The conference adopts as a starting point the historic and cultural constitution of what has become established as “domestic” in the western historico-cultural narrative, the revision of which is being widely debated today. Do we need to revise our understanding of what “domestic” means, and which politics of household and budget management at different levels – from the private household to the region, the city, the planet – are yielded by such a shift in perspective?
Household and budget management is one thing above all else: a navigation between scarcity and surplus. Food, globalisation and politics are thereby inextricably linked. In the context of the summit, a second panel will therefore address the complex coherencies between bread and politics. If today there is talk of a “global food system”, this refers to the extensive geographies tied in with food, to the conditions of agricultural production and the huge consumption of resources that underpins this production. How to feed the growing global population is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Food politics range from urban agriculture initiatives and organic farming to dealing with the post-colonial geographies of food.
A third panel, “Towards a global domestic revolution”, discusses new models of work beyond the working society, which are already inherent in the complex practice of housekeeping. Flexible models of home-work, precarious and underpaid employment, creative work and work-related migration are already part of everyday working life in the 21st century. Global budgets combine the incomes of transnational work-related migration, home-work and family networks. Transnational households, co-working and sharing suggest other practices of conveying the essence of domestic work and re-evaluating it. They circumvent the social hierarchies inherent to the evaluation of domestic labour and thereby reveal perspectives for an emancipation of domestic work beyond the “working society”.
Closing of the Haushaltsmesse 2015 with the international summit on domestic affairs, “The world. One Household”
7 to 9 August 2015 in the complex of Masters’ Houses;
http://www.bauhaus-dessau.de/haushaltsmesse-2015-internationale-summit.html
