We provide dessert for the break after the seminar. Please register if you want to join and/or enjoy the dessert! Online participation will be arranged upon request, you can indicate this in the registration form as well.
Where is home? Relational homemaking and the embodied relationality with death for people ageing with HIV | Cesare Di Feliciantonio (Manchester Metropolitan University)
“Ageing in place”, i.e. ageing in the same house/community with some form of autonomy rather than residential care, represents a popular concept among scholars, policy makers and service providers who emphasize the importance of maintaining a sense of home. However, for some people, especially those who moved several times across their lives, establishing profound emotional ties in multiple places, home is not attached to just one location. The paper builds on critical feminist and queer housing scholarship to question limited and simplistic understandings of ageing in place, examining the relational character of homemaking for people ageing with HIV (PLHIV50+). Focused on the life narratives of Tamara, a cisgender woman from Latin America in her 50s who lives with HIV in Madrid, and Sonia, a transgender woman from Latin America in her 60s who lives with HIV in Rome, the paper is organised around three points. First, homemaking represents a relational construction that includes multiple homelike places across cities and countries. Second, homemaking plays a central role in navigating the uncertainty of daily life provoked by the lack of adequate knowledge by medical and service providers and an increasing sense of precarity due to the lack of adequate support from the welfare state. Third, homemaking, as both embodied and symbolic, material and felt, includes the “embodied relationality” (Evans, 2021) with death, i.e., the everyday connections established with the dead through multiple objects, memories and practices, transcending spatial and temporal boundaries.
Cesare Di Feliciantonio is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University, specializing in geographies of sexualities, housing and HIV, mostly through the use of biographic methods. He is one of the editors of Social & Cultural Geography. His work has been published in, among others, Antipode; Dialogues in Human Geography; Geoforum; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers; Urban Geography.