ABSTRACT
The pandemic brought the plight of people living in the streets, those I call roofless people, to the forefront. How can one ‘stay at home’ without a roof over one’s head? While society needs to find an answer to this question (and partly did during the pandemic), another question emerged: How Can Anyone ‘Domesticate’ Media Technologies If They Are Living on the Streets? Or, put differently, what does the concept of domestication offer in the context of researching the media use of roofless people? This chapter addresses these questions with reference to a research project on that topic of rooflessness and digital media use, conducted in Berlin from 2019 to early 2023. Concepts such as dis-domestication, the question of ‘making do,’ and others are discussed in relation to empirical material, which brings to light different instances of non-domestication in the context of rooflessness. This material is also used to engage with the theoretical question of wilderness and taming – concepts that lie at the heart of the domestication concept.
