Displacement describes the condition of lacking a home in a world in which a home is required to gain access to the privileges of citizenship. The condition of transitory figures inhabiting precarious states of “home” tests the capabilities of our theoretical infrastructures for formulating dwelling, bringing the political questions and demands of communal space and life to the fore. Where theorists like Henri Lefebvre and Gaston Bachelard offer foundational critical frameworks for considering the relationship between space, politics, and laboring life, new practices of communal spatial life necessitated by contemporary conditions of permanent war, confinement, developing communications and logistic technologies, and increasingly precarious labor (e.g., gig work, union repression) demand capacious critical vocabularies that respond to capital’s “restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes” (David Harvey 2001).

To meet these ever-evolving moments of capitalism’s crises, military and carceral restructurings of geography continuously redefine conceptions of race, ethnicity, and citizenship and render the status and language of dwelling deeply unstable. In turn, across habitable and uninhabitable zones, borders, and circuits, displaced figures often associated with a lack of place and forced liminality—the immigrant, the exile, and the prisoner—produce communal modes of living through political and aesthetic practices of social reproduction and reimagination.

We are interested in collectively produced sites—hotels, prisons, parks, sidewalks, corners, etc.—as transient spaces where alternative modes of citizenship and participation are articulated within and against authoritarian and carceral spaces. In a moment where space is governed by regimes of power that work to obfuscate their machinations, place-making emerges as a legible cultural lexicon, producer, and product itself—never neutral, but an uneven, dialectical form through which subjectivity and the sociopolitical relations of confinement, capitalism, migrancy, and radical organizing are constituted, reproduced, and governed.

This panel seeks to critically investigate how radical communal living practices create agential sites in which alternative forms of space-making are dialectically produced and practiced. How do displaced figures collectively make their homes in a world unwilling to acknowledge them as a part of its citizenry? How do literature, art, and visual culture function as mediums that articulate a global practice of communal life? How do these mediums offer radical strategies for reading and imagining the relationship between space, capital, and (anti-)juridical regimes?