&Now 2019 Conference

There’s no place like home. Home is a point of convergence. Home is a point of contention. Home is appointed, perhaps more often than it is chosen. Who gets to choose? Who gets to come home, and who is sent home? “Go home.” Go home how, and to/with what? For some, home was not left behind but/and cannot be returned to. Home may not be a place to like. Home may not be a place at all. Or, like, there’s no home? There’s no home-like place. No likeness to home in.

In Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes, Mimi Sheller writes, “Freedom of mobility may be considered a universal human right, yet in practice it exists in relation to class, race, sexuality, gender, and ability exclusions from public space, from national citizenship, from access to resources, and from the means of mobility at all scales. In many ways mobility justice is itself a mobile concept, insofar as it treats justice as an unstable configuration that moves across scales and realms.”

When home becomes a public space—and a public debate—what rights do we have to move to, within and away from it? This panel adopts experimental and performative approaches to consider the (im)mobilities and (in)stabilities of home. The three writers—Indian, Ugandan, and Iranian by origin, and currently based in the US—examine both the public and the private relations and rituals through which home is (un)made. They compare, map, inventory, and (re)call. They do it all over again. Home is redefined. Home changes scale. Home is always and never (un)settled.