Reimagining Home in the 21st Century (original) (raw)

Home in Question Uncovering Meanings, Desires and Dilemmas of Non-home

European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2021

What is the opposite of home? Is it necessarily something 'negative'? Similar questions, far from having a self-evident answer, make for a fruitful entry point for research into the social experience of home. Central to this article is a novel conceptualisation of non-home, against the background of the pre-existing criticisms of the normative, romanticized and de-politicized understandings of home. This article draws from fieldwork on the everyday dwelling experience of migrants and asylum seekers to illustrate the volitional dimension of non-home. Not attaching a sense of home to a dwelling place or set of relationships is not merely consequence of poor housing conditions. It may also involve an active choiceat least at some points of the life course, in certain household conditions. In this sense, nonhome is more than a matter of absence, dispossession, reconfiguration or implosion of home. In questioning the normative view of home as inherently positive and desirable, this conceptualisation highlights the reciprocal interact ion between home and non-home as mutually interdependent constructs.

Multiple Meanings of Homes: A Changing Social and Political Domain across Cultures

2017

The 1990s saw anthropological studies renew its longstanding interest in space and place. This called for a re-conceptualisation of theory and research which shifted the perspective of spatial dimensions of culture and behaviour to the foreground (Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2008 [2003]; Buchli 2013). This shift re-ignited a longstanding political debate on doing anthropology at home, mainly in Europe and the UK (Okely 1999). Thus, this renewed interest turned the gaze from the ‘savage other’ and the ‘noble savage’ onto the Western home. Okely argues that due to this ‘anti-Europeanist ethos in favour of an exoticised elsewhere,’ the discipline of anthropology suffered from a lack of Western ethnography (1999: 40). This may explain why the Western home featured less in the ethnographies of the home.

Immigrants and Home in the Making

The search for home as a material and symbolic space is an increasingly salient social question across contemporary multiethnic cities. The boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic are increasingly contested and yet remain a crucial issue, especially for minority groups such as immigrant and ethnic communities. The domestication of everyday living spaces carried out by immigrant and ethnic groups entails a variety of ways of ‘cultivating home’. In a context characterized by transnational mobility, ethnic segregation and social marginality, domesticity—understood as the potential to enact a domestic dimension in meaningful places—is an important asset to resist present hardships, cultivate memory and lay out projects for the future. In this Editorial, we seek to untangle the multiple stakes entailed by the practices of ‘making home’ and ‘feeling at home’. We invite scholars to observe how, even in minute and mundane details, dwelling places and the built environment come to be imbued with social and cultural meanings, which are pivotal to survival and social recognition. The articulation of domesticity, commonality and publicness can be fruitfully mapped through the concept of ‘thresholds’, which brings together the case studies that follow. By doing so, this Special Issue as a whole lays out a new research agenda at the intersection of housing, urban and migration studies.

"Home" as an essentially contested concept and why this matters

Housing Studies

This paper makes two interlinked arguments. First, that the "concept of home"-the focus of a burgeoning literature within housing studies-meets Gallie's conditions for an "essentially contested concept." The influential theory, drawn on throughout the social sciences, seeks to explain concepts for which disputes are intractable; they cannot be settled by empirical evidence or argument. Second, that this "essential contestability" is not just a theoretical label, it tells us something useful about how scholars can best employ the concept of home in their own work. The argument is put in three sections. The first provides a summary of Gallie's theory. The second argues that the concept of home meets Gallie's conditions for essential contestability. Finally, the third outlines the implications of the arguments put in the first two sections for scholars engaging with the concept of home.

Editorial special issue: house, home and dwelling

Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 2012

The aim of this special issue is to further our understanding of 'house', 'home' and 'dwelling' by presenting five empirical studies that investigate different aspects of these concepts. All three are complex, multi-faceted and multi-layered concepts, whose diverse connotations are often used interchangeably. For example, the word home is used for the physical structure of the house, for the meanings attached to the house, as well as for the process of homemaking. From an analytical point of view this is undesirable, since we require our concepts to be as unambiguous as possible. Therefore, in this introductory paper, the guest editors present a conceptual framework for studying house, home and dwelling that is based on the fundamental distinction between an environmental object and the affordances attached to it. The studies presented in this special issue investigate different aspects of house, home and dwelling, but they all use this conceptual framework and share the same theoretical perspective on people-dwelling relations. And, although each of the papers has its own merits, together they demonstrate that the conceptual framework is an effective tool for dismantling the concepts of house, home and dwelling.

Introduction.: Home and Homemaking in a Time of Crisis

2018

A decade ago, the question of homemaking within a mobile global population was an important one. Today, as we grapple with a growing refugee crisis, alongside a hardening of anti-immigration feeling and deepening communal segregation in many parts of the developed world, the issue of the nature of home and homemaking is critical, and is becoming daily more so. Media reports tumble over each other telling of refugees who, whilst seeking home and hospitality in Europe, drown in the sea passages between North Africa and Italy. Such news jostles with reports of a rising tide of political rhetoric about building walls between ‘us’ and ‘them’ at a time when cities in the Western world, including Europe and the United Kingdom, are witnessing racist abuse, some of it deadly. For example, following the murder in the marketplace of Harlow, Essex, United Kingdom in September 2016 of Arek Jozwik, a Polish resident of the town, his friend, Eric Hind, told the journalist Jill Lawless (27 October ...

For a comparative sociology of home: Relationships, cultures, structures

Current Sociology, 2020

Home matters, for people's everyday life and for social research, in ways that are still lacking a systematic sociological framework of analysis. As a contribution toward this framework, we define home as an emplaced relationship that prioritizes certain socio-material contexts over others, by virtue of the emotional, affective and practical values attached to them, in forms and degrees that change over space and time. This understanding highlights the interdependence between relational, cultural and structural aspects of home as a distinctive social experience. We then connect the sociological debate with the discourse on home across social sciences more broadly, with a particular emphasis on the heuristics, practices and multiscalarity of home. In terms of practical research, the methodological bases of 'home studies' are still in development, also regarding the prospects of translating and comparing home across socio-cultural and spatial contexts. Nonetheless, this Special Issue of Current Sociology opens up new ways to advance the field of home studies-theoretically in our opening paper, and empirically in the six articles that follow.