Domestic Authorities/ Authority over the domestic in the Atlantic World
(Organizers: Nina Clara Tiesler, Brigitte Reinwald, Jana Gohrisch)

The current migration movements demonstrate that people are forced to leave their homes, to look for new homes abroad and to engage with unfamiliar domestic orders in their host countries. The massive influx of visibly different migrants prompts the western world to debate intensely the criteria of membership and belonging with conflicting agendas. On the one hand, there are the members of civil society who commit themselves to welcome migrant and especially refugees. On the other hand, there are those who demand an exclusive right to property and estate, who contest established domestic authorities and membership configurations. These debates about ‘domestic authorities/ the authority over the domestic’ reflect political power relations and social processes of inclusion and exclusion. In addition, they point to dimensions beyond the social and political orders of the domestic which can more easily be negotiated and transformed in everyday life. Thus, they testify to socio-cultural practices of appropriation, revision and inversion.
The colloquium invites presentations that look at domestic authorities/ authority over the domestic in the Atlantic realm from the 16th century to the globalized present from a variety of inter/disciplinary perspectives: history, sociology and cultural anthropology as well as literary and cultural studies. Investigations of seemingly minor and concrete subject matters such as securitization and surveillance, anti-terror rhetoric and prevention, houses in their materiality and hospitality, households as social, ethnic and gendered units of cohabitation as well as imaginations of domesticity and belonging should be addressed as pointing to major and abstract processes of negotiation, continuities and changes in the Atlantic space.
The following questions are particularly interesting to us: How are forms of membership negotiated at different levels? How can one conceptualize the intersection of gender, race and nation in the realm of domestic authority? To what extend do hegemonic discourses of the domestic employ family structures to present the figure of the nation? How does hospitality come into play when we discuss domestic authorities?