At home in the suburbs: Domesticity and nation in postwar Australia (original) (raw)

The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain

Journal of Contemporary History, 2005

This article explores the meanings of ‘home’ in postwar Britain: how was home situated in public discourse and what was the relationship between public perception, individual desire and material reality? It considers the extent to which the British home was re-made in these years asking whether domesticity 1950s-style was distinct from previous models and exploring the degree of penetration achieved by a home-centred model. The article draws upon life history sources and social survey materials that allow access to subjective understandings of ‘home’. In particular, it employs evidence collected by the pioneering British social investigative organization, Mass-Observation, to explore both historically-sited meanings of home and recently-solicited memories of the postwar period.

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.

"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.

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.