Dwelling as a settler: Natalie Osborne, ‘Dwelling: Domesticity, Decay and Inhabiting Otherwise’, in Stories of Place: Geographies of Meaning, Memory and Connection, Palgrave, 2026, pp. 125-142 | settler colonial studies blog

Dwelling as a settler: Natalie Osborne, ‘Dwelling: Domesticity, Decay and Inhabiting Otherwise’, in Stories of Place: Geographies of Meaning, Memory and Connection, Palgrave, 2026, pp. 125-142

23Feb26

Abstract: This chapter considers how modes of dwelling and inhabitation on stolen land are shaped by settler-colonialism, and how suburban dwelling is both troubled and constituted by non-human others and environmental change. Through a poem about a dilapidated and beloved timber house, where the white settler author dwells in collaborative and contested community with plants, critters, fungi and floodwater, this piece confronts the myths of the bordered and bounded self, and settler-colonial-patriarchal notions of mastery and control over the domestic space. Storying these intimate, everyday encounters demonstrates how self, place and Others are blurred, in a form that suggests ambivalence, uncertainty, contingency and open-endedness. Through practices of care and through lively decay, some forms of being are undone; in the undoing, other modes of living and dwelling become possible.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed