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    Door locks, wall stickers, fireplaces: Assemblage Theory and home (un)making in Lewisham’s temporary accommodation

    Harris, Ella and Brickell, K. and Nowicki, M. (2020) Door locks, wall stickers, fireplaces: Assemblage Theory and home (un)making in Lewisham’s temporary accommodation. Antipode 52 (5), pp. 1286-1309. ISSN 0066-4812.

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    Abstract

    This paper explores resident experiences of life in PLACE/Ladywell, a “pop‐up” social housing scheme in London providing temporary accommodation for homeless families. Specifically, we consider barriers to, and assertions of, homemaking in this temporary setting through fixtures and fittings—a door lock, wall stickers, and a fireplace. The paper utilises assemblage thinking to understand homemaking within these time‐limited and constrained circumstances. Despite their seeming banality, fixtures and fittings offer a material, politicised, and lively means of studying the attempted and thwarted production of home by residents living in PLACE/Ladywell. The absence of door locks reduces parents’ ability to maintain privacy and intimate relations; restrictions on hanging pictures and other decorative measures are circumvented by the use of wall stickers; and a defiant decorative fireplace establishes a sense of home in a temporary setting. Together, these objects constitute vital elements in negotiations between fixity and impermanence in temporary accommodation.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): precarity, homemaking, homelessness, materiality, assemblage, affect
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
    Depositing User: Ella Harris
    Date Deposited: 08 Jul 2020 09:59
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 18:00
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/32489

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