How has COVID-19 influenced domestic life?

The Disobedient Buildings team reflect on both the positive and negative implications of spending more time in the home and within the community during Covid-19 lockdowns across their field sites. In the final episode of the series, Inge Daniels talks with Gabriela Nicolescu and Anna Ulrikke Andersen about how COVID-19 has influenced domestic life in London, Bucharest and Oslo. During the pandemic’s lockdowns residents valued the sense of security that was established in their community but also experienced frictions with neighbours both within and beyond block boundaries. Key to these experiences was sound, which brought both positive and negative implications. How did noise directly affect the health and wellbeing of participants?

Om Podcasten

Disobedient Buildings (disobedientbuildings.com) is a multi-sited research project about housing, welfare and wellbeing based at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, part of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (anthro.ox.ac.uk), at the University of Oxford. It is funded for four years by the Art and Humanities Research Council. Launched in January 2020, the project employs a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and visual practitioners to study the impact of neoliberal reforms over the past three decades on the everyday lived experiences of inhabitants of ageing tower blocks in different European welfare states: the UK, Romania and Norway. The Disobedient Buildings podcast is conceived and presented by Inge Daniels, the project's principal investigator, and the project’s two postdoctoral researchers: Gabriela Nicolescu and Anna Ulrikke Andersen. In Season One, the team scrutinises key themes guiding their research such as disobedience, inequality, urban development, welfare and health. The 10 episodes feature interviews with local experts and highlight commonalities and differences experienced by residents in the three field sites of London, Bucharest and Oslo. The podcast asks, what is a disobedient building, why is home ownership promoted, and will the State look after you?