Housing our Selves: An Ethnography of Active Inhabitation

• Applicant: Dr. Martin Fuller
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 283678090

The proposed research project is an ethnographic study of the activities that are involved in producing spaces of dwelling and ideas of home. Scholarship from the social sciences, philosophy and literature tells us much about the symbolic meanings attached to spaces of dwelling, but there is a need for research that documents and brings clarity to the ways that a physical building is transformed into a space of dwelling imbued with meaning and symbolism. The proposed research methods consist of ethnographies of two residential buildings that will be newly built and renovated during the initial phases of the research. Ethnographies will be conducted of the apartments and inhabitants of each building including interviews before moving into the new apartments, during the process of moving and one-year after inhabiting the new spaces. In this way, the research will explore and document the transformation of the built environment and raw structure of housing into spaces of affect, symbolism and emotion. One case study is a new apartment building in the Wedding district of Berlin, planned by an architectural firm for privately owned, owner-occupied apartments. The other apartment building is a renovation of a former socialist pre-fabricated housing block, now owned by the second largest housing cooperative (Wohngenossenschaft) in Berlin, located in the outskirts of the city in Marzahn. The primary research objective is to use concrete empirical data to develop our understanding of the processes by which dwelling spaces become meaningful. The central research question is: how does a structure designed for inhabitation become a space imbued with meaning, symbolism and significance for dwellers? In addition to this are two ancillary objectives to contribute to broader theoretical perspectives. The first of these is to develop a contribution towards a social theory of dwelling under the thesis: housing is an activity. Housing is more than a shelter, just as it is also more than a private refuge from the public activities of life outside its walls. The quotidian everyday practices of housing are best described as activity. Finally, this research seeks to integrate key spatial sociological concepts and tools from the spatial turn into the expanding theoretical framework of cultural sociology.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Jeffrey C. Alexander; Professor Dr. David Inglis; Professor Dr. Göran Therborn