Homescapes make the world we live in

Cities in the global South are home to most of the world’s population and 70% of the population in these cities lives in low-income neighbourhoods. However, we know little about the social AND ecological life within low-income homes in the urban South. And If we do not understand how the majority of humanity lives, in their ordinary routines, we cannot aspire to build inclusive and sustainable futures. What we do know is that globally, the home is a place of gendered care work. BUT, we lack an understanding about how power relations, including gender ones, intertwine with the ecological realities of low-income homes in the urban South. HOMECAPES takes water as an entry point of an investigation into these homes. 

Participants: Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero, Jeimy Arias-Castano, Atina Rosydiana, and many others

The Invisible Stories of Italian Migrant Women in Utrecht (City and Region): The Co-creation of Transgenerational Cultural Heritage

This project explores what home means across three generations of women linked to the migration of Italian guest workers in Utrecht (City and Region). Through oral history interviews and digital storytelling, it documents how the cultural heritage of migration and family shapes memories, identities, habits, and senses of belonging between two home countries. Together with the women involved, the project will contribute stories to “De emigratie generatie”, co-create a public exhibition in Bibliotheek Neude, organize a workshop on curating migration between the Netherlands and Italy, making these often-overlooked stories visible while fostering dialogue on migration, home, and shared cultural heritage.

Participants: Monica Jansen and Manuela Pinto

Modernist Architectural Dialogues between Italy and the Netherlands: the Cultural Transfer of Home and Housing in the Spheres of the Private, Public, and the Sacred

This project in progress starts from a collaboration for the 2026 ESPRIT conference with a joined paper on “The Modern in Avant-garde and Sacred Architecture: A Dialogue between Architectural Traditions in Dutch and Italian Periodicals”. Using reception studies as a method, this project will investigate how the concepts of home and housing travel between the spheres of the private, public and the sacred. It studies how the exchange of ideas, styles and collaborations is documented in periodicals, exhibition catalogues, and archives. The cultural transfer between Italy and the Netherlands is conceived in the material and ideological spaces of Modernist Europe, including colonial, fascist and missionary practices.

Participants: Francesca Billiani (The University of Manchester) and Monica Jansen

Stemmen van Nieuwkomers

This project explores how parents with a forced migration background experience home, belonging, and identity while raising children in Dutch asylum reception centers. Through qualitative interviews, it examines how displacement, uncertainty, and language shape everyday family life and the sense of being at home. By bringing parents’ voices to the forefront, the project contributes to broader conversations on migration, belonging, and inclusion.

Participants: Manuela Pinto (principle investigator), Darin Nshiwi (UU), Birgen Işik (IMC- It’s My Child), Ali Işik (UU)

Threads in Common: the Omega workshop, wellbeing and refugees in the First World War

Together with Dr Rebecca Gill (University of Huddersfield), Dr Claire Barber (University of Huddersfield) and Dr Stéphanie Prévost (Université Paris Cité/ IUF), Wendy investigates the history of the Coloured Embroidery Scheme established in 1916 in war-torn France. The project members test the boundaries between art, therapeutic solace and refugee enterprise via archival, collection and practice-based and collaborative methods of inquiry, while connecting organisations and community groups linked through a history of textile art but not so far in dialogue.

Participants: Dr Wendy Wiertz (Utrecht University), Dr Rebecca Gill (University of Huddersfield), Dr Claire Barber (University of Huddersfield) and Dr Stéphanie Prévost (Université Paris Cité/ IUF)