Most Americans take for granted much of what is materially involved in the daily rituals of dwelling. In Dwelling in Resistance, Chelsea Schelly examines four alternative U.S. communities—“The Farm,” “Twin Oaks,” “Dancing Rabbit,” and “Earthships”—where electricity, water, heat, waste, food, and transportation practices differ markedly from those of the vast majority of Americans. Schelly portrays a wide range of residential living alternatives utilizing renewable, small-scale, de-centralized technologies. These technologies considerably change how individuals and communities interact with the material world, their natural environment, and one another. Using in depth interviews and compelling ethnographic observations, the book offers an insightful look at different communities’ practices and principles and their successful endeavors in sustainability and self-sufficiency.

How do some Americans come to adopt alternative technologies in residential dwelling? In order to consider this question, this dissertation explores six diverse cases of alternative technology adoption at the residential scale through a theoretical lens that focuses on the cultural embeddedness of choice, the ways that material systems operate as strategies of power (shaping social life, mental conceptions, and personal action), and how alternative material systems involve alternative forms of social organization and personal practice. Homeowners who have adopted solar electric technology in Colorado (n=48) and Wisconsin (n=48) were interviewed about their choice to adopt and their experience living with solar technology. In addition, through ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation examines radically sustainable off-grid homes (called Earthships) and the alternative organization that builds them, two intentional communities (The Farm and Twin Oaks), and temporary alternative dwelling at Rainbow Gatherings. In this order, these cases represent increasing levels of disengagement from "the grid" - the material systems of electricity, water, waste, food, and transportation (as well as reproduction, education, work and social organization) - upon which normal residential dwelling depends. This research suggests that the choices and practices of these Americans, which involve living with alternative technology, are organized around a particular set of ethics, a unique ethic operating in each case. These orienting ethics shape how individuals organize their life preferences and actions, although they are not necessarily conscious positions. Thus, people dwell in resistance, although they are not consciously resisting, because their physical practices and bodily actions are organized around abstract ethical principles that contradict the ideals embedded within and perpetuated by mainstream dwelling technologies.

A collection of thought-provoking essays on the changing face of domestic architecture over two centuries, highlighting the wide range of source materials and theoretical perspectives available to scholars of architectural history.

This book contains the proceeding of the conferences on Disasters and the Small Dwelling, held at Oxford in September 1990. The 26 papers cover recent experiences of post-disaster shelter and housing provision, review what has been achieved, what needs disseminating and implementing, and assesses what needs further development. The volume thus defines an international agenda to achieve safer low-income dwellings in the course of the 1990s, designated International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction by the UN. It will be essential reading for anyone - whether governmental or non-governmental agency officials, academic researchers, representatives of private industry or consultants - whose work involves analysis, shelter, mitigation and reconstruction programmes for low-income dwellings in disaster-prone areas.

Activism at Home offers a unique study of architects' own dwellings; homes purposely designed to express social, political, economic, and cultural critiques. Through thirty case studies by architectural scholars, this book highlights different forms of activism at home from the early twentieth century to today. The architect- led experiments in activist living discussed in this book include the dwellings of Ralph Erskine, Paulo Mendes Da Rocha, Charles Moore, Flora Ruchat-Roncati, Kiyoshi Seike, and many others. Offering candid appraisals of alternative living solutions that formulate a response to rising real estate prices, economic inequality, social alienation, and mounting environmental and cultural challenges, Activism at Home is more than a historical study; it is an appeal to architects to use the discipline's tools to their full potential, and a plea to scholars to continue bringing architecture's activist practices into focus--whether at home or elsewhere.

Dwelling in Possibility cuts across conventional boundaries between critical and creative writing by featuring the work of both women poets and feminist critics as they explore and exemplify the relationship between gender and poetic genres. The contributors suggest new ways of thinking and writing about poetry in light of contemporary questions about history and identity. Most of the contributions are published here for the first time.

The Dwelling Portably series returns with Holly and Bert's newest contribution to their fourth decade of DIY homesteading. The 2009-2015 collection assembles their correspondence and what they've picked up over the last six years, lovingly crafted on manual typewriters from a remote Oregon outpost. The tips and tricks presented here are practical and useful—pertaining to things like biking, permanent camping, alternative communities, DIY healthcare, disaster preparation, eating off the land, and MacGyver-like skills to prepare you for any and all situations. Whether you’re planning to step off the grid or just simplify your life a little, Dwelling Portably has something for just about everyone.

Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2020.

Archival snapshot of entire looseleaf Code of Massachusetts Regulations held by the Social Law Library of Massachusetts as of January 2020.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize. “[A] beautifully conceived and penetrating book . . . one of the finest studies of American slavery ever written.”—The New Republic Published some thirty years ago, Robert Manson Myers’s Children of Pride: The True Story of Georgia and the Civil War won the National Book Award in history and went on to become a classic reference on America’s slaveholding South. That book presented the letters of the prominent Presbyterian minister and plantation patriarch Charles Colcock Jones (1804–1863), whose family owned more than one hundred slaves. While extensive, these letters can provide only one part of the story of the Jones family plantations in coastal Georgia. In this remarkable new book, the religious historian Erskine Clarke completes the story, offering a narrative history of four generations of the plantations’ inhabitants, white and black. Encompassing the years 1805 to 1869, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic describes the simultaneous but vastly different experiences of slave and slave owner. This “upstairsdownstairs” history reveals in detail how the benevolent impulses of Jones and his family became ideological supports for deep oppression, and how the slave Lizzy Jones and members of her family struggled against that oppression. Through letters, plantation and church records, court documents, slave narratives, archaeological findings, and the memory of the African American community, Clarke brings to light the long-suppressed history of the slaves of the Jones plantations—a history inseparably bound to that of their white owners. “Clarke’s magisterial, multiperspective study of the antebellum South describes two family groups . . . a ‘total’ history of interconnected people divided by race, legal status, and gender.”—Choice