Dwelling: Cultural Representations of Inhabited Places

Dwelling is both an action and a location; it combines the spatial idea of habitation (dwelling in) with the temporal idea of lingering (dwelling on). We live not only in bricks and mortar, a tent, a hut or a spaceship, but also in that most changeful of forms, our body, or in a remembered or virtual home. Especially since COVID-19 we have seen changes in the topography of everyday life. In this multi-disciplinary collection, a complex of meanings is approached from a variety of specific, often personal angles.

Framed by two longer essays which theorise how the psychology of home may change under sudden pressure and how social relations are embodied in windows, doors, walls and stairs, the book includes 18 further essays. Part I, ‘Informal settlements’, shows how a slum, urban development or nomadic life may create a self-sustaining identity; in Part II, ‘Huts and bridges’, impermanence shapes the state of dwelling, while Part III, ‘Liminal bodies’, presents bodies suspended at thresholds of change. Movement in time and space characterises the last three sections: Part IV, ‘Moving home’, depicts transitions and arrivals, Part V, ‘Dwelling in Memory’, focuses on recollections of past places and Part VI, ‘Are we there yet?’, points the way to a future in which the consulting-room changes to 2D, a family is exiled onto the small screen or we imagine breaking away altogether into outer space.