Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus a contemporary psychiatric care unit’s ambiguity of being both a home and a homelike non-home institution. The paper is based on an ethnographic fieldwork in a care unit in Sweden and is a part of my ongoing work on my dissertation about contemporary psychiatric care.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will discuss a contemporary psychiatric care unit's ambiguity of being both a home and a homelike non-home institution for its patients. The inpatient psychiatry is supposed to be temporary, only for those with difficult often acute psychiatric conditions. Ideally the patients should be integrated in society and live in their own home. The institution is framed to be just enough homelike to make the patients stay comfortable, but not too homely since that would make it hard for the patients to leave. But for a large group of patients - of which some also are returning to the care unit more or less frequently - the institution symbolizes everything a normative home does, such as security, the pleasant company of other people, peace and quiet, recovery, in contrast to their own homes associated with loneliness, anxiety and lack of daily routines. Therefore the homeliness of the non-home institution becomes an object of competing interpretations creating conflicts of meaning which includes power and resistance. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss how this conflict of meaning take place and affect everyday life in a psychiatric unit. The paper is based on an ethnographic fieldwork in a care unit in Sweden, and is a part of my ongoing work on my dissertation about contemporary psychiatric care and its differences from the institutions described by e.g. Foucault and Goffman.

Paper short abstract:

In my paper I will explore the meanings Palestinians refugees in different locations of exile associate with the refugee camps they currently dwell in. I aim to highlight how camps as spaces bring together different temporalities, and how they materialise the ambivalent realities of refugeeness.

Paper long abstract:

Refugee camps are usually considered to be liminal spaces, a stop on a way from flight to resettlement. But in some cases they become places where lives are lived from cradle to grave. For Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, the refugee camps have been part of their everyday lives from the days of al-Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The camps have developed from tent gatherings to more permanent places of dwelling that have expanded over the year to house the growing refugee populations. They have been places of vulnerability and violence, but also steadfastness and resistance. They are defined by overcrowdedness and lack of privacy, but also by strong communities and feeling of belonging. Camps are not only places where refugees dwell in their everyday lives, but are also integrally associated with their political struggle and the right of return. Camps materialise multiple temporalities as they function as reminders of Palestinians' refugeeness and historic connection to Palestine, when at the same time they form the everyday spaces where lives unfold and futures are aspired. In my presentation, by leaning on fieldwork done in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, West Bank and Jordan, I hope to scrutinize the meanings given to the camps by the refugees who dwell in them, and draw attention to their ambivalent nature as places that are both celebrated and perceived with despair.

Paper short abstract:

Home is a temporal process. It changes in time. In this presentation different manifestations of temporality are analyzed in the housing experiences in the Third Age. What is the relationship between housing and experiences of home? What makes housing feel homely?

Paper long abstract:

The data consist of four group discussions which took place in Finnish South Ostrobothnia and in Helsinki in 2014. The data were collected through two written assignments, one of which was a written question, the other, an improvisation exercise. The data were transcribed and divided into clusters on the basis of keywords. Ten groups were differentiated, and a sexpartite ideal model of home was then constructed on the basis of the clusters.

People understand their homes as a series of events. When talking about themselves, people use memories and stories to structure temporality and their own existence. One's own life career is often structured as a series of moves. The main attention is not on the event of moving but on the key moments in each home. Consecutive homes help us remember what happened at each stage of life. History follows us also as inheritance. Buildings, movables and land property may be inherited property and therefore dear to the people owning it. Multispatiality, too, has a temporal dimension. It is built on consecutive place experiences. Supragenerational attachment often happens with a holiday home. Home is one of the most important places of nostalgia. Everyday objects and their use are key carriers of collective memory. Dressing, eating and ways of cooking may transfer the home feeling to new landscapes, so that a completely strange environment still feels like home.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the ethnography about the concept of home among Lithuanian women living in Scotland, this paper explores fragmented temporalities of a place through narratives about remembered and imagined homes, and attempts to 'be at home' elsewhere.

Paper long abstract:

By developing a notion that 'we carry places within us' (Dylan Trigg, 2012) when a person moves from one place to the other, I am analysing how a migrant experiences a place through entanglements of visible and invisible, present and absent aspects of a place, and a sense of one's self continuation. I am arguing that once a person places memories and imaginaries within experiences of a place here and now, a sense of place transcends itself as something that is here and now, though always remains an incomplete and fragmented personal experience.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is a reflection on how remembering the lost home and dreaming of a future home shape the materiality of our actual dwelling. What is that connects us back to the places where we actually stay even if we do not call them home? How do we inhabit our present?

Paper long abstract:

The situation of displacement brings about particular temporality. Fairly grounded in the present, we are floating in the virtual realm of technology-mediated relationships, wandering through the memories of the home we left behind and the fantasies of an ideal home, yet not existing. Remembering or dreaming is a slow motion.

I believe that the process of filmmaking as ethnographic and artistic practice has a particular capacity to reveal the consequences of this altered temporality.

These explorations are based on my work on a complex video project entitled The Places from Which We Are Absent, in which I have been exploring the paradoxes of a migrant's journey in counter tension with what it means to pursue a better life, real and imagined, in Western Europe. The Places from Which We Are Absent is an interaction of two parallel storylines; on the one hand, my family's life in Poland and my cosmopolitan life in Western Europe, and on the other, the everyday life of a Guinean-Polish friend living in present-day United Kingdom. I have been editing my filmed sequences with home movies and public archives in order to highlight the tensions between the real and the imaginary.

Referring to the Bergsonian philosophy of time and duration, and making use of Charles S. Peirce's categories representing modes of experiencing reality, I will try to trace how the recollections of home in Poland and in Guinea, and the unfulfilled dreams of a better life elsewhere, shape our dwelling in the Western Europe.

Paper short abstract:

Looking at two imaginaries of place - the post-War "lost territories of Germany, and an independent Scotland of the future - this paper, drawing on a toposophical approach, will explore factors that shape who is regarded as being from, and coming to, in specific contexts of place and belonging.

Paper long abstract:

After a period when mobility and the resultant migration was widely hailed as a defining characteristic of the global marketplace, the acceleration in large-scale flight and expulsion through armed conflicts and natural disasters is leading to social and political discourses bringing issues of place and belonging into sharp relief.

Taking a close look at aspects of two challenging case studies - the German context of "Erinnerungskultur" in relation to post-War flight and expulsion with the subsequent imaginaries of "lost homelands", and an increasingly dis-United Kingdom with its emerging imaginaries of a future Scotland to be built by self-conscious dwelling in and on it - this paper will draw on a toposophical (=place wisdom) approach to explore factors that shape who is regarded as being from, and coming to, in specific contexts of place and belonging. It will examine how dwelling between tropes of 'self' and 'other' enables actors to transform different world versions into their individual and collective "Heimat".

Paper short abstract:

The paper reflects the changes of belonging to Moldova as homeland depending on the changes of its borders through time. Moldova’s borders have not been stable, which affects the perception of homeland by people who feel their belonging to the state and includes it in a broader context (USSR, EU).

Paper long abstract:

Temporality can be defined through official and/or cultural borders - that is what the analysis of content of four Moldovan media agencies (two leading central state news agencies pan.md and enews.md and two leading Gagauz news agencies gagauzlar.md and gagauzinfo.md) for the last five years shows.

As a "nation-in-the-making" (Berg, Meuers) or a "delayed nation" (King) Moldova is creating its new boundaries, new symbolic geography today. This process is connected to the idea of necessity of patriotism promotion by shaping and maintaining civic identity based on the borders of a new independent Moldova which represent contemporaneity.

At the same time cultural heritage forms the feeling of belonging to two broader spaces: East and West. East is connected to the former USSR. Being a part of it Moldova is connected to common soviet history (for example, with the victory in World War II), Russian language and culture (so called "Russian world"), economic welfare of the country. In this case Moldova is "located" in the past through the belonging to the Eastern region.

West is mostly represented by the EU. Meanwhile Moldova has a very strong idea of European integration which is still a project of being included in the Western region that can symbolize the future. In this case Moldova is associated with the development of Western values and progress.

Choosing temporality and broader space Moldova is also choosing the way its citizens will define home.

Paper short abstract:

Mothers seeking protection, Irish Traveller and ex-pat mothers contributed to ethnographic research into the challenges faced by women living in temporary dwellings and the manner in which they create home places and spaces outside the dominant culture where they can raise their children.

Paper long abstract:

International migration has resulted in a diversity of spaces and localities of childhood and notions of upbringing. This research takes a closer look at motherhood outside the dominant culture and taken-for-granted notions regarding mothering, taking into account different ways of mothering within particular contexts, cultures and spaces such as living in temporary dwellings and coping with trauma and exclusion. This contribution offers contextualised knowledge, theoretical conceptual perspectives and discourses on mothering practices and childhood.

Through ethnographic research conducted among protection-seeking mothers living in Irish direct provision, Irish Travellers, and ex-pat mothers living in Ireland, this presentation explores the manner in which women create home places in which to raise their children.

Although significant differences occur across these populations, common themes have emerged. These include: women raising their children in a culture different from their own carry out activities with cultural meaning for a variety of reasons: in order to stay connected to their home place, to form strong and unique connections with their children, and as protective measures. Moreover, varying concepts of "good" mothering and practices which are culturally constructed take into account a range of social and spatial locations, which vary across time and space. Finally, the surveillance of mothering practices takes place within both public and private dwelling spaces whereby the more marginalised a woman is, the greater she and her children are subject to surveillance and control. Despite these challenges women endeavour to draw on their resources to create a home in which to raise their children.

Paper short abstract:

An examination of urban temporalities through a closer interpretation of urban atmospheric workshops held in Edinburgh and Athens between February and May 2016 that seeks to contribute an alternative way of understanding the temporal aspects of a city's inhabitation.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the embodied understanding of urban temporalities in a series of performative workshops in Edinburgh and Athens in February 2016 and May 2016 respectively. Being part of the actions of the International Network Urban Emptiness (http://urbanemptiness.org/), the workshops traced the temporality of urban inhabitations by deploying the ideas of emptiness and silence as tools of performative explorations. Silent walks, repetitive actions and practices of changing rhythms were combined to investigate the dynamics of intimacy (diverse shades of belonging) in the dwelling of the city and suggest a multi-layered narrative made of personal and group stories. Past, present and future were interconnected in this narrative to unfold hidden and imaginary qualities of an embodied urban topography. From their briefing to their performance and creation of the outputs (texts, choreographies, mappings, installations, performances etc) these actions suggested alternative temporalities of the city, fostering conditions of place experience that add a new way of experientially interpreting the rhythms of urban environment.