128110 VO Popular and Media Cultures VO / Cultural Studies - MA M01 (2025S)

This interdisciplinary lecture explores the various ways in which ideas and ideals of homes are constructed, contested, and negotiated, i.e., how they are re-assessed, within cultural production. The lectures cover the multiple forms and functions that representations of home can have as well as the multiple forms in which literatures, the arts, media, activism, or concrete home-making practices negotiate and grapple with the diverse manifestations of home and their impact on individuals and communities.

The lecture covers transdisciplinary research on home and its histories, which has outlined that home is a multidimensional term that may refer to physical structures such as a house, social units such as a family, a place of origins, concrete practices, or affective ties. It is assessed as a place, a practice, an imaginary, a feeling, or a sense of self, sometimes all at the same time. Home is also a scalable concept that may start with the mind or body as home, a house as home, and end with a nation or even the planet as home. In effect, a focus on home and home-making makes visible that “[h]ome does not simply exist, but is made” (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 23). A look at concrete imaginaries, practices, and forms of home can make explicit different, concrete uses made of home and outline how artists, activists, and other practitioners across different fields have made visible how ideals and notions of home shape how people, communities, and their environments can or cannot co-exist.

This lecture series includes lectures on:

• narrating and representing politics of home across periods, genres, and media,


• social, literary or media practices as home-making practices,


• the politics of home connected to class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality (incl. discussions of racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc.),


• governmental practices and politics of (public) housing, architectural design and urban planning,


• home as a site of threat and oppression (incl. discussions of domestic violence),


• home as a site of resistance and creativity.

The lectures will include a number of guest lectures with experts from within and beyond the University of Vienna. Students can also provide material that they see as related to the respective session topic and that may be integrated into the discussion then.

In the lecture, students will gain a deeper insight into a range of approaches, theories, concepts and methods related to the different material that the lectures tackle. After the lecture, students will have reflected about the complexity of cultural representations of home and will be able to use their knowledge of the lecture's texts and contexts to approach, analyse and contextualise other cultural and literary discourses and their politics of representation in the course of their studies. Students will have heard about different methodologies of analysing home and its related practices and will know how to integrate the theoretical concepts from the lecture in close readings of relevant material.