Inga B. Kuźma, The sense and the practices of living in a homeless shelter
Abstract: The author describes a fragment of her research, conducted in a shelter for homeless women in Łódź. She is interested in how the structure of the shelter, which is a disciplinary body as well as an instituton inducing homeless women to repair their lives, affects the recovery of women’s sense of domestication in the social world. The sense of domestication is closely associated with a house. The author describes cultural practices undertaken by the shelter’s residents, who recreate a house and the ways of living and existing in the facility. The rules of the shelter refer, in a specific way, to the sense of living and the meaning of a house. These various modes of living (bottom-up, reproduced by women and top-down – induced by the shelter’s rules) reveal known as well as the additional senses of “home/hause” and “woman”.
