In many parts of the world, crisis is not a temporary rupture but a chronic condition—an enduring backdrop to everyday life. This project investigates what it means to dwell and make home in such contexts, where infrastructural collapse, military, state and vigilante violence, economic breakdowns, environmental degradation, and political incapacitations are not exceptions but persistent realities. Focusing on three regions deeply affected by such conditions—Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon— the project explores how people continue to build, inhabit, and make home amid material deprivation, affective disruptions, and political violence/incapacitation.
Rather than treating home as a stable or secure foundation, the project approaches dwelling through exposure to spaces that disrupt, repel, and incapacitate. It asks how people live with, and through, the material and affective dislocations that environments of prolonged violence impose—how they navigate spaces where the familiar is rendered fragile, and thus remain exposed to what continuously negates, repels, and incapacitates the everyday. In doing so, the project shifts attention from affirmative narratives of resilience or recovery to the more ambivalent ways in which home is made in the shadow of chronic disruption, loss and destruction.
Conceptually, the project engages critically with dominant strands of posthuman, materialist and affect theory-orientated thought. It asks what becomes of these frameworks and their ontological alignments when applied to lives lived in conditions of structural negation, colonial violence and constant disruption—where the capacity to act, connect, or flourish is persistently curtailed. Rather than beginning with what connects humans to the world, the project hence turns to environments, conditions, atmospheres, non-human agencies and forces that sever, distance, or render such connections fragile or impossible. In doing so, it opens space for more grounded and politically attuned understanding of how dwelling is constituted by forces and conditions that unmake as much as enable it.
Empirically, the project is anchored in multi-sited research across the three regions. It examines:
• Material spaces where infrastructure is destroyed or denied, and where the environmental conditions of dwelling are under constant threat;
• Affective spaces where uncertainty, disorientation, and exhaustion shape the emotional and attached texture of everyday life;
• Political spaces where violence is not only enacted through spectacular military force, bombardment, and erasure, but also embedded in long-term strategies of domination—such as settler colonial expansion, infrastructural incapacitation, and the systematic production of less or uninhabitable environments.
These dimensions are treated as interwoven aspects of how home and dwelling are constituted and contested in spaces of prolonged, chronic violence. Through interviews, participatory workshops, oral histories, and collaborative fieldwork with local organizations, the project generates rich, comparative insights into the spatial, material and embodied dynamics of dwelling under duress.
The expected impact of the project is threefold. First, it offers a significant conceptual intervention by rethinking the relationship between politics, ontology, and space in contexts where negation is placed at the centre of world-making. This enables a rethinking of dwelling through its exposures and interruptions—foregrounding how home is made in relation to forces that negate it. By doing so, the project, secondly, advances a methodological approach in which the conceptual work is seen as central for how we study dwelling, violence, and exposure. The methodological novelty of the project thus lies in the operationalisation of negativity, not simply as a conceptual lens, but as a methodological process—as a way of directing attention to the ruptures, incapacitations, and affective disorientations that shape dwelling, and our understanding of it, in spaces of chronic crisis. Third, the project provides empirically grounded knowledge that speaks to broader debates in human geography, postcolonial theory, anthropology, political science, and peace/conflict studies. It offers findings that further resonate among affected and engaged local communities, civil society actors, and institutional stakeholders.
Altogether, the project foregrounds the complexities of home in crisis as a material and political condition. It contributes to a deeper understanding of how people dwell with crises, and how such dwelling reveals the limits and possibilities of life in spaces that continually threaten to undo conditions supporting it.
