 10.00am to 4.00pm (UK time). It will concentrate on the ability to connect or disconnect residents from the city by critically exploring how infrastructures of transportation and mobility determine who can move freely, to where, and in what speed and frequency. Infrastructure is crucial to any analysis of political mobility and movement. At the same time, regimes of separation solidify social and political (in)equality that hinder the ability to relocate and sets the urban conditions that reorganize human capacity to move, settle and reside.

My paper will be titled Infrastructural violence and the impossible possibility of ‘home’.

Register here for the event. Thanks!

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Dwelling in Liminalities – A lecture @CriticalUrbanisms

Since the beautiful people at the Critical Urbanisms lab in Basel recorded it… let me share.

In this lecture I try to make sense of underground inhabitation, and the propositional politics of the uninhabitable in contemporary Bucharest. This is work I started in 2003, and it continues to evolve, at its own tempo. The main aim is to encompass the colonies of home/homelessness and think about the margins as site of resistance (hooks) and as site of otherwise dwelling assembled through praxis of radical care. The latter is not there to accept the status quo – it ain’t resilience. Instead, it signals more profound and radical challenges to the entrenched violence of our anti-ecological, racist, gendered and extractive ideals of ‘home’.

Beyond the stuff I’ve published around the tunnels in Cultural Anthropology and the IJURR, there is a now under-review book for Duke on the politics of home(lessness). And then, of course, the work of many others who have inspired mine, the struggle of my comrades Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire, and this small video above. Avanti!

 

 

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Keynote @EUGEO on Lessness: Recentering the politics of home

Today I will open the 7th EUGEO Congress in conjunction with the 51st Conference of Irish Geographers, here in the west of Ireland – Galway City. The theme for the 2019 conference is Re-Imagining Europe’s Future Society and Landscapes.  This is one of the largest gathering of Geographers in the world, alongside the RGS-IBG (UK) and the AAG (USA).

In my keynote I will situate my grounded critical approach to homelessness, as I have developed in my research it in the last 10 years. This is essentially a call to de-instutionalize our approach to the matter and to cease seeing ‘homelessness’ as in opposition to idealized notions of ‘home’. The latter needs to be re-thought in their entirety in order to tackle the root of housing precarity, and of the trauma associated with it. These are key themes that I am developing at the Urban Institute, through the Life at the Margins research theme.

Thank you to Kathy Reilly (Galway) for the invitation and support. The abstract of my intervention can be found below.

Abstract for EUGEO conference
On Lessness: Recentering the politics of home.
Michele Lancione
m.lancione@sheffield.ac.uk

Homelessness is one of the strongest cultural signifiers of the contemporary urban age. It works as a machine intersecting structural economic inequalities with cultural stigmatisation, on top of which a whole assemblage of personal traumatic experiences, institutional policing, and charitable interventions flourish. Despite its pervasiveness, homelessness is still framed as a ‘phenomenon’, a social ‘issue’ amongst others to be dealt with: homelessness as the negation of ‘home’. But what if homelessness is not the exception arising from the lack of shelter, but instead the full and most quintessential representation of what ‘home’ is within capitalistic modes of organising and being? In other words, what if ‘homelessness’ cannot be solved, unless one is ready to fundamentally alter the parameters of ‘home’? This keynote address ‘homelessness’ as a socio, cultural and economic process configured within an exclusionary understanding of ‘home’ and assembled through a number of governmentalities, which are identified with the notion of ‘lessness’. Through several ethnographic vignettes, the fundamental relationship between ‘lessness’ and ‘home’ is showed, revealing the impossibility of any reconfiguration without radical change. The latter is addressed through a number of propositions around a new politics of ‘home’.

Relevant works in relation to the theme of the keynote:

  • Lancione, M. (monograph in preparation). On Lessness: Recentering the politics of home
  • Lancione, M. (2019) Weird Exoskeletons: Propositional Politics and the Making of Home in Underground Bucharest. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43.3, 535–50.
  • Lancione, M. (2016a) Racialised dissatisfaction: homelessness management and the everyday assemblage of difference. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41.4, 363–75.
  • Lancione, M. ed. (2016b) Rethinking life at the margins: the assemblage of contexts, subjects and politics. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London ; New York.
  • Lancione, M. (2016). Beyond Homelessness Studies. European Journal of Homelessness, 10(3), 163-176
  • Lancione, M. (2014c). The spectacle of the poor. Or: ‘Wow!! Awesome. Nice to know that people care!’ Social & Cultural Geography, 15(7), 693–713.
  • Lancione, M. (2014b). Entanglements of faith: Discourses, practices of care and homeless people in an Italian City of Saints. Urban Studies, 51(14), 3062–3078.