MEDIAHOMES
This project explores European film and media representations of the home and their networks of production and circulation from the 2008 economic crisis to the COVID-19 emergency. It takes as case studies Ireland, Portugal and the UK to investigate representations of the home, housing precarity and homelessness, focusing on the aspect of socioeconomic inequality across gender, race and class.

Its overall objective is to devise, through a strongly interdisciplinary methodology combining methods in the humanities with studies in the social sciences, a new, transnational model to analyse screen narratives of housing precarity, their production and circulation. Across a range of documentaries, essay films, realist features and short non-fiction films the project will investigate the representation of an ongoing housing crisis and trace their intersections with the developing corpus of housing precarity in the lockdown and the pandemic. The project is mentored by Prof Laura Rascaroli at UCC and Dr Mariana Liz at ICS-Lisboa
What is Home? Mural by @artofabsestos @ardustreetart, 2021. South Main Street, Cork. Photo credits: Anna Viola Sborgi
Within this corpus, the project considers three modes of media activity:

Representation

Production

Circulation
(distribution and screening)
The main research objectives of the action are:
1) to build a transnational corpus of media representations of the urgent challenge of housing precarity and inequality within European cinema and to provide an innovative model for its analysis across media genres,

2) to understand who the subjects producing this corpus are and whether filmmakers from a variety of gender, race and class backgrounds have equal access to representation or not

3) to understand how films about housing circulate across different platforms online and offline and in society at large

4) to investigate how these productions have been affected by the transformation of the home into a site of creative labour during the pandemic and how this intersects with socioeconomic inequality.

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About MEDIAHOMES
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101033615