Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging


Book Description

Assembling Mass Observation Archive material with historiographies of family, house and nation from ancient-Greece to present-day Europe, China and America, this book contributes to current debates on identity, belonging, memory and material culture by exploring how power works in the small spaces of home.




Home, Memory and Belonging in Italian Postcolonial Literature


Book Description

This book examines the meaning of home through the investigation of a series of public and private spaces recurrent in Italian postcolonial literature. The chapters, by respectively considering Termini train station in Rome, phone centres, the condominium, and the private spaces of the bathroom and the bedroom, investigate how migrant characters inhabit those places and turn them into familiar spaces of belonging. Home, Memory and Belonging in Italian Postcolonial Literature suggests “home spaces” as a possible lens to examine these specific places and a series of practices enacted by their inhabitants in order to feel at home. Drawing on a wide array of sources, this book focuses on the role played by memory in creating transnational connections between present and past locations and on how these connections shape migrants’ sense of self and migrants’ identity.




Migration, Settlement, and the Concepts of House and Home


Book Description

How do migrants feel "at home" in their houses? Literature on the migrant house and its role in the migrant experience of home-building is inadequate. This book offers a theoretical framework based on the notion of home-building and the concepts of home and house embedded within it. It presents innovative research on four groups of migrants who have settled in two metropolitan cities in two periods: migrants from Italy (migrated in the 1950s and 1960s) and from mainland China (migrated in the 1990s and 2000s) in Melbourne, Australia, and migrants from Morocco (migrated in the 1950s and 1960s) and from the former Soviet Union (migrated in the 1990s and 2000s) in Tel Aviv, Israel. The analysis draws on qualitative data gathered from forty-six in depth interviews with migrants in their home-environments, including extensive visual data. Levin argues that the physical form of the house is meaningful in a range of diverse ways during the process of home-building, and that each migrant group constructs a distinct form of home-building in their homes/houses, according to their specific circumstances of migration, namely the origin country, country of destination and period of migration, as well as the historical, economic and social contexts around migration.




Dwelling


Book Description




Intimacies, Critical Consumption and Diverse Economies


Book Description

This collection explores the relationships between the emotional and material, engaging with and developing the debates surrounding the emotional and material labour involved in producing and reproducing domestic and intimate spaces. The contributions examine the geographies and spaces of consumption in international and local-global spheres.




Family Mourning After War and Disaster in Twentieth-Century Britain


Book Description

Across the twentieth century, the families of people who died in war and disaster were left to make sense of their sudden loss and navigate newfound grief. This book focuses the families of people who died in the First World War and in mining disasters in the early twentieth-century. These bereaved families were often denied access to bodies and choice over burial rights, all while dealing with the increased bureaucracy of death.Families created domestic memorials, which took on additional meaning because of this lack of memorial agency elsewhere. Although the ways that these families were bereaved each took place in different circumstances, the ways that families grieved were recognizable to one another: they drew on common memorial practices, augmented to take on special meaning after sudden death.This memorial material provided a vehicle for families to navigate their loss, but also to communicate the memory of the dead both externally, through donation to museums, and linearly, through ancestral lines. Drawing on a nuanced reading of a wide range of sources - from ephemera to administrative museum paperwork - this book explores family reactions to mass death events in early twentieth-century Britain. The result is a comparative and domestic perspective on mourning at the turn of the century that makes important contributions to the growing field of death studies, and will be of interest to those working on the First World War, interwar Britain, the history of work, the social history of the family, and the history of memorialization. 6 b&w illustrations




Sexuality and Gender at Home


Book Description

Sexuality and Gender at Home is the first book to explore the meanings and experiences of home through the framework of sexuality. Looking at a broad spectrum of sexuality, gender and domesticity, it examines the many ways in which home is constructed, performed and experienced in relation to sexuality and gender. Considering identity issues such as age, class, ethnicity and gender, the authors problematize intimacy and question conventional ways of thinking about allegedly ‘private’ home space. Comprehensive introductions to each of the book’s three sections – on Intimacy and Home, Queering Home, Beyond Home – provide a coherent overview of the existing literature as well as additional historical and cultural context. Fourteen chapters present ground-breaking research and insights into sexuality, gender and home across culture, time and space. Written by academics from a range of subject disciplines, chapters are based on research covering countries including Australia, France, Sweden, the UK, the USA, Guyana, Israel, and Singapore.This highly original text is the ideal starting point for anyone wishing to get to grips with the emerging field of sexuality, gender and home and will particularly appeal to researchers and students in anthropology, architecture, gender studies, sociology, and human geography.




Home Across Borders


Book Description

This book studies how transnational migrants create a sense of home in their host countries. It draws on case studies of Sri Lankan migrants living in Australia to argue that 'home' is an existential experience rather than a fixed entity. The author looks at how the sense of home arises as a fresh category which is critical in defining one’s existentiality in the host society. Going beyond the conventional methodological approach of an ethnographer objectivizing other’s sense of home into fixed categories, the book attempts to foreground the immigrant’s articulation of home which evolves parallel to their being. It reveals how three important aspects of our lives – time, space and memory – intersect with the trajectories of migration. The author also delves into the ways in which migrants engage in building a home as a way of creating materiality in their dwelling practice. Unique and compelling, the book will be highly useful in studies of diaspora, globalisation and transnational migration. It will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of anthropology, migration and transnational studies, as well as sociology and other related disciplines.




Ideal homes


Book Description

Ideal homes investigates the tastes and aspirations of the suburban communities that emerged in Britain after the First World War. It explores how new class and gender identities were forged through the architecture and decoration of the home. This edition includes a chapter on researching the history of your own house.




Home and Sexuality


Book Description

This book explores the meanings and experiences of home among a group of lesbians who over the past five decades have sought to create alternative intimate and public living spaces. The protagonists who enact the ethnographic narrative are a small group of older lesbians, mainly feminist activists, residing in the metropolis of London. The meaning of home and domestic space emerges from unique life histories informed by the wider social and political context, and moves from the earliest memories of their childhood kitchens to their contemporary domestic lives. Leaping from the radical lesbian feminist collectives and squats of the 1980s to the ordinariness of home life, the kitchen emerged as a tangle of cultural norms, customs, duties, ideas, aspirations, expectations, and values that tells us about the thinking process and behaviour of this specific group of older lesbians. In this context, the kitchen brings out the experiences of social inequalities experienced by these older lesbians, mainly brought out by the hegemonic institution of heteronormativity and patriarchy. This ethnography will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines in anthropology, sociology, geography and feminism.




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