Just Home: Place, Belonging, and Justice

What helps to establish beneficial (just and nurturing) homes, communities, and connections to place? What works against these? This seminar explores the relation between people, place, identity, and belonging, with a strong emphasis on racial, Indigenous, feminist, queer, and environmental justice. The seminar begins by interrogating the concept of home broadly. What constitutes notions of home and belonging? We then move to different frameworks through which we explore the concept of home: for example, nationhood, colonialism, and globalization; Earth as home and more-than-human dwelling; Indigenous dispossession and homemaking; feminist and queer ways of belonging; Black homes as sites of resistance, tenderness, and beauty; belonging and precarity among the unhoused and the incarcerated. The readings addressing these topics are diverse in disciplinarity and genre.