Home in Crisis: Deconstructing ‘home’ in crisis – understanding intersecting crises through the lens of ‘home’

image used with the permission of the artist Jonah Sack

We all live our day-to-day lives in a state of climate crisis. We board planes and plough fields, we commute, we work, we collect water and build houses, we care for our children, we fall asleep, we wake up in a climate crisis.

This project uses a humanities-approach-to-law to locate the idea of ‘home’ at the centre of an intimate and experiential understanding of crisis. This allows for a radical shift in legal and policy contexts, where the intimate dimensions of the climate crisis are often overlooked. This project engages with the idea of climate crisis as one that is unfolding inside our homes. In centring the idea of ‘home’, we examine the ways in which the climate crisis is lived and felt at home and we examine what home means in a state of climate crisis, in which one can be unhomed and rehomed, rendered homeless in one’s home, and homesick in one’s homeland.

Legal understandings of crisis tend to overlook the interconnected and overlapping nature of crises, their complex temporalities, their histories, and the fact that crises are personal and manifest in intimate spaces. By engaging in humanities-based approaches to law, we develop a novel and perspective-shifting understanding of the climate crisis in law. Using home as a lens through which to understand the climate crisis allows us to better understand the ways in which the crisis is intimate, shaped by gender, location, community, age, disability, sexuality, and how we know and live in our homes. This perspective allows us to better see how limited legal understandings of home can create and exacerbate damaging experiences of crisis.

The project is a collaboration between researchers based in Norway, Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom, working with partners in South Africa, Canada and a global environmental law charity. Through this collaboration, we are developing novel arts and humanities based approaches to address law’s otherwise conceptually limited resources, and to enable legal systems to recognize the meanings of home that accommodate the breadth what is being changed, lost and damaged in climate crisis. The researchers adopt an arts and humanities approach, rooted in theatre, literature, and Indigenous practice to enable the creative aspect of law, that might otherwise remain outside the normal jurisdiction of legal thought.

The project objectives are to reveal diverse understandings of home and the ways it is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed in the context of the climate crisis. Home in Crisis will develop new understandings of the climate crisis, its impacts, and how those ought to be addressed within and beyond law and its systems.

Keywords:

home, crises, climate crisis, indigenous peoples, migration, law.

Consortium:

Project Leader: Miriam Cullen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Dina Lupin, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Marie Aronsson-Storrier, University College Cork, Ireland
Hugo Reinert, University of Oslo, Norway

Associate partners:

Empatheatre / Rhodes University, Environment Learning Research Centre, South Africa
Lea Main-Klingst, Client Earth, United Kingdom
Lily Yamugulova PhD, Project Director, Preparing Our Home, Canada