HISTORIES OF HOME SUBJECT SPECIALIST NETWORK

SECOND ANNUAL CONFERENCE

MULTIPLE BELONGINGS: DIASPORA AND TRANSNATIONAL HOMES

Date Friday 21 May 2010, 10.00 – 17.30

Venue British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB

The Histories of Home Subject Specialist Network’s Second Annual Conference is an

exciting opportunity to explore the meanings associated with the material culture of
transnational homes from the late eighteenth-century to the present, with a particular
emphasis on contemporary homes. Papers will focus on material aspects of setting up home
in another country, such as room layouts, furnishings and other possessions and how these
are adapted, integrated or negotiated between host nation and place of origin. Wider
meanings of home will be explored through concepts of belonging and questions around
what and where home is, where and when people “feel at home”.
The conference programme reflects both the interdisciplinary nature of the SSN and the
international scope of the theme with a wide range of backgrounds and methodologies
represented including religious studies, geography, cultural and architectural history,
material culture, ethnology and museology.

The Conference is aimed at: Getting there

▪ SSN members
▪ museum and heritage professionals working
with home-related collections in interpretation,
exhibitions, contemporary collecting and
documentation, community work and audience
development
▪ academics and postgraduate students with a
research interest in domestic cultures
▪ housing and immigration policy-makers
By train
5 minutes’ walk from King’s Cross, St
Pancras and Euston stations.
Underground
Piccadilly, Metropolitan, Victoria, Northern
and Circle Underground Lines.
Buses
Bus routes 10, 30, 73, 91, SL1, SL2

Book now Delegate fees*

Book early to secure your place! £70
£45 (full-time students)
To book return completed booking form with includes light lunch and refreshments
payment by Friday 14 May 2009 to:
*international delegates please contact
Krisztina Lackoi, SSN Co-ordinator SSN Co-ordinator Krisztina Lackoi
Geffrye Museum, Kingsland Road, to arrange payment
London, E2 8EA
klackoi@geffrye-museum.org.uk
Tel.: 00 44 (0)207 749 6009 Supported by:
Fax.: 00 44 (0)207 729 5647
Speakers
Hester Dibbits Researcher, Meertens Institute, Amsterdam
Fostering nature - patterns in decorative practices among migrant families
Examines the persistence of the stereotypical image of migrants in the Netherlands through collective
repertoires in decorative preferences and practices.
Victoria Gardner Lecturer, Regent’s College, London
Home, advertisements and identities in the early nineteenth-century British world
Discusses newspapers from three colonial sites at the beginning of the nineteenth century - New South
Wales, the Cape Colony, and Barbados - focusing on the high volume of advertisements relating to the sale
of newly imported and second-hand furniture, utensils, and other goods for the home.
Madeleine Hatfield (née Dobson) PhD Cadidate, Royal Holloway, University of London
Moving ‘home’?: Home and homemaking amongst transnational return migrant households
Examines the complex roles played by domestic homes in return migration through the example of
highly-skilled British return migrant households returning contemporarily to the UK from Singapore.

Candace Hoffman-Hussain PhD Candidate, Lancaster University

Object-based narratives of ‘homeland’ for British Muslim men in interfaith marriages
Focuses on the way objects within the home represent the fluidity of ‘belonging’ by drawing from examples
contained in narratives between interfaith Muslim-Christian couples living in Britain.

Joanna Long PhD Cadidate, Queen Mary, University of London

Fifty plants, one rug and no walls: Palestinians making a home in England
Challenges dominant discourses that place ‘Palestine’ or ‘homeland’ at the centre of what it means to be
Palestinian by critically examining one couple’s living room and their domestic social life, focusing on the
material objects, architectural spaces and practices of hospitality that provide personal, political and cultural
‘coordinates of home’.
Simon MacDonald PhD Cadidate, University of Cambridge
British and Irish expatriate households in late eighteenth-century Paris
Examines a cross-section of British sites in Paris - including ambassadorial, religious,
and private houses - by drawing on seized personal papers and confiscation inventories dating from around
the time of the French Revolution.

Özlem Savas Lecturer, Bilkent University, Ankara

Displaced furniture and shifting belongings: reconstitution of Turkish home in Vienna
Challenges the common view on homes in diasporic or migratory resettlements as spaces arranged in a way
to achieve keeping ties with the past and attempts to reveal the local particularity and uniqueness of Turkish
homing in contemporary Vienna.

Nina Vollenbröker Lecturer, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

Rootedness in mobility - identity, space and spatial relationships in the nineteenth-century American West
Questions accepted definitions which tie rootedness to long-term stasis and familiar places, drawing on the
nineteenth-century American West and its transitory inhabitants as a case study.

Thomas Michael Walle Curator, Norsk Folkemuseum, Oslo

Living, documenting, and exhibiting: Transnational homes in Norway and Pakistan
Outlines three different projects at Norsk Folkemuseum that address the issues of transnational Pakistani
homes and discusses the challenges the museum is faced with when collecting objects related to the
migration process and the transnational experience, as well as when constructing a fully furnished apartment
to reflect the new cultural diversity of Norwegian society.
Tessa Wild Curator, Thames & Solent Region, National Trust
'A fresh breeze from a distant land blew through his pen': Khadambi Asalache's creation of a home of his own
Explores the influences Kenyan-born poet, mathematician and artist Khadambi Asalache drew upon in the
creation of his house in south London from the mid-1980s to his death in 2006, particularly traditional
African coral houses, the Moorish architecture of Andalusia and Ottoman architecture.
Linda Young Senior Lecturer, Deakin University, Melbourne
The cultural baggage of home
Explores the power of cultural baggage - the ideological and the material - in translating English genteel
standards of living to New South Wales into the homes of settlers, both coerced and free, in the early
decades of the nineteenth-century.