Workshop - “Domicide”: State violence and the destruction of home in the Middle East and China

The Destruction of the City of Homs, 2016, ink and wash on paper, framed dimensions 1277 x 2520 x 50 mm. Collection: Tate, Photographer: John Bodkin, 2016 © Deanna Petherbridge

 “Domicide”, the deliberate destruction of the built environment and of the material, symbolic, and affective spaces of “home”, has become an increasingly urgent focus for scholars across disciplines. This informal workshop brings together historians, geographers, and political scientists to consider how we can use domicide as an analytical frame to understand “slow violence”, structural violence, and the relationships between society, space, and the smaller scales of individual, family, and community life in the increasingly hostile conditions of contemporary global history.

Participants include: Ammar Azzouz, author of Domicide: Architecture, War, and the Destruction of Home in Syria, and Salwa Ismail, author of The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory, and Government in Syria, on the Syrian regime and civil war; Margaret Hillenbrand, author of On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China and Jennifer Altehenger (Co-Director, Oxford Centre for Global History) on China; with Farida Makar (History Faculty) on struggles over space and heritage in Cairo; Alex Vasudevan (School of Geography and the Environment) on urban precarity in Europe.