Space and Culture current issue

Care and the Art of Dwelling: Bodies, Technologies, and Home

Schillmeier, M., Domenech, M. — 2009-08-06

Dwelling With the Fourfold

Harman, G. — 2009-08-06

This article explains Martin Heidegger's notorious fourfold (Geviert) as the intersection of two distinct dualisms in Heidegger's philosophy. The role of the fourfold in Heidegger's concept of "the thing" is discussed in especial detail.

When a "Home" Becomes a "House": Care and Caring in the Flood Recovery Process

Sims, R., Medd, W., Mort, M., Twigger-Ross, C. — 2009-08-06

This article focuses on the spatialities of care that are revealed, disrupted, and produced by the dependencies and vulnerabilities associated with flood recovery. It is based on a case study of the summer floods of June 2007 in Hull, Northeast England. The authors use a real-time, diary-based methodology to document and understand the everyday experiences of individuals following the floods. In contrast to the literature, which looks at the impact of care and caring on the home, they ask what we can learn about caring when the home is disrupted. Focusing on the diaries, the authors explore what flood reveals about the emotional and physical landscapes of caring in the context of recovery and illustrate the intimate connections that exist between ideas of dwelling and caring. In drawing on the accounts of carers (who are often also those displaced by flood), they explore the tensions and intersections between the spatialities of caring work as these are enacted between the routines of everyday "normal" life and the specific disruptions generated by flood.

Keeping & Dwelling: Relational Extension, the Idea of Home, and Otherness

Latimer, J., Munro, R. — 2009-08-06

This article explores the topic of home in terms of the art of dwelling. We set out to show that what people "keep" affects their experience of dwelling. Keeping, in this analysis, grants relational extension (Latimer 2009a, 2009b; Munro, 1996; Strathern, 1991; Latimer and Munro 2006), creating and reproducing worlds that bind. As we illustrate, the meaning of home for Euro-Americans can be understood as gravitating from feelings of belonging being anchored within specific locales to matters of identity being entangled in locutions that address the figure of self. In taking up Heidegger's (1978) argument that dwelling is thinking as much as it is "building," we go on to trouble how reflection, when conducted in the mode of comparison rather than contemplation, conflates keeping with issues of choice.

The Role of Domestic Architecture in the Structuring of Memory

Davidson, T. — 2009-08-06

In this article, through personal narratives of three houses she knows, the authors asks, Can houses remember? She suggests that through processes of inhabitation, houses become "second bodies" that remember in two ways. Houses remember and haunt as they animate the memories of previous inhabitants, memories that become embodied by the houses and the current dwellers. Houses also embody histories of design, reflective of broader social attitudes toward intimate places. Second, houses remember as they are imbued with the responsibilities of representing in material form the virtualities of childhood, acting as Bachelard's "land of Motionless Childhood." More broadly, houses become dwelling places through processes of inhabitation and appropriation. These processes involve the synthesis of memories of others animated by a house and one's own experiences of inhabitation.

Dwelling the Telecare Home: Place, Location and Habitability

Lopez, D., Sanchez-Criado, T. — 2009-08-06

Home has become a newly fostered place for care giving in what might be called an aging in place paradigm. As a result, thinking about how the home's spatialities are configured and how they might transform caring has become an important issue for the social sciences. This article is a contribution to this line of thought and looks at being-at-home from a non-anthropocentric point of view. By focusing on the telecare cases of an ongoing ethnographic project and drawing on Heideggerian insights on dwelling and place, we coin the term habitality. We think this term is useful for two purposes: (1) to think about the home as a materially heterogeneous set of spatialities and subjectivities and (2) to understand being-at-home not as a way of living in an enclosed and protected shelter of routine activities, but as a way of combining those spatialities and subjectivities and the differences (and oddities) they might bring.

Home Beyond Home: Dwelling With Threshold Devices

Michael, M., Gaver, W. — 2009-08-06

This article attempts to explore "dwelling" in the contemporary technonatural world through a series of novel interventions in the home. In particular, users' reactions to one of three "threshold devices"—the video window, the local barometer, and the plane tracker—are studied ethnographically. Drawing on Heidegger, the authors interpret the opaque functionality of these technologies as "poetical" insofar as they facilitate users' access to the heterogeneity, ambiguity, and complexity of the technonatural world within which the home is situated. Such access, the authors suggest, can resource a dwelling through which "care" can be enacted. Some of the methodological and political implications of such devices are discussed.

The Question of Movement in Dwelling: Three Displacements in the Care of Dementia

Tirado, F., Callen, B., Cassian, N. — 2009-08-06

The authors explore transformations in the surveillance and discipline framework proposed by Foucault (technologies that "allow to see," the panoptic as a completely closed space) by analyzing new Global Positioning System (GPS) care technologies. The authors contrast the antinomadic characteristics of traditional care practices for people with dementia with the new "in-movement" GPS care devices. They outline three main displacements: the definition of a new space that erases the distance between separated social and sanitary spaces; the lifting of the boundary between the home and the neighborhood; and finally, we point out the importance of movement in this process. These devices show the emergency of new micropractices of power and control: a new anatomy of surveillance. Grounded on movement, they transform physical barriers into risk alarms that do not block users' way; instead, they generate information that mobilizes others. The authors refer to the notion of kinevalue to explain how these devices turn living organisms' motility properties into a value that can be managed, as well as the central feature around which new exercises of patients' security and caregiving may be deployed. Through the analysis of a pilot project on GPS telecare devices carried out by the Spanish Red Cross, the authors suggest a new diagram of the control and management of subjects based on their movement, called "kinepolitics."

BooK Review: Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory, John Roberts (2006). London: Pluto. ISBN 0-745324-11-8. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices From Surrealism to the Present, Michael Sheringham (2006). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-199273-95-2

Gardiner, M. E. — 2009-08-06

Erratum

2009-08-06

Erratum

2009-08-06