Workshop: methods for the more-than-human home

Living, Lively, Livable: Exploring the more-than-human home

Most people on earth have access to some kind of home, and we tend to spend a large and significant portion of our lives in homes. Yet, what goes on in the home is often taken for granted, dismissed or made invisible, contrasted with the “real” business going on outside them. Paying attention to more-than-human dimensions of homes, however, opens new perspectives on the entanglement between humans and the broader world. As previous human-centred understandings of homes increasingly give way to acknowledgment of homes as consisting of a host of more-than-human beings, entities and materials, we get new insights into how our daily lives depend on non-human others. They help us to maintain livability and comfort, but also challenge us, acting in unexpected or unwanted ways, even making us ill, each with their own capacities for shaping and affecting outcomes.

 This workshop explores methods and tools for capturing and acknowledging the complex ways that organisms and lively things and materials intersect with human lives inside the home. While homes offer rich possibilities for investigating practices of everyday life, they also present methodological challenges. Homes tend to be associated with privacy, intimacy and even secrecy, and may be awkward to access. Furthermore, what goes on inside them is often disregarded as trivial, mundane and ordinary, not always easy to verbalise or evenperceive. This, it may be argued, is particularly true when it comes to our entanglement with the more-than-human. What tools and methods, then, are useful for grasping, accessing and conveying our co-existence with non-human others in the home? 

Welcome!

/ The Global Heritage Futures Research 

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