Open Call: Dwelling

The editors of Konesh Journal and Think Pieces invite submissions that explore the concept of dwelling - broadly understood as the ways we inhabit, imagine, and move through space and time. Inspired by recent workshops in Bloomsbury’s Gordon Square, we are interested in works that consider dwelling as practice, memory, projection, imagination, or presence, across geographies, scales, and experiences.

Dwelling may be interpreted both as the act of remaining, inhabiting or belonging to a space, and as the act of contemplation, remembering, or imagining. By allowing for this dual interpretation of dwelling, we hope to encourage contributors to consider dwelling as a capacious and, even, radical term. Inspired by Lutz Koepnick’s (2014) concept of ‘radical slowness’, we aim to consider the ways in which dwelling may be considered as both a temporal and political concept. As Koepnick remarks, slowness has the capacity to ‘enabl[e] us to engage with today’s culture of speed and radical simultaneity without submitting to or being washed over the present’s accelerated dynamics’. Dwelling, or spending extended time in an environment or in contemplation, stands in direct contrast to the rapidity of technology, information, and interaction in the digital age. How might dwelling be seen as a radical or political act? What occurs if we remain in a particular place or thought ‘too’ long? What are the lines between dwelling and being stuck? Can dwelling, in contrast to movement or consumption,be anticapitalist? Can dwelling act as a spatial practice that opens space to alternative meanings, disrupting power structures that regulate bodies, presence, and performance?

In considering the political nature of dwelling we are struck, too, by the constraints and permissions which surround the concept of dwelling in either public or private spaces. What - or whom - is permitted to dwell and under what conditions? From public park closing times to the criminalisation of ‘loitering’ and ‘trespassing’, dwelling is a well-legislated term but much of what governs or restricts dwelling is unspoken or unfairly enforced upon minorised groups. Migration, displacement, exile, and environmental destruction are unevenly distributed, too and in considering the ways in which race, class, gender, ability, or citizenship affect the right to dwell we consider how practices of dwelling come into tension with one another across shared or contested spaces, and what it might mean to dwell alongside, against, or within hostile socio-political structures. We also invite reflections on dwelling and the relationship between human and more-than-human worlds. As scholarly (Haraway, 2016), artistic (Macfarlane, 2025), and legal (Ecuador Constitution, 2008) interest in considering the rights of nature in the face of human habituation increases, we look to consider dwelling as both an ecological and ethical practice. 

Finally, we invite contributions that approach dwelling as a lived and embodied experience that unfolds across time. From a phenomenological perspective, memory, imagination, and bodily perception are not separate domains but intertwined ways of inhabiting space: the past persists in habits, gestures, language, and sensory orientations, while imagined or remembered spaces are encountered through the body as vividly as physical ones (Casey, 1984; Fuchs, 2012). Dwelling, in this sense, is not limited to material occupation but emerges through the ongoing interplay between body, memory, and environment. How do we dwell in spaces that are carried within us - through recollection, anticipation, or affective attachment? How is dwelling registered through the senses, movement, and the positional attunements by which bodies come to feel settled, comfortable, uncomfortable, or disoriented within a space? How do we capture and communicate these experiences of dwelling?

In sum, our provocations are:

• When does dwelling become a political act?

• Who is permitted to dwell and who is not?

• What forms of dwelling exceed the physical?

• How do bodies dwell?

• What does it mean to dwell with and not just in the world?

• Can dwelling disrupt dominant spatial logics or structures of permission?

Abstracts (of no more than 250 words) which relate to these ideas and provocations are invited by 20 April 2026. Submissions may include essays, conversations, experimental writing, audio and visual contributions, performance pieces, or other creative works.

Please submit your full name, abstract, medium type, and any institutional affiliation (if relevant) to info@konsesh.space

Editors
Think Pieces: Marthe Lisson
Konesh: Saba Zavarei, Flora Sagers, Peter Browning