Time: 6:30pmVenue: Skeel Lecture Theatre, Peoples’ Palace, Mile End Campus
This lecture will examine current research within anthropology regarding the unstable nature of the home, its materiality and its regulation of flows, attachments and temporal frames. The home as a regulator of various flows was a preeminent concern of early Modernists especially the Russian Constructivists. These early social reformers sought to redirect those flows towards the creation of novel forms of social life using new materials and technologies and thereby sought to dissolve the notion of a stable material domestic space. These issues are especially relevant now under the conditions of late modernity when considering the domestic realm and its unstable status and the rise of new technologies and the flows of people and things, particularly in relation to the question of sustainability.
Victor Buchli is Reader in Material Culture at the Department of Anthropology University College London. He is co-founder and managing editor of Home Cultures and the author of numerous works concerning the intersection of architecture, material culture and anthropology. His forthcoming book ‘An Anthropology of Architecture’ will be published by Bloomsbury. Some of his previous publications are ‘An Archaeology of Socialism (Berg 1999), ‘Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past’ (Routledge 2001) with Gavin Lucas, ‘The Material Culture Reader’ (Berg 2002), and with C. Alexander and C. Humphrey, ‘Urban Life in Post Soviet Asia (Routledge 2007).
A reception will follow the lecture