Homes in Mardin: Women's Reproduction Of Daily Life In Pandemic Times

Abstract

"The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks." G. K. Chesterton. Pandemic has transformed our daily lives and domestic practices and has redefined the gender roles within those practices drastically. While it remains uncertain how long it will last, how this transformation takes hold in different contexts and how permanent these will be remains as important questions. Taking the historical city of Mardin as the case, this study aims to understand how women experience the home during the pandemic times and discuss the ways in which they reproduce the daily life in different housing typologies. Along with its unique topography, coexistence of different ethnicities and religions in the region for centuries affected Mardin's urban development and social and spatial character. Today, Mardin has an urban landscape consisting of various housing typologies where traditional and modern ways of domesticity coexist: traditional stone house, country house, apartments and gated communities. In- depth interviews will be conducted with women living in these four housing typologies, coming from different marital and employment status to understand new practices and how they transform the home, and how old/routine domestic practices have transformed over time and through the pandemic. Everyday narratives of individuals will be discussed through Lefebvre’s concepts of production, praxis and rhythm. In every city, the daily production of women has a vital place in the context of social production, and this study aims to offer an insight into how the pandemic has affected this, drawing parallels between subjective and local and universal conditions impacting them.