2025/07/31 by Gregorio Astengo, Rebecca Carrai, Joana Albernaz Delgado +9 · 1 voice
Computer Science · #Library Science and Information Systems
paper · doi:10.16995/ah.18874
openalex publication_date 2025/07/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Histories of the modern home can be written through the transformations of its material components: architectural elements, such as doors and windows, as well as furniture and movable items, like desks, sofas, electronics and even clothing items, which are designed, appropriated, or reinvented for domestic use. The rise of mass production and consumption has increased the availability of these domestic objects, hand in hand with the establishment of mass media, from commercial catalogues to home magazines, from advertisements to cookbooks. The global circulation of objects and media has historically suggested and imposed on readers lifestyles, gender roles, spatial layouts, and economic and cultural paradigms, many of which remain influential today. Following our first meeting in Madrid in June 2022 and our second in Athens in June 2024, the EAHN Interest Group ‘Building Word Image’ welcomes international contributors to reflect on original material histories through modern and contemporary media. We were especially interested in overlooked, non-Western case studies that adopt plural methodologies, from archival research to oral histories and new readings of material artefacts. By collecting contributions that engage with these questions through specific case studies, we gathered a diverse global panorama on domesticity, where seemingly meaningless objects, like dantels and doorbells, and their mediatisation become the primary lens through which to problematize and re-categorize our domestic modernities. The term domesticity was thus viewed as encompassing both spatial features—including those shaped by specific objects—and social actions aimed at nurturing the interior. This Fieldnote is made of ten short contributions of 600 words each, with a wide geography and a focus on the 20th century. All ten articles attempt to read forms of mediatisation of domestic objects as active components of broader processes of cultural, social and political transformation, considering how the home may be the territory where such processes become visible.