About and Through Homes

The workshop, "About and Through Homes," aims to collectively explore the diverse meanings of the concept of home in a world where homes have become both commodities and military targets. The workshop includes a conceptual component as well as introductory training in the fundamentals of oral history as a research tool for understanding history from homes. We will explore several questions: How has the concept of home been written about? How do we talk about it in our daily lives? How do those who have lived through wars and displacement in the Arab region define it? How can we approach our research and history through the lens of the home and the meanings it conveys?

Instructor

Nayera Abdel Rahman Soliman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universitat Berlin, as part of the research project funded by the Einstein Foundation on the socio-cultural life of social concepts in the Arab-speaking region. She received her PhD in political science from the Freie Universitat Berlin in 2024. Her dissertation addresses the ghosts of the forced displacement in the aftermath of the 1967 war from the city of Suez, employing feminist oral history methodology and history from home.