128110 VO Cultural Studies - MA M01 (2018S)

This interdisciplinary lecture series addresses the many configurations and struggles of how "home" becomes meaningful, when it is approached in terms of mobilities: Voluntary or forced, physical or imaginative, there are strong relations and tensions between forms of motion, movement, flows, transport, travel, communication and home-making.
Migration, exile, refugees and post-colonial diaspora testify to how historical and geopolitical processes have always enforced mobility on a large scale and have thus troubled understandings of home as enrooted life and located safe space - an idea that the latest rise of nationalistic tendencies, border-walls and homeland-security, ironically, fiercely pursues and protects. A global economic system asks and responds to flexible employees and consumers working away from home, accelerating commuting, travel and circulation of goods, but also promotes home offices with cloud-based desktops and ready available products and information; governments using spyware to monitor citizens as much as "smart homes" make the right to non-interference with one’s home (as laid down in Article 12 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) urgently debated, while the real-estate bubble burst and the housing crisis displaces people, AirBnB and Uber commodify the private spheres of house and car. These are just a few examples that show that home is a symbolically and materially contested, permeable and mobile category of space, identity and belonging. In that sense, home may be best understood in terms of affective space- and placemaking practices, imbued with exclusionary logics and contingent on power relations. The question who is in- or outside home (be it the feeling, the private sphere, a residence, a family, a community or nation) then needs to be expanded with who (and what) can where, why and how move or stay.
With various case studies and points of departures, the guest speakers will discuss manifestations, experiences, imaginations and theories of home on ideological, socio-historical and cultural grounds.
(1) 06.03.2018 Introduction Barbara Maly-Bowie (University of Vienna)

(2) 14.03.2018 Key Note: Home Territories - Virtual and Material Geographies Prof. David Morley (Goldsmiths, London)

(3) 20.03.2018 "Doing Home: The Politics and Practices of Home in Anglophone and British Writing" Prof. Sarah Heinz (University of Vienna)

(4) 10.04.2018 "Kazi na kuwa mfanyakazi - Work as Home in Labour Settlements in Lubumbashi (DR Congo)" Dr. Daniela Waldburger (University of Vienna)

(5) 17.04.2018 Home as a prison? Postcolonial negotiations of the home(land) Syntia Hasenöhrl (University of Vienna)

(6) 24.04.2018 Between the Batcave and the (urban) Battlefield: American Superheroes and the (De)-Stabilization of the Home Ranthild Salzer (University of Vienna)

(7) 08.05.2018 W. H. Auden’s Austrian Home: Object-Things in the Home-Turned-Museum Timo Frühwirth (University of Vienna)

(8) 15.05.2018 Blogging Descent: Genetic Ancestry Testing, Whiteness and the Limits of Anti-racism Dr. Katherine Tyler (University of Exeter)

(09) 29.05.2018 Everyday Bordering and Hierarchies of Belonging in the Context of the Brexit Continuum Dr. Georgie Wemyss (University of East London)

(10) 05.06.2018 Stories Make Place: Indigenous Homescapes in Literary Motion Alexandra Hauke (University of Passau)

(11) 12.06.2018 "A 'civil wildness': Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow? (1839) Prof. Alexandra Ganser-Blumenau (University of Vienna)

(12) 19.06.2018 Sharing is Caring: Forms of Quartering from Billy Wilder’s The Apartment to Airbnb & recap Roman Kabelik (University of Vienna)

(13) 26.06.2018 EXAM