Abstract
This paper examines how domestic interiors as built environments mediate the experience of belonging within contexts of displacement in South Asia. It explores how the idea of home, often perceived as a stable center of attachment, becomes unsettled through displacement, prompting new ways of negotiating belonging. In such conditions, domestic interiors emerge not as fixed sites of residence but as provisional spaces where identity and memory are redefined through spatial, material ,and social practices. The need for this reinterpretation arises from the tendency to treat belonging as a naturalized and affective state rather than a constructed and negotiated condition shaped by social and cultural processes. This framing overlooks the contingent and dynamic ways in which belonging is reconstituted through movement, loss, and resettlement. Situated within the disciplinary frameworks of architecture and interior design, this study draws on phenomenology to examine how material and spatial conditions of interiors construct or contest belonging. Methods include comparative textual analysis, literature review, and material culture studies. Through close reading and theoretical reconceptualization, the study investigates how belonging emerges as a process of situating oneself within shifting social and spatial conditions, a concept referred to as emplacement. Results suggest that belonging is co-produced through design decisions, social practices, and material affordances that embody a sense of being “at home.” Reframing belonging through the lens of emplacement expands the ethical and imaginative scope of design practice, positioning lived experience as a generative site for rethinking the social life of constructed environments.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
BELONGING, IDENTITY, EMPLACEMENT, SOCIAL PRACTICES, DOMESTIC INTERIORS
