Project

Inhabiting Uncertainty (IU) analyses the transformations in the way of inhabiting public and private spaces in the light of health emergencies caused by epidemics and pandemics and investigates their effects in terms of lifestyles, inter-subjective relations, communication, urban structures and bodies. It is a multidisciplinary project involving  different research methodologies (qualitative, quantitative, visual) and scientific perspectives (Sociology, Sociology of Law, Communication Studies, Economic and Social History, Architecture, Medicine).

There are four main objectives:

1. Re-formulating the concept of space as a category capable of capturing the complexity of the phenomena related to exceptional states of crisis, and to situations of risk caused by the pandemic. Space is not natural but historical; it is mutable in the ambivalent sense of frontier-opening or boundary-ghetto. After the pandemic, the experience of space can no longer be thought of merely by referring to an abstract naturalism or to legal configurations established on the regulatory framework, but will need to be articulated as a space of life, of flows, of relationships.

2. To critically reconsider what inhabiting a space means in all its articulations, analysing it on the empirical level, probing the evolution that such an "emotional" disposition has undergone in the course of the pandemic. The COVID-19 has disrupted the conceptual dichotomies through which we have always thought and studied this topic: inside/outside, open/closed, public/private, concrete/abstract, virtual/real, referring to a dialectic that has now lost its real referent.

3. To investigate the real ability of digital devices to compensate satisfactorily for the temporary lack of physical interpersonal and environmental contacts.

4. To formulate new strategies and practices for a culture of inhabiting places, aware of the vulnerability and fragility that have always constituted us as human beings: incomplete, flawed and exposed to the events of others. To address these issues it has been necessary to integrate different skills and fields of knowledge capable of reading the phenomena under question organically.