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Format: audio
Producer: Rowland Atkinson
Series: McCaughey Centre Seminar Series
Synopsis:
In our homes we find a place of comfort and protection, yet the home itself is also nested within defensive arrangements that abut and surround it: gated communities and defended neighbourhoods, cities locked down by militarised policing and social programs that contain and deny access while reinforcing patterns of segregation. At the widest scales national identities and processes of boundary-making and sealing are articulated in defence against otherness and terror. In this presentation these arrangements are considered before discussing the social processes that flow across public and private space, paying particular attention to the home. This is detailed in terms of two key ‘scripts’, or rules for management and social encounter. The first of these relates to the script of enclosure and domestication; of public spaces and social encounters within it. The second describes the script of autotomy, in which spaces are ejected from public responsibility and access, as a means of coping with their perceived risks and disorder. These modes of management are explained via the desire to recede into the innermost space of the home, which is evermore desired as a place of maximum predictability and defence. These characteristics form the underlying rules by which bodies, as states, collectivities and individuals, control feelings of pervasive fear and anxiety. The domestic, as a value system and social ‘shell’, has been neglected in commentaries on the partitioning and management of cities and should become more central to theorisations of civic space, fear and the nature of contemporary urban experience.
Dr Rowland Atkinson is Associate Professor and Director of the Housing and Community Research Unit in the School of Sociology at the University of Tasmania. His research interests are focused on social diversity, segregation, affluence, homeownership and social exclusion as well as issues relating to sound and noise in cities.
Domesticity and the two scripts of public space: the role of autotomy and enclosure by Rowland Atkinson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at the Knowledge Transfer Group.
Context: Mental Health and Community Wellbeing, McCaughey Centre for, Public health epidemiology and health services,