Call for Papers: Approaching Home: New Perspectives on the Domestic Interior

External News

20 December 2018

RACAR special issue to be published October 2020. 

The home, while sometimes conceived as stable and secure, has a history of change and evolution as long as humankind itself. As domestic spaces became increasingly distinguished from places of work, a new understanding of the privacy of the home took shape, opposed to the publicness of the city, and linked to assumptions about gender, class, age, race, and sexuality.

As a worldwide and everyday experience, the home and the domestic have been a topic of choice for artists of every era, as well as the object of many designers' and architects' often radical attempts to rethink how we live as individuals and communities. Artists' representations of the domestic have followed changing cultural understandings, but have also sought to challenge these understandings, for example, through feminist practices that underline that the home is also a space of labour and that the domestic is in direct relationship with the political. In recent years, social media and the increasing importance of networked technologies in our lives are increasingly blurring limits between what is thought of as private or public. This call builds on recent works, such as the edited collection Breaking and Entering: The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted (edited by Bridget Elliott, 2015), which have highlighted the potential of gathering designers, artists, and historians to expand the ways we look at and understand the domestic interior.

To this end, the editors of this special issue of RACAR invite artists, designers, art historians, architectural historians and design historians to interrogate and unsettle assumptions about the home across time and around the world. We welcome historical or theoretical pieces, accounts of artistic, design, or curatorial practices, as well as portfolios that cover topics such as: house museums and period rooms; artists' houses; domestic objects and agency; furnishings and social performance; the layering of meaning within and across interior spaces; relationships of the interior to the exterior or between private and public; matter, materials, and materiality in the home; memory/senses/the body/time, and the home; mobile homes; the production of domestic space; queering the interior; art and rituals in the home; the home and the life stages; phenomenology of the interior; specific rooms in the home: the study, bedroom, living room, etc.; and collecting and the home.

We are soliciting three types of proposals, in either French or English: articles (maximum 7,500 words, including notes), accounts of practices (maximum 3,500 words, including notes), and portfolios (maximum 10 images and 1,000 words, including notes). The articles and accounts of practices will be submitted to peer review.

Please submit your proposals of a maximum of 250 words and a short CV by 1 February 2019 to: Olivier Vallerand (olivier.vallerand@asu.edu) and Erin J. Campbell (erinjc@uvic.ca). If proposing an account of practice or portfolio, please include 2-5 images.

Headline image: © Do Ho Suh.