News

This talk explores how American media cultures imagine home in the moment it becomes insecure. In light of the housing crisis in 2007-08, which turned assets into liabilities, Professor Faisst asks: How is the idea of home unmade in an age of ever-increasing spatial inequality and housing disparity? Her talk focuses on the most extreme case of precarious belonging: homelessness. She discusses how selected photographs, videos, and films negotiate the lack of a permanent abode as a form of economic dislocation and the fear of becoming unhoused. In these examples, home and homelessness are tied up with a language of rights and possession, and find their aesthetic expressions in material conditions, the language of affect, and the imaginary. Taken together, they constitute the meaning of what it feels like to (not) be at home. Home and homelessness, she argues, should not be considered as opposites, but as mutually interdependent, leading us to re-think questions of visibility and agency.

Join us for a lunch discussion in Bonn with two Former Members of the U.S. Congress (Congressmen Mike Capuano and Fred Upton).

Paisley Rekdal’s "West: A Translation" (2023) and Cecily Nicholson’s "From the Poplars" (2014) offer exciting ways to re-think the poetic elegy and documentary poem. Both writers explore how violence results from struggles over the ownership of land. Rekdal reflects on the building of the transcontinental railroad across the United States during the nineteenth century, seeking to memorialize those who were exploited as part of its construction, particularly Chinese laborers. Nicholson focusses on the local, charting the history of Poplar Island, Qayqayt land in the Fraser River by the Canadian city of New Westminster. In this talk, Dr. Munro considers how Rekdal and Nicholson use elegy to rematerialize the dead. Both poets draw attention to collective memories that are more inclusive and resist dominant narratives, including those which prioritize human over non-human experiences.