Thesis title: Queer Inhabitation: Gender Geographies and Home-making Practices between Rome and Lisbon
This thesis, Queer Inhabitation: Gender Geographies and Home-making Practices between Rome and Lisbon, explores how LGBTQ+ individuals negotiate housing insecurity and feelings of belonging within Southern European contexts (Rome and Lisbon) influenced by familistic welfare regimes and housing financialisation. Rooted in feminist and queer geographies, it introduces the concept of “queer inhabitation” to highlight the embodied, affective, and relational dimensions of dwelling while addressing systemic inequalities.
Methodologically, the study proposes ‘affective curatorship’ as a queer and feminist research posture, utilising embodied and visual tools—such as mapping, drift walking, and photovoice—to foster empowerment, community building, and collective imagination.
Empirical findings, organised as curatorial assemblages, underscore non-linear housing trajectories, radical imaginaries of coexistence, comfort and discomfort in public space, and activism as forms of spatial reclamation. The thesis argues that queer inhabitation and worlding serve as both survival strategies and sites of resistance, offering critical insights into housing, kinship, and care amidst growing precarity.