Together with principal investigator Pau Obrador Pons (Northumbria University, UK) and Dave Loder (University of Edinburgh, UK), I will start working on a project that examines the digital mediations of home through short-term rental platforms. The project will be funded through the British Academy Leverhulme Small Research Grant.
Short-term rental platforms have taken on an essential role in mediating practices and imaginaries of home. The homely atmospheres that users advertise through digital images on these platforms have been critical to the success of a rapidly evolving global temporary housing market. The project is concerned with the digital mediation of home spaces and imaginaries on various short-term rental platforms. It seeks to understand how the platform´s domestic aesthetic regimes shape understandings of home and feelings of homeliness and how these affect the organisation and inhabitation of interior spaces. Using a combination of visual methodologies and semi-structured interviews, it questions how home interiors are imagined and experienced through digital images and what social differences and power relations are consequently made visible and invisible on platforms. By focussing on the impacts of platform economies inside the home, this project will help better understand the digital reordering of the private sphere.
The project will start in September 2024 and end in September 2026. A list of all awardees of the BA Leverhulme Small Research grants can be found here: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/the-british-academy-and-the-leverhulme-trust-award-over-27-million-in-small-research-grants-to-support-shape-researchers/