Anna Bohlin, universitetslektor Götebrogs universitet
Anna Bohlin has previously researched issues of memory and temporality in relation to place, in particular in connection with various state projects such as democratization (South Africa) or river restoration (Sweden). Current research interests include people’s relations to everyday domestic items; waste; and second-hand and reuse as embodied and alternative forms of heritage. She is part of the leadership group of the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies and the Research Cluster Making Global Heritage Futures.
While repair and maintenance recently have been acknowledged for their role in keeping large-scale technical infrastructures working, less attention has been directed to similar, but often even more invisible, marginalised and mundane work of maintaining livability and comfort in domestic spaces. This presentation focuses on the way that everyday housework involves sensing and responding to the rhythms, patterns and tempos of more-than-human coordinations (Gan and Tsing 2018). It suggests the term house-holding to refer to the ongoing process of perceiving, anticipating and negotiating not just the way single objects or organisms unfold and physically transform over time, but also the way such trajectories will cross paths and interact, thereby effecting new outcomes. The presentation will discuss the relevance of such house-holding for understanding dynamics of both consumption and wasting practices, topics of central concern in the transition to more environmentally responsible ways of living.
The presentation is based on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken within the project Staying (with) Things: Alternatives to Circular Living and Consuming, Swedish Research Council 2019-2015, and draw on a manuscript co-authored with Veera Kinnunen, University of Oulu, to be submitted to Time & Society.