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Central to human life and experience, habitation forms a context for enquiry within many disciplines. This collection brings together perspectives on human habitation in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, social history, material culture, literature, art and design, and architecture. Significant shared themes are the physical and social structuring of space, practice and agency, consumption and gender, and permanence and impermanence. Topics range from archaeological artefacts to architectural concepts, from Romano-British consumption to the 1950s Playboy apartment, from historical elite habitation to present-day homelessness, from dwelling «on the move» to the crisis of household dissolution, and from interior design to installation art. Not only is this volume a rich resource of varied aspects and contexts of habitation, it also provides compelling examples of the potential for interdisciplinary conversations around significant shared themes.
List of contents
Contents: Antony Buxton/Linda Hulin/Jane Anderson: Introduction - Linda Hulin: InHabiting Space: Archaeologists, Objects and Architecture - Jane Anderson: Uncertain Futures, Obscure Pasts: The Relationship between the Subject and the Object in the Praxis of Archaeology and Architectural Design - Andrea Placidi: Furnitecture - Wendy Morrison: You Are Where You Eat: Worldview and the Public/Private Preparation and Consumption of Food - Matthew Jenkins/Charlotte Newman: London in Pieces: A Biography of a Lost Urban Streetscape - Antony Buxton: Feasts and Triumphs: The Structural Dynamic of Elite Social Status in the English Country House - Rebecca Devers: Miracle Kitchens and Bachelor Pads: The Competing Narratives of Modern Spaces - Damian Robinson: A Home on the Waves: The Archaeology of Seafaring and Domestic Space - Rachael Kiddey: Homeless Habitus: An Archaeology of Homeless Places - Catherine Richardson: Continuity and Memory: Domestic Space, Gesture and Affection at the Sixteenth-Century Deathbed - Stephen Walker: Don't Try This at Home: Artists' Viewing Inhabitation - Frances F. Berdan: Afterword.
About the author
Antony Buxton is an ethno-historian who lectures on design history, material and domestic culture in the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. His foremost research interest is the way in which spatial context and objects articulate values and social relationships, as explored in Domestic Culture in Early Modern England (2015).
Linda Hulin is an archaeologist and research officer at the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology in the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. Her principal ongoing research interest is the intersection of mariner networks and the creation of value.
Jane Anderson is an architect and Principal Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. The author of Architectural Design (2011), her research interests include the relationship between reality and imagination in architecture, and interdisciplinary connections and collaborations between art, literature, music and architecture.
