Home as infrastructure, process and practice

Venue: Department of Sociology and Social Research, via Verdi, 26 - Trento,  Meeting Room - Second Floor
Time: 11a.m.

Speaker:

• Alejandro Miranda-Nieto

Chair:

• Paolo Boccagni

Discussant:

• Peggy Levitt

Unremarkable as they may appear, the technological assemblages that facilitate homemaking and integrate part of its material bases produce no surprises. Running water, electricity, gas, ventilation, heating systems, as well as wider transportation infrastructures, institutions and global commodity chains are some of socio-technical platforms that we take for granted in our ordinary lives. Infrastructures may constitute the ‘invisible background’ (Edwards 2003: 191) of domestic and migrant lives. Yet, they are platforms for mobility and immobility (Larkin 2013) that afford specific ways of dwelling and migrating. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Madrid, Milan and the Netherlands, in this presentation I examine home as an organisational facility that contains, relies on, and is linked to wide socio-technical systems. In looking at examples at micro-level on how these technological assemblages facilitate and deter processes and practices, I advance the notion of ‘home infrastructures’ to investigate the socially productive dimension of home, the unequal access to home and mobility (broadly conceived), and its impact on the affordances of dwelling and being mobile