Home

"Home" is a key idea in numerous traditions of geography as well as a key site and spatial imaginary in the contemporary world. This book provides a critical geography of home from domestic to transnational scales.
Through an engagement with geographical, feminist, cultural studies and postcolonial scholarship, the book demonstrates the complex nature of home as a place and as a spatial imaginary: home can invoke a sense of belonging as well as alienation; ideas and emotions about home can be stretched across the world, connected to a nation and attached to a house; the spaces and imaginaries of home are central to the construction of people's identities and are materially manifested in a wide range of home-making practices. The argument is made through diverse historical and contemporary examples, including:
* the linking of home and nation in contemporary US politics
* the historical experiences of the British in India
* the social correlates of the suburban house and high-rise apartment
* home as work and the transnational migration of domestic workers
This book provides an essential guide to studying home and domesticity. Each chapter includes text boxes, research boxes and is well illustrated throughout with photographs and figures.

‘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.

1. Setting Up Home: An Introduction 2. Representing Home 3. Residence: House-as-Home 4. Home, Nation and Empire 5. Transnational Homes 6. Leaving Home

Alison Blunt is in the Department of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Robyn Dowling is in the Department of Human Geography at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.