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- Convenors:
-
Lizette Gradén
(Lund University)
Jessica Enevold Duncan (Lund University)
Eleonora Narvselius (Lund University)
Tom O'Dell (Lund University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- SUSTAINABILITIES
- Location:
- Room H-204
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel revisits the topic of homemaking against the background of current socio-cultural conditions and through the optics of the ongoing debates about sustainability, heritage, and home in ethnology, anthropology, folkloristics, critical heritage studies, and memory studies.
Long Abstract:
In many representative domains, particularly the cultural heritage sector, re-conceptualizations of domesticity detectable in changed approaches to planning, design, and presentations of the home have been a focus of discussion for a long time. The dominant cultural discourses that tend to view the home as a singular space, located in one place and time, clearly gendered and beyond the reach of big politics, have been challenged multiple times.
This panel revisits these topics against the background of the current socio-cultural conditions and through the optics of the current debates about home in ethnology, folklore, anthropology, critical heritage studies, and memory studies.
In a time in which sustainability issues are of extreme importance, how are homes being pulled together in new ways to address sustainability challenges, and how do conceptions of identity and heritage inform the choices people make as they get on with the business of homemaking?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Hemnet.se is Sweden's largest real estate market. Focusing on the term "renovation" in the discursive home-making of real-estate ads, I discuss why in this age of "strong sustainability" and Agenda 2030, realtors may have to be challenged as invoking concerningly unsustainable consumption practices.
Paper long abstract:
Hemnet is Sweden’s largest digital real-estate market. Relative to visits per capita, it is the world’s most popular website for real-estate browsers. Hemnet markets itself as a place where dreams are made; the “best tool” for people to find their “dream house” (Hemnet 2021). It is not news that buying a home of one’s own is a coveted dream, that realtors do everything they can to attract buyers (Garber 2008), and that buyers have different motivations and plans for their purchases (Gunnemark 2019). But what is the dream house and home now presented on Hemnet? Real-estate agents do more than sell houses, they also promote the idea of “home as identity” (Andersson 2018). How is that identity constructed? What metaphors do imagined dwellers “live by” in their texts (Lakoff & Johnson 1980)? What is sold to whom? What are buyers supposed to do in and with their dream house? In addition to "charming" and "cozy", a very commonly used adjective is "renovated". Here, my reading of the application of renovation, and its various synonyms and collocates in Hemnet ads, aims to illustrate how home-making is construed as an arena where creative cultures of "renovated is the new Folkhem" (Enevold 2021), “heritage-preservation" (Rolfsdotter-Eliasson 2019), and “self-realization” (Lury 2011) intersect with the current global goals and demands of “strong sustainability” (Daly 2007) and Agenda 2030 (UN 2015). At this intersection, realtors regularly become, and may need to be challenged as, invokers of concerningly unsustainable consumption practices.
Paper short abstract:
Recently new villa owners have renovated and reconstructed the classicistic building style from 1920s while the reputation of the suburb has improved. The aim is to discuss this renewal with references to sustainable living, homemaking, recognition of cultural heritage and gentrification.
Paper long abstract:
Villas in old fashion styles have been more attractive on the house market during the latest decades in Sweden. But why do many people appreciate to buy old houses instead of new build ones? What kind of expectations do they have about homemaking, repairing and sustainable consumption? The aim is to discuss the impact of reevaluating young families have had when they bought and renovated old villas in the beginning of the 21th century through their enthusiasm for reconstruction of the classicistic style from 1920s. Has it something to do with a contemporary trend about sustainable living, while the reputation of a villa suburb in Gothenburg was improved? The analysis also includes interplay between the ideal of interiors and contemporary imaginations of cultural heritage. Do the new inhabitants know anything concerning the biographies of their old houses? Do they see themselves as inheritors or influencers? It is notable that different generations have been living in this neighborhood; workers who build the houses; re-newers with functionalist ideals; creative class with low expectations of comfort; re-renovators with creative homemaking ambitions. Each generation has made efforts for realization of their dreams for good living. It is obvious that this development is similar to other working class areas where gentrification trends are visible in Sweden and elsewhere. However, analyses regarding common villa suburbs with recognitions of cultural heritage are astonished rare.
Paper short abstract:
Analysis of a bulk of policy documents conducted for the project MaHoMe: Making it Home, allows me to make a conclusion that the concept of 'folkhemmet Sverige' has been reconfigured, especially in the context of discussions about integration and homing of the new immigrants.
Paper long abstract:
To unpack the meaning of home/hem conveyed in Swedish policy documents, it makes sense to address not only practices and policies of housing, but rather to revisit a mutual constitution between “the formal features of actual dwellings and the social life that inhabits them” (Boccagni 2016:4). In this respect, reincarnations of folkhemmet deserve a special attention as this highly adaptable political idiom continues to reverberate in both ‘social life’ and political discourses in Sweden.
In the twentieth century, the period of political salience of folkhemmet was associated with the rule of Social-Democratic Party, wide-scale social reforms, growing public sector, and significant improvement of housing conditions. Notably, the idea of folkhemmet gained traction in the 1930s, when both immigration and emigration were on historically low level, and faded by the end by the 1980s, with increase of global migration and adoption of humanitaristic policies. The period of folkhemmet is thus limited to the decades when the share of migrants in the country was still quite low, and the main referent of the social-democratic domorhetoric was the culturally and ethnically homogenous nation. Nevertheless, my analysis of a bulk of recent policy documents conducted for the international project MaHoMe: Making it Home, allows to make a conclusion that folkhemmet has been reconfigured and sedimented, especially in the context of discussions about integration and homing of the new immigrants. My presentation will thus spotlight ‘sedimentation’ of folkhemmet on the material of declarations of Moderate-dominated and Social-Democrat-dominated governments between 2010 and 2020.