Beyond Habitability: Homes as Built and Imagined Spaces

Submission Date: Monday, January 1st, 2024

Opening Remarks: Cole J. Graham, PhD Student, The Ohio State University 

Closing Remarks: Ujaan Ghosh, Assistant Professor, History of Art, The Ohio State University 

Home—It’s a capacious word that opens onto explorations of urban and rural architecture, the division between the public and the private, questions of craft and production, and everything in between. The rapidly multiplying questions that the concept of “home” raises are thorny (and more urgent than ever, as we face the large-scale movement of people across the globe, migrations made either willingly or unwillingly): How does the concept of "home" come to bear on our situatedness within the cosmos and our dispersal throughout and over our “Spaceship Earth”? What does it mean to be at or in a home? To feel at home? (And how is this feeling tied to embodied experiences of difference such as race, gender, ability, and sexuality?) In what ways does one miss or long for home? What is it to come home? What kind of projects are necessary to make a home? In other words: what makes a place (in)habitable? 

We invite proposals from current graduate students at all levels for 20-minute, virtual presentations that explore questions of architecture, displacement, queer phenomenology, landscapes, domesticity, craft, enclosure, techno-utopias, and all other themes related to habitability.  

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words, accompanied by a CV, to the History of Art Graduate Student Association (hagssymposium2024@gmail.com) by Monday, January 1^st, 2024. 

See the Call for Papers Flyer.