‘Somewhere, Someone is to Blame’: Domicide, Riskscapes and the Anthropocene

Keywords: domicide, riskscape, climate change, home, anthropocene, memory, affect, cultural geography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 15

Abstract

Porteous and Smith (2001) define ‘domicide’ as: “the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in pursuit of specified goals, which causes suffering to the victims.” Human agency is centred; “somewhere, someone is to blame” (Porteous and Smith 2001). This leaves so-called ‘natural disasters’ outside its scope. But can domicide, powerfully anchored in personally felt dimensions of home loss, exclude natural disasters when clear affective dimensions of blame are displayed?

Australia’s 2019-20 ‘Black Summer’ provides illustration. This catastrophic bushfire season resulted in 3,500 homes lost across multiple states (ABC 2020). Indeed, rhetoric across those who lost their homes and others certainly fixated on someone, somewhere, to blame. Through blame discourse analysis, I argue domicide’s emphasis on everyday contexts should extend to normalised practices that have long underpinned our changing climate. This includes interrogating dominant cultural narratives that frame the human home as 'risk insulation' (against nature, human threats, financial insecurity). These animate demand for real-estate property markets and climate adaptive housing while driving the human home’s ongoing ecological and climate consequences. This research belongs to a broader project investigating lived experiences of risk transfer. Müller-Mahn and Everts (2012) argue that spatialised risk perceptions (‘riskscapes’) are often interwoven and contradictory. We consider how interwoven forces of suburbanisation, insurance and climate policy retreat produce ‘climate risk’ perceptions that invoke domicide. Ethnographic fieldwork will use memory mapping to draw on home as a “memory machine” (Douglas 1991) to explore affective dimensions of home loss that potentially enrich understandings of domicide and riskscape dwelling.