Grants

This project explores, what it terms, "spatial-affective," constructions of family in interwar America through an interdisciplinary approach that combines analyses of architecture and literature. It fills a gap in the "spatial turn" in literary criticism, and the corresponding "social turn" in architectural history and theory, as it explores how the single-family detached house and representations of family life in middlebrow literature together create affective orientations and affective maps that locate family as a happy object. The project employs a method that combines traditional close and contextual readings of literature with explorations of the "multi-sensory" properties of architecture. It analyses two sets of empirical materials, focusing on everyday literature and architecture to provide new knowledge of middle-class norms: 1) Architectural floor and situational plans of and advertisement for single-family mass-produced homes and 2) Middlebrow novels concerned with family.

This project studies literary illness narratives in order to explore the affective dynamics generated by the intersection of health and neoliberal capitalism in today’s Scandinavian societies. The aim is to understand how the current transformations of the Nordic welfare states affect the experiences of bodies unable to meet demands of optimization and competitiveness. To get there, the project brings together literary research on the Nordic welfare states with literary illness and disability studies and adds to this combination an affective methodology. On this basis, the project’s guiding idea is that contemporary Scandinavian literary illness narratives hold rich affective accounts of what it feels like to live as a body unfit for neoliberal capitalism. Following this idea, the project more specifically explores the ways in which 1) competitive atmospheres, 2) accelerating rhythms, and 3) mobile movements in today’s Scandinavian societies affect experiences of “neoliberal misfits”.

Re-thinking the social in architecture is a major concern for architectural communities guided by global agendas e.g. UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Thence, there is a need for deeper analysis of design methodologies that include varied and site-bound practices to enhance citizen engagement. This practice-led research embeds Henri Lefebvre’s (impossible) aspiration that spaces are produced socially, as much through people’s desires to create and use them as within experts’ mainstream design processes. Drawing on emerging architectural-ethnographic ways of knowing, the project examines and demonstrates 1) how use-value has been inscribed into initial and ongoing architectural design processes of a post WWll large-scale housing estate; and how it is then enacted through inhabitants’ own creation of lived space; and from here 2) how use-value can be enhanced in new multi-perspective techniques of architectural instructions that value the relational and open-ended production of space.

This postdoctoral project is an anthropological investigation of the contrasting formulations of landscape among indigenous communities, wildlife conservationists, and natural gas prospectors in the landscapes of the Kalahari Desert, Botswana. Specifically, it examines how prospectors work to turn land into a resource for Coal-Bed-Methane (CBM) extraction and the resulting conflicts with local human communities and ecologies. This project aims to describe and compare the contrasting formulations of landscape of various actors living and working in the region who similarly, but differently, track aspects of Kalahari landscapes. In doing so, this project stands to show how extractive industries situate themselves in relation to post-colonial politics and indigenous livelihood practices, issues that are central to contemporary debates about the Anthropocene.