Deconstructing “home” in crisis: Understanding intersecting crises through the lens of home

The project is a collaboration between researchers based in Norway, Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom, working with partners in South Africa, Canada and a global environmental law charity. Through this collaboration, we are developing novel arts and humanities based approaches to address law’s otherwise conceptually limited resources, and to enable legal systems to recognize the meanings of home that accommodate the breadth what is being changed, lost and damaged in climate crisis.

Legal understandings of the climate crisis tend to overlook the interconnected and overlapping nature of crises, their complex temporalities, their histories, and the fact that crises are personal and manifest in intimate spaces. In centring the idea of ‘home’, we examine the ways in which the climate crisis is lived and felt at home, and what home means in a state of climate crisis, in which one can be unhomed and rehomed, rendered homeless in one’s home, and homesick in one’s homeland.

By engaging in humanities-based approaches to law, we develop a novel and perspective-shifting understanding of the climate crisis in law that allows us to better see how legal understandings of home can create and exacerbate damaging experiences of crisis.

The project is a collaboration between researchers based in Norway, Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom, working with partners in South Africa, Canada, Greenland and a global environmental law charity.

Please see “The Team” above to see all team members.