Call for Papers /// "Domestic" – Special Issue of Interiors
- s-architecture
- Nov 6
- 5 min read
Call for Papers /// "Domestic" – Special Issue of Interiors
Special Issue Editor(s)
Igor Siddiqui, School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin igor.siddiqui@utexas.edu
Domestic
Home — material and metaphoric — is a slippery concept. Ensnared in the diffuse and oscillating boundaries of the domestic sphere, it denotes both the physical enclosure that provides the fundamental requirement of shelter and the symbolic scaffolding for the complex processes, rituals, occupations, and forms of life contained within. The special theme for this volume of Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture is an invitation to revisit home — perhaps the most familiar, and also the strangest, of all interiors — to interrogate its evolving meaning, materiality, and methods through which the interdisciplinary field of interiors continues to engage it.
Domicile
To “house” means to contain, to make use of boundaries, rooms, and relations of material structure in order to solidify a range of visible and invisible social, cultural, economic and political forces. For instance, historian Mark Wigley aptly asserted that marriage precedes the house made for it; the institution expects an architectural vessel to give it form.[1] Thus, the very idea of home is laden with influences both beyond and between its architectural boundaries. From Neoliberal policy to changing demographics to income inequality, the domestic interior is a coalescing of vast, often imperceivable structures. To unpack these hidden influences, feminist historians such as Alice T. Friedman, Despina Stratigakos, and many others have offered alternative histories that contest and complicate as well as recenter and recast normative understanding of agents and actors in the production of real houses, while recent scholarship and speculative histories have further enriched the many stories of housing through the unseen contributions of collectives, cooperatives, and everyday individuals. How then can a renewed examination of the “home” further grapple with the material realities and power structures embedded in our domiciles? How can revisiting lost practices, unearthed stories, and forgotten strategies for a host of domestic arrangements assist in shaping modes of dwelling today? Which histories of the house and housing have yet to be told? In other words, what does the home still house?
Domesticity
As much as the first decades of the twenty-first century have ushered in emergencies both local and global, there has long been a crisis of dwelling. Philosopher Martin Heidegger knew as much when he reflected on the manifold issues of living in the world following the Second World War. “The real dwelling plight,” he famously quipped, “lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.”[2] Almost a century later and in the wake of such political, social, economic and spatial challenges, what might this call to “think for the sake of dwelling” mean in such a precarious moment?[3] At a time when global conflict, violence, and migration continue to destabilize conceptions of place, ownership and belonging, what role does the built environment play in the many formulations of domesticity? Beyond the romantic lens of nostalgia, what defines contemporary domesticity, and, moreover, how can we anticipate or imagine new, urgently needed domestic forms for the future? In the midst of traumatic displacements across the globe, what harm might existing constructs, myths, and genealogies of domesticity pose, and how can the design of the built environment provide remedy?
Domestication
Aside from its physicality and the forms of life it engenders, the home is also a site for domestication: one that orders relationships between matter and transforms agents into subjects and objects. Within, a range of entities are disciplined, managed, tamed and socialized to ascribe new behaviours and norms to various “things” once deemed wild or unruly. From vibrant matter to contact zones, what might the ecological turn in the arts and humanities offer in collapsing binary notions of physical and virtual, natural and post-natural, and analogue and digital inside and outside “home”?[4] How might this help illuminate the unseen networks that enmesh with our domiciles and distinguish the human and nonhuman aspects of domestic environments? If the “home” is an increasingly unstable entity entangled with greater urban and global systems, what does that mean for the interior? How can notions of domestication provide more useful frameworks for interrogating issues of habit, habitation, and life amongst diverse beings? With a renewed awareness of matter and the inevitable togetherness between human and non-human, what might come after home?
For this issue, we seek cutting-edge scholarship that interrogates theses various Domestic states — Domicile, Domesticity, and Domestication — and the corresponding lines of inquiry each elicits. This tripartite division of the issue further reflects the subheading of the journal Design/Architecture/Culture: encompassing the systems of production that bring spaces and places into being, their position as material artifacts and their subsequent roles as armatures to greater social and cultural conditions.
This call for submissions is aimed at theorists, historians, researchers, creative scholars, and practitioners in architecture, design, and other related fields interested in engaging the home as a critical interior condition. may be based on project-based work or developed as thematically related articles grounded in theoretical or historical research. As such, a submission may take one of the following formats:
A traditional scholarly research essay between 5000 and 7000 words.
A reflection on creative or professional practice between 3000 and 5000 words with supporting images.
A submission that takes creative practice further with a greater conceptual or exploratory analysis. This submission type places emphasis on images with supporting text between 1000 and 3000 words.
[1] See Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in Beatriz Colomina, Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 327-389.
[2] Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 159
[3] Ibid., 159.
[4] See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Submission Instructions
Contributors are encouraged to submit an optional note of interest with a maximum 300-word abstract, a short biography, and one to two key images that illustrate the content of the proposed article to idacjournal@gmail.com by December 1, 2025.
Editors will aim to respond with feedback by mid-December, with full manuscripts due by March 15, 2026.
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