ICAS 26 'Home: Belonging, Identity and Displacement'

Keynote speakers: Megan Hunter The End We Start From (2017) and Eileen Murphy CEO of Women's Aid Armagh Down

The concept of home – at once intimate and expansive, personal and political –continues to captivate scholarly inquiry across disciplines. In an era marked by unprecedented mobility, environmental precarity, and socio-political flux, home emerges as a critical locus for interrogating the conditions of belonging, identity, and place.

ICAS 26 seeks to engage with the multifarious meanings and materialities of home. Drawing inspiration from Gaston Bachelard’s seminal meditation in The Poetics of Space (1964), wherein he posits that ‘the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer,’ alongside bell hooks’ compelling assertion that ‘home is a place of resistance’ (1990), we seek to probe the complex dialectics of home as refuge, site of contestation, and matrix of affect.