Home (Key Ideas in Geography)

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.

Alison Blunt is Deputy Vice Principal for Impact (Culture, Civic, Community) and Professor of Geography at Queen Mary University of London. She is founding co-director of the Centre for Studies of Home, a partnership between Queen Mary and the Museum of the Home. Her research on home, migration, and the city has been funded by the AHRC, the ESRC, and The Leverhulme Trust. She is the academic lead on ‘Stay Home Stories’, a project funded by the AHRC as part of the UKRI rapid response to COVID-19.

Robyn Dowling is Dean of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. She has an abiding interest in how people make home in cities and dwellings. Her current research focuses on urban governance responses to climate change, technological disruptions, and innovation.