Home-making at ANAMED: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking a Room of One's Own
What does it mean to make a place feel like home—especially when that place is temporary?
During my fellowship at ANAMED (Koç University Research Centre for Anatolian Civilisations), I found myself thinking less about houses and more about rooms, objects, routines, and the quiet labour of belonging. Academic fellowships often promise time and space for research, yet they also involve constant movement: arriving, settling, leaving, and beginning again elsewhere.
In this personal essay, I reflect on the emotional and material process of creating a "room of one's own" within an institutional setting. Inspired by Virginia Woolf's famous phrase, I explore how spaces are continuously made, unmade, and remade through everyday practices, memories, and the objects we choose to surround ourselves with.
The piece is also about the often invisible dimensions of academic life—the excitement of new beginnings, the uncertainty of temporary homes, and the ways material things help us negotiate identity, comfort, and belonging while living between places.
This essay was originally published on the ANAMED Blog. Read the full article here
Image: Virginia Woolf’s writing lodge (Historic England)