Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
What does it mean to make a home out of a temporary dwelling? This paper presents an autoethnographic account of a year spent renovating and living in a 1970s caravan, reflecting on liveliness, decay, and tensions between permanency and contingency.
Paper long abstract:
I met Lilith in June 2020. She had recently turned 47. For the previous five years, the mustard 1973 15” Viscount Ambassador caravan had sat rotting in a coastal Queensland front yard, with an increasingly leaky roof and buckling laminate internal walls. At some point, a lizard had crawled into the wardrobe and died. I thought Lilith was perfect, so she returned home with me to be transformed into something more habitable.
Temporary dwellings like this rundown caravan can be a way forward to the foreseeable, intended to offer control during upended life circumstances, or circumvent unaffordable housing markets and rental crises. Lilith was a chance at personal autonomy and privacy, while capitalising on the financial convenience and connectedness of staying with family during a turbulent time.
This paper presents an auto-ethnographic account of a year spent renovating and living in a caravan. Considering notions of decay and repair, I reflect on living permanently in a dynamic setting that is typically envisioned as being mobile or temporary. Accounting for the sociality of objects and tensions between permanency and contingency, I ask what it means to make a home of dwelling that is seemingly alive, dripping and sparking of its own accord, refusing to keep still. At the same time, what does it mean to live in a dwelling that is equally marked by its own mortality, where aging materials and potential exposure to the elements are more noticeable in a smaller space?
Thinking about alternative modes of dwelling: what makes a house a home?
Session 1 Friday 26 November, 2021, -