Where is our Home?
The Kent postgraduate community organised an interdisciplinary conference reflecting on the meaning of the word ‘home’.
Co-organised by English PhD students Barbara Franchi and Christopher Chang, Home|less, a Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Conference was a lively and successful event funded by the Graduate School as one of the winning projects of the Postgraduate Experience Award 2013-14. It brought together researchers and professionals from different backgrounds, ranging from the humanities to the social sciences and healthcare, committed to wonder about the meanings and implications of the concept of home. Taking place in Keynes College on the 20th and 21st of June, the two days of the event saw a number of fascinating and interesting papers as well as lively discussions encompassing different disciplines and approaches. In a truly international spirit, guests and speakers came from many parts of Europe, such as France, Ireland and Malta, as well as from several UK institutions. There were also a large number of female delegates in attendance.
The idea of the conference originated from a workshop about urban environment and homeless people attended in Budapest by Christina Chatzipoulka, the architect in the organising committee. The other members were Christopher and Barbara, from English, and Luca Di Gregorio from Italian studies. Together, the team pushed the project beyond the limits of a specific discipline, to question notions related to the simple though universal concept of home: homeland, identity, homelessness, and so forth. As international students, the topic had special relevance to the organizers’ own experience: living ‘across boundaries’ between two countries, two cultures and, at least, two languages could ultimately be considered a metaphor of everybody’s experience of displacement and search, sometimes fortunate, sometimes dramatically tragic, of one’s place in the world.
Professor Gordana Fontana Giusti, from Kent School of Architecture and Dr Marianne Amar, director of research at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris delivered two fascinating keynote lectures on homelessness and displacement in urban contexts, as well as stories of exile and migration across time and space. Finally, to breach the gap between the academia and our local context, we also chose to invite representatives from local charities: St Mungo’s Broadway in London and Porchlight in Canterbury. The presentations they delivered about their activities and the people that they help everyday were so touching that they left an indelible impact on us all: their presence was definitely the icing on the cake of these two intense and amazing days.
Christopher Chang (Ph.D. Candidate – School of English)
Christina Chatzipoulka (Ph.D. Candidate – Kent School of Architecture)
Luca Di Gregorio (Ph.D. Candidate – SECL)
Barbara Franchi (Ph.D. Candidate – School of English)
Please click here for the conference website.