Best Graduate Paper 2016

The winner of the EISA´s Best Graduate Paper 2018 award is Sebastian Larsson for his paper “The Last Resort – Sheltering Practices and the Dispositif of Disastrous Futures”.

The abstract of the paper:

Where do we go when we have nowhere else to go? This paper investigates current practices of constructing and seeking shelter by exploring how sites of  protection are configured as an element within dispositifs against human-induced disasters. The notion of a physical ‘last resort’ is approached via a genealogy-styled analysis, tracing out the historically peculiar characteristics of protective shelters. Subsequently, sheltering practices appear to be have been fundamentally adjusted and dispersed in their current configuration. The last resort is now considered in terms of architectural elements implemented in building and site designs that, in turn, merge with a wider urban environment of human circulation. With reference to a ‘layers of defence’-model, sheltering practices focus on keeping out, slowing down and hindering the mobility of threats through a complex set of commodified (in)security devices. This contests the assumption that sheltering is a defensive and conscious move, suggesting instead that a ‘last resort’ is injected with private security and draws on aggressive yet concealed everyday security practices, pertaining to the protection of certain valued ‘assets’, rather than the survival of human beings.