BA (Hons) Architecture Stage 3 Coordinator, Dr Ambrose Gillick, is Principal Investigator for a successful British Academy funded research project titled, ‘British Academy Special Research Grants: Covid-19 – ‘Making-Unmaking-Remaking Home in Lockdown Margate‘. Co-investigators of the project are Professor Helen Carr (Kent Law School) and Professor Karen Jones (School of History). The research project will run from July 2020 until October 2021.
Dr Gillick writes, “Set in Dalby Square and Gardens, Margate, a vulnerable community disproportionately impacted by Covid-19, this project explores and maps home as process and network in a COVID 19 context using a transdisciplinary methodology drawing on law, history, architecture, health and housing studies. In this project home is understood as simultaneously bounded and networked, a space and a set of processes and relationships. We utilise the focus on home networking and home making-unmaking-remaking that has been the inevitable consequence of ‘lockdown’ to unpack the taken-for-granted understanding of home as a safe haven and explore issues around social and environmental regulation, inequalities, marginalization, vulnerability and dislocation as they have been intensified by COVID-19. We situate these in, somewhat paradoxical, historical understandings of Margate as a ‘haven of health’, and develop a toolkit for a rich and productive understanding of contemporary home making, unmaking and remaking during a global pandemic.”