The study of domestic interiors has been treated separately from the study of public or common exteriors. This separation re-enforces the idea that interiors are and can be sealed and separate from exteriors. Indeed, the separation of domestic spaces from surrounding environment was a myth of the modern age that guided practices and technologies of sealing, separating, and creating barriers between “inside” and “outside.”
What would it look like to go beyond this binary of interior versus exterior? This workshop aims to unseal the study of domestic interiors across geographies, periods, and academic disciplines, so as to draw focus to and detail processes of sealing and unsealing domestic spaces from surrounding environments, variously conceptualized. It seeks to examine questions of domestic interiors and economies in relation to common spaces and communal economies, and in relation to questions of inhabitability, at various scales (from the microbe, to human and more-than-human bodies and beings, such as insects, pets, ghosts, and kitchen gods, to assemblages and planetary scales) and approached through various epistemologies and ontologies (including traditional ecological knowledge, scientific and medical knowledge, vernacular and cultural knowledge, and decolonizing perspectives, among others).
The workshop is convened by Johanna Conterio, associate professor at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History (IAKH) and head of the OCEH Multispecies Landscapes Lab.