Alison Blunt

Robyn Dowling

Home articulates a ‘critical geography of home’ in which home is understood as an emotive place and spatial imaginary that encompasses lived experiences of everyday, domestic life alongside a wider, and often contested, sense of being and belonging in the world. Engaging with the burgeoning cross-disciplinary interest in home since the first edition was published, this significantly revised and updated second edition contains new research boxes, illustrations, and contemporary examples throughout. It also adds a new chapter on ‘Home and the City’ that extends the scalar understanding of home to the urban. The book develops the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of a critical geography of home, drawing on key feminist, postcolonial, and housing thinkers as well as contemporary methodological currents in non-representational thinking and performance. The book’s chapters consider the making and unmaking of home across the domestic scale – house-as-home; the urban – city-as-home; national – nation-as-home; and homemaking in relation to transnational migration and diaspora. Each chapter includes illustrative examples from diverse geographical contexts and historical time periods. Chapters also address some of the key cross-cutting dimensions of home across these scales, including digital connectivity, art and performance, more-than-human constructions of home, and violence and dispossession. The book ends with a research agenda for home in a world of COVID-19. The book provides an understanding of home that has three intersecting dimensions: that material and imaginative geographies of home are closely intertwined; that home, power, and identity are intimately linked; and that geographies of home are multi-scalar. This framework, the examples used to illustrate it, and the intended audience of academics and students across the humanities and social sciences will together shape the field of home studies into the future.

Home

‘Home’ is a significant geographical and social concept. It is not only a three-dimensional structure, a shelter, but it is also a matrix of social relations and has wide symbolic and ideological meanings; home can be feelings of belonging or of alienation; feelings of home can be stretched across the world, connected to a nation or attached to a house; the spaces and imaginaries of home are central to the construction of people’s identities. An essential guide to studying home and domesticity, this book locates ‘home’ within wider traditions of thought. It analyzes different sources, methods and examples in both historical and contemporary contexts; ranging from homes on the American frontier and imperial domesticity in British India, to Australian suburbs, multicultural London, and South Asian diasporic homes. The core argument of the book has three main parts that cut across each of its chapters: home-making identity and belonging homely and unhomely spaces. Each chapter includes text boxes and exercises and is well illustrated with cartoons, line drawings, and photographs. Outlining the social relations shaping, (and being influenced by) the geographies of home; and the imaginative as well as material importance of home, this book will be a valuable reference for students of geography, sociology, gender studies, and those interested in the home and domesticity.

Robyn Dowling

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