DefrostingHOME · Rethinking Home in Volatile Worlds

What defines ""home"" in an era of precarity and volatility? DefrostingHOME explores the interplay between unstable dwelling conditions and evolving notions of home, challenging traditional binaries such as private/public spaces, stability versus precarity, and home versus homelessness. Mainstream Western narratives often prioritise stability and ownership, marginalising those living in conditions that deviate from these norms. The project follows current critiques of normative conceptions of inhabitation and expands their scope in three ways. First, it will investigate volatile forms of inhabitation on the ground to bring to the fore everyday practices of homemaking and subtle, often neglected forms of care, agency, and resistance. Second, it will develop a decolonial hybrid methodology that combines ethnography with participatory visual methods, co-creating knowledge with research participants. Third, it will establish the foundations for a comparative framework based on the examination of the structural causes of volatility at the global level, including extractivism, war and nationalism, neocolonialism, borders, gender violence, and climate change, as well as the ways these factors intersect to produce volatile dwelling conditions in various scenarios. Through diverse case studies in Argentina and Italy, in contexts such as urban slums and refugee camps, and leveraging insights from phenomenological anthropology, decolonial studies, ecofeminism and multimodal methodologies, DefrostingHOME interrogates volatile dwelling as a condition for reimagining habitation. Ultimately, DefrostingHOME aims to redefine home as a dynamic, relational and adaptive process, offering transformative insights for urban policy, migration studies, and climate adaptation efforts.""