'At Home In the Future' by Dr Helen Hester скачать в хорошем качестве

'At Home In the Future' by Dr Helen Hester

The home represents a crucial (and often overlooked) example of material hegemony. It can be understood as contributing to the solidification of governance through the subtle closing off of options and by the production of generalised consent to an existing order. But there are many possible forms of domestic arrangement – both spatial and relational – aside from the atomized and too often depoliticized single family dwelling. Indeed, it is important that we understand the built environment and its infrastructures not only as a means for registering and consolidating dominant political positions, but also as a potential site for intervention and transformation. In this lecture, I will draw upon post-work politics and social reproduction theory to argue for a wide-ranging re-conception of what “the home” might mean. Looking at previous feminist experiments with living arrangements, as well as ongoing attempts to dis-embed domestic imaginaries, I suggest that the collectivization of both labour and facilities – via spatial interventions at the level of infrastructure, architecture, and urban design – could enable the reduction of reproductive drudgery. Opening up the geographies and infrastructures of reproductive labour, I argue, may be one way of contributing to the construction of a new kind of (explicitly feminist) post-work common sense.