We are pleased to announce that, due to the high number of requests for extensions for late submissions, we have extended our deadline to the 15th of April.
Two more weeks to turn in your abstract!
Month: March 2014
Of Home and Hospitality in Jacques Derrida
We know that there are numerous that we call ‘displaced persons’ who are applying for the right to asylum without being citizens, without being identified as citizens. It is not for speculative or ethical reasons that I am interested in unconditional hospitality, but in order to understand and to transform what is going on in our world.
This passage from Derrida’s ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility’ reaffirms the importance of ‘hosting’ the Other, without necessarily demanding anything in return, and on how absolute, unconditional hospitality (such as an abolition of borders, visas and immigration laws) fails in its intrinsic impossibility.
Questions of where home is, and who is given the chance of obtaining a new home, are raised here.
For the full text, see Derrida, Jacques, ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in R. Kearney and M. Dooley, Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 1998 (65-83).
After the Diaspora: is Return Possible?
Elisabeth De Waal’s posthumously published novel The Exiles Return (Picador, Jan 2014) seeks an answer to this question. The author, an intelligent Viennese lady from one of the prominent banker families at the turn of the century, escaped to England after Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany in 1938. She is also the grandmother of Edmund de Waal, who recently immortalised her family history in the bestseller The Hare With Amber Eyes (2010).
Elisabeth de Waal’s novel explores the possibilities of an exile’s return to one’s origins: Jewish scientist Kuno Adler returns to Vienna from the U.S., where he finds love while fleeing the confines of his marriage. Will he find a new home in his birthplace? Or is the possibility of home precluded to him forever?
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Domestic Imaginaries
The Domestic Imaginaries Network aims to be a central hub for researchers working on representations of domestic spaces and homes in film, literature and popular culture.
We like the Domestic Imaginaries Network and thank them a lot for the post!
Why homeless services are failing women
An interesting article from The Guardian which explains the difficulties that homeless women have to cope with. Some food for thought for everybody…
Poster
Homeless 