HOMInG interview with Stijn Oosterlynck (University of Antwerp)

Conducted by Milena Belloni, October 2019

“I don’t think that homing should be equated to the fact that people like the place where they stay. We often see that people live in substandard places, but are still expressing attachment to it. It is cognitive dissonance. If you live in a place with a leaking roof of course you don’t like it but you can still feel at home there. Because it is hard to live in a place which you deeply hate. If you know that a place has to be your home for the future, as there is no way to find something else, you will start to accommodate yourself in some way. You could not explain otherwise how all these people live in substandard conditions but do homing in one way or another. My idea is that familiarity creates security because it becomes predictable. And I think you can get attached to things you do not like out of necessity, or because that is the way things have always been. It is like solidarity. People do not have to like each other personally for them to be in solidarity with each other”.

READ THE INTERVIEW!