The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson befor returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
Note: You can print the entire lesson by clicking on the "Print" link above.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve looked at nationalism as an extension of identity, mobility and migration, and the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers. Now we turn toward a theme that connects all of these: home. In this lesson, you will consider the nature of home, see some critiques of traditional concepts of home, and see how these play out for people who have been displaced.
Upon completion of this lesson, you will be able to:
If you have any questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them to the GEOG 571 - General Discussion Forum. (That forum can be accessed at any time in Canvas by opening the Lesson 0: Welcome to GEOG 571 module in Canvas.)
This lesson is one week in length. Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates. To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below. You may find it useful to print this page out first so that you can follow along with the directions.
Step | Activity | Access/Directions |
---|---|---|
1 | Read | The lecture notes can be accessed by clicking on the Lesson 9: Home I - Dynamics of Home link in the Lessons menu on this page. |
2 |
Required |
Morrice, S. (2013). Heartache and Hurricane Katrina: Recognizing the influence of emotion in post-disaster return decisions. Area, 45(1): 33-39. Tete, S. Y. A. (2012). ‘Any place could be home’: Embedding refugees’ voices into displacement resolution and state refugee policy. Geoforum, 43(1), 106-115. |
3 | Submit the final draft of your research project. | Submit the final draft of your research project to the Lesson 9 Research Project dropbox in the Lesson 9: Home I - Dynamics of Home module in Canvas. |
4 | Take the Lesson 9 Quiz | You can find the Lesson 9 Quiz in the Lesson 9: Home I - Dynamics of Home module in Canvas. |
5 | Submit your Executive Summary of your research project. | Submit the executive summary of your research project to the Lesson 9 Exectutive Summary dropbox in the Lesson 9: Home I - Dynamics of Home module in Canvas. |
We’re going to begin this lesson with an exercise. Get a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, or pull up a new document where you can make some notes before you read the prompt. Your answers will be incorporated into the discussion for this week.
Part 1:
When you hear the word home, what immediately comes to mind? Don’t think about it; just write down the first five things that come to mind. These can be words, phrases, descriptions of mental images, memories, etc. — whatever comes to mind when you hear the word “home.”
Part 2:
Review the list that you made. Do you notice any patterns in how you think about home? What overall qualities do you ascribe to it, based on your list?
Traditionally, home is presented as 1) a place, that is 2) safe, 3) secure, and 4) a space of belonging. In the United States, it’s an image we see throughout both folk and popular culture. For example, the song “Home, Sweet Home” begins:
Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there
Which seek thro' the world, is ne'er met elsewhere
Home! Home!
Sweet, sweet home!
There's no place like home
There's no place like home!
Ads from organizations such as the National Association of Realtors and mortgage lenders regularly rely on similar visions of home, such as this ad from Citi (see video below), which is aimed at Black Americans, who historically have lower rates of homeownership than White Americans (Collins & Margo, 2011); the gap between Black and White homeownership is currently the widest it has been in fifty years (Choi, 2020).
The idea of home as a familiar and comfortable place associated with family was a major theme for humanistic geographers working in the 1970s. Drawing on phenomenology (a branch of philosophy), they worked on the assumption that home is not just emotionally significant, but also a starting point or focal point for everyday life. This passage from Ted Relph’s book Place and Placelessness provides a clear example of this line of thought:
Home is the foundation of our identity as individuals and as members of a community, the dwelling-place of being. Home is not just the house you happen to live in, it is not something that can be anywhere, that can be exchanged, but an irreplaceable center of significance. (1976, p. 39)
A passage from Yi-Fu Tuan’s landmark book Space and Place shows this conceptualization of home in action:
Consider the routine of going to work in the morning and returning home at night… In the morning the office lies ahead, in one's future… At the end of the day the office worker puts on his coat and prepares to return home. Home is now in his future in the sense that it takes time to get there, but he is not likely to feel that the return journey is a forward movement in time. He returns—tracing his steps back in space and going back in time—to the familiar haven of the home. Familiarity is a characteristic of the past. The home provides an image of the past. Moreover in an ideal sense home lies at the center of one's life, and center (we have seen) connotes origin and beginning. (Tuan, 1977, pp. 127-128; emphasis added)
Return now to the list you made for the exercise above. Do the ideas of Relph and Tuan resonate with your own? For some of you, perhaps they do; for others perhaps they don’t. As we will see in the next section, geographers in the 1990s and 2000s started to question this approach to home.
Choi, J. H. (2020, February 21). Breaking down the Black-White homeownership gap [2]. Urban Wire.
Collins, W. J, and Margo, R. A. (2011). Race and home ownership from the end of the Civil War to the present. The American Economic Review, 101(3), 355-359.
Relph, T. (1976). Place and placelessness. Pion.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.
In the previous section we introduced the idea of home as a place that is both comfortable and comforting, and that is associated with family, personal history, and belonging. While this idea has long been present in American culture and was held as a basic assumption by humanistic geographers, it has also undergone considerable scrutiny — both within popular culture and in academic contexts.
The popular culture that we see in books, films, music, and other media is an excellent gauge of a culture’s values and expectations. By analyzing popular culture, we can understand not only the underlying expectations of the culture, but also the ways those expectations are contested or even disregarded by various groups or subcultures within it.
The notion that home is a safe place is a frequent target of horror movies. The horror of Wes Craven’s 1991 satirical film The People Under the Stairs hinges on the extreme mistreatment of children by “Mommy” and “Daddy” (who, it turns out, are siblings) in what is ostensibly a reputable home; here, a literal house of horrors masquerades for a site of family. In Stephen King’s book Misery (1987) and the film adaptation (1990) of the same name, writer Paul Sheldon is rescued from a car accident by Annie Wilkes, a fan and former nurse who takes him into her home, sets him up in her guest room, and proceeds to torture him when she learns that he has killed off the protagonist of his popular romance series in the most recent installment. In this instance, Annie’s home should be a safe site of convalescence and caretaking, but it is instead warped into a site of danger and harm. Conversely, the family home of Rose Armitage in Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out is an eerily welcoming place for her boyfriend, protagonist Chris Washington, who fears that her family won’t accept him because he is Black. Yet they do — and their instant acceptance and warm welcome disguise the horrors to come.
In the previous examples, the safety of home is subverted by people who live within it. Yet in haunted house stories, all of the occupants are at risk. Consider, for example, Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist, in which the house itself — built on top of a cemetery whose graves were never relocated — seems to become possessed, manifesting strange and increasingly aggressive supernatural phenomena, and ultimately abducting the youngest child in the family. In this instance, the house’s safety is not the only thing that is troubled; the sense of familiarity and comfort that comes with living in it is slowly eroded over the course of the film by the paranormal happenings — a chair sliding from one point to another on its own, turning around to find that the kitchen chairs have all been stacked neatly but precariously on the kitchen table, and so on.
(In the kitchen scene, you can see the emotion play across the face of Diane Freeling as she asks her daughter Carol Ann about the chairs; she is experiencing the uncanny — the horrifying feeling that something is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.)
It may be tempting to dismiss these examples as mere entertainment, but this would be shortsighted. In each of the examples above, home and our basic cultural assumptions about what it is supposed to be like are called into question. These examples operate on the premise of shattering our expectations of home — they resonate as terrifying because they take ideas that are deeply ingrained in our psyches by years of immersion in subtle (and not-so-subtle) discourses that tell us what home should be, and they distort or invert those ideas.
In the previous section, we presented examples of the ways that American popular media critiques traditional (and perhaps mythical) ideas about home that are embedded in US culture. Popular culture does not provide the only critique of home; in the 1990s and early 2000s academics in a variety of disciplines began to pick the concept apart (for extensive reviews, see Mallett, 2004 and Blunt, 2005). These efforts culminated in the 2006 publication of the book Home by Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, which quickly became one of the central texts on the topic.
In brief, critical work on home during this period revealed a number of ways that traditional ideas about home fail to reflect the realities of people’s lived experiences. The resulting critiques fall into two broad categories: questions about the nature of home, and responses to nostalgic representations of home.
As Mallett points out, scholars rely on varying ideas of what ‘home’ means, and are prone to conflating it with other things: “Is home (a) place(s), (a) space(s), feeling(s), practices, and/or an active state of being in the world? Home is variously described as conflated with or related to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying” (2004, p. 65). And although she notes these conflations throughout her review, most scholars work on the general assumption that home is a place.
If home is indeed a place, we must remember, as Massey (1994) argued, that places are not static entities, but instead are dynamic. The meanings of places shift over time, and places are interconnected via networks through which goods, capital, ideas, people, etc. flow. Home, if it is a place, is no different; following Massey’s lead, Blunt and Dowling argue that home is “a spatial imaginary: a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connect places” (2006, p. 2).
A few, however, go beyond the assumption that home is a place, presenting it as either a space of significance that does not necessarily have a fixed location, or as something that is more than place. Key among these is Douglas’s description of home as space:
Home is “here,” or it is “not here.” The question is not “How?” nor “Who?” nor “When?” but “Where is your home?” It is always a localizable idea. Home is located in space, but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a boat, or a tent. It need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control. Having shelter is not having a home, nor is having a house, nor is home the same as household. (Douglas, 1991, p. 289)
In this description, home is not a fixed or static place, but rather a process of turning space into place.
Among those who see home as more than place, Saunders and Williams argue that home “is a crucial ‘locale' in the sense that it is the setting through which basic forms of social relations and social institutions are constituted and reproduced” (1988, p. 82). That is, home is a space where we create, practice, and pass down our understandings of what social relationships are supposed to be like — and this informs how we are in the world. This is no small order.
Bowlby, Gregorie, and McKie (1997) offer a less grandiose and more intimate picture of home. While they assume that home is typically centered on a place, they argue that it is defined in part through daily practices that happen within it. In her review, Mallett describes this practice-centered idea of home as “a physical space that is lived” (2004, p. 80).
The second set of critiques focuses on the traditional ideas of home as a safe, secure, private site of family and belonging. In another critical review, Blunt (2005) turns to literature on domestic violence, homelessness, and transnational migrants to demonstrate how home can also be dangerous, precarious, alienating, and unsettled — for individuals and families alike.
Troubled or complicated experiences of home can have lasting impacts on individuals. Experiences of home that involve loss, conflict, or trauma have significant impacts on people’s identities, in terms of both how one’s identity forms and the personal sense of identity one carries (Manzo 2005). Likewise, continual disruptions of living situations and family relationships, as is often the case for foster children, can coalesce in what Samuels (2009) calls “an ambiguous loss of home.”
And for transnational migrants and refugees alike, home is complicated by experiences of displacement — of leaving (temporarily or permanently), resettling, reception, and acculturation (or, in some cases, assimilation). For the young New Zealanders that Wiles (2008) interviewed, migration between New Zealand and London prompted an unsettling reflection on home. While living in London, her subjects expressed traditional ideas of home, often associating it with family and familiarity, with easy access to their own possessions, and with places and landscapes that enabled familiar daily practices and lifestyles. Yet, on returning to New Zealand, many of them found that their wistful memories of home in New Zealand no longer seemed to fit them; their experiences had changed them:
What turns out to be disconcerting for those who return is that they cannot in fact return to that ‘home’ because as their sense of self and as a group changes so too do their relationships to home and their processes of meaning making. For many in this group, the return home and attempts to resettle ultimately lead to some of the most difficult changes in their sense of identity and exploration of difference. The actual return home abruptly challenges the idealistic and sometimes simplistic vision of New Zealand as home that structured their lives in London. (Wiles, 2008, p. 134)
We wish to close this section with two final critiques. First, traditional conceptualizations of home are highly localized (usually to a place of residence) — but as Blunt and Dowling (2006) among others point out, home is a multiscalar phenomenon. We will address this point in greater detail in Lesson 10.
Second, just as spaces we think of as ‘homely’ can be experienced in ‘unhomely’ ways — that is, supposedly ‘safe’ houses can be violated by burglary or domestic violence — people sometimes find (or create) home in unlikely spaces or ‘unhomely homes’ (see Blunt & Dowling, 2006). Because we perceive residences such as jails, school dormitories, squatter settlements, and refugee camps as temporary, uncomfortable, and distant from the familiar, we don’t think of them as home-like or ‘homely’ spaces. And while people sometimes actively resist designating or producing a sense of home in temporary residential spaces (see, e.g, Parrott, 2005), in some cases people do find home in these and similar spaces (see, e.g., Kenyon, 1999).
Blunt, A. (2005). Cultural geography: Cultural geographies of home. Progress In Human Geography, 29(4), 505-515.
Blunt, A., and Dowling, R. (2006). Home. Routledge.
Bowlby, S., Gregory, S., and McKie, L. (1997). “Doing home”: Patriarchy, caring, and space. Women's Studies International Forum, 20(3), 343-350.
Douglas, M. (1991). The idea of home: A kind of space. Social Research, 58(1), 287-307.
Kenyon, L. (1999). A home from home: students’ transitional experience of home. In T. Chapman, and J. L. Hockey (Eds.), Ideal homes? Social change and domestic life (pp. 84-95). Routledge.
Mallett, S. (2004). Understanding home: A critical review of the literature. The Sociological Review, 52(1), 62-89.
Manzo, L. C. (2005). For better or worse: Exploring multiple dimensions of place meaning. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25(1), 67-86.
Massey, D. (1994). Space, place, and gender. University of Minnesota Press.
Parrott, F. R. (2005). ‘It’s not forever’: The material culture of hope. Journal of Material Culture, 10(3), 245-262.
Samuels, G. M. (2009) Ambiguous loss of home: The experience of familial (im)permanence among young adults with foster care backgrounds. Children and Youth Services Review, 31(12), 1229-1239.
Wiles, J. (2008). Sense of home in a transnational social space: New Zealanders in London. Global Networks, 8(1): 116-137.
It is clear, then, that home is a messy concept at best: it’s hard to define, and the ways that people experience home sometimes stand in complete opposition to the ideal images of home quietly instilled in us through discourse and social construction. With this in mind, we are left wondering: what can we take from all of this?
First, home is not just a place, but something that people create, experience, live, reflect upon, and modify — and it can be multiple rather than singular (for example, many students make a distinction between ‘school-home’ and ‘home-home’). Second, no matter how far away from the ideal it may be, home — whether it’s something a person has, something they’ve lost, something that has been damaged, or something they want — is meaningful for people at the psychological scale. Third, although some homes come close to our culturally-mediated ideals, many do not, and the reasons for this vary in intensity and form (e.g., apartments offer less permanence than owner-occupied houses, while home structures that are deteriorating are unsafe; one’s sense of home may be unsettled by something as commonly experienced as feeling like one doesn’t fit in with family members, but also by the dangers of domestic violence; the list goes on). Fourth, as we see in popular culture, people are aware that culturally-mediated ideals of home are not only elusive, but also troubled and in some respects mythical.
That home is both fundamental to our everyday lives (witness the ready availability of cliches that we used for the titles for this lesson) and also such a troubled/troubling thing makes it deeply relevant to issues of human security. The readings for this week consider home from opposite experiences: establishing home as a refugee, and returning to home after disaster. In both cases, the authors present the experiences of individuals as factors that should influence policy decisions. In these articles, we see that even in cases where people have highly troubled and unsettled experiences of home, home acts as a strong emotional force that binds, drives, and pierces people’s lives.
Morrice, S. (2013). Heartache and Hurricane Katrina: Recognizing the influence of emotion in post-disaster return decisions. Area, 45(1): 33-39.
Tete, S. Y. A. (2012). ‘Any place could be home’: Embedding refugees’ voices into displacement resolution and state refugee policy. Geoforum, 43(1), 106-115.
Note: Registered students can access the readings in Canvas by clicking on the Library Resources link.
Throughout the course to date, you’ve had several mini-assignments culminating in the completion of your final project, which is due this week. These mini-assignments have allowed your instructor to provide you with constructive feedback on the direction of your assignment.
Please review again the guidelines for the final research project [3]. Make sure that your final project meets all of these guidelines. Also review the Research Project Grading Rubric [4].
As a brief reminder, your final project should:
Format Reminders:
When you are ready to submit your final research project, please return to Canvas and open the Lesson 9 Research Project Final Draft dropbox in the Lesson 9: Home I - Dynamics of Home module.
Part of disseminating research is being able to clearly and concisely discuss your research. This so-called “elevator speech” is especially important for conveying the purpose and importance of your research to people who may not be familiar with your field of study. This may be used in the industry to convey key findings of a longer report, allowing customers the ability to get the most important information from that report without having to read the whole report — almost like the “Cliffs Notes” version of a report.
As part of your final research project, you will be required to submit an Executive Summary of your overall findings. This executive summary should be written in the style of the written brief, which you’ve been practicing throughout the term. Please refer to the “Writing a Brief [5]” portion of the lesson material for a refresher.
The Executive Summary should be:
When you have completed your executive summary, return to the Lesson 9: Home I - Dynamics of Home module in Canvas and look for the Lesson 9 Executive Summary dropbox. The dropbox has instructions for submitting the assignment.
In this lesson we looked at the concept of home as a place of extreme significance — one with sometimes mythical qualities. We reviewed some critiques of home and saw how home can be troubled or ruptured through loss, trauma, and other painful experiences. With the readings, we placed these concerns in human security contexts, looking at the experiences of refugees forced to leave home, and post-disaster returns to home. In the next lesson, we will revisit the idea of home as existing across scales as we tie up several of the themes we presented throughout the course.
Please return to the Lesson 9: Home I - Dynamics of Home module in Canvas where you will find the Lesson 9 Quiz. The quiz will asses your understanding of the Lesson 9 content and associated readings.
Please check the Canvas Syllabus or Calendar for specific time frames and due dates.
You have reached the end of Lesson 9! Double-check the to-do list on the Lesson 9 Checklist page [6] to make sure you have completed all of the activities listed there before you begin Lesson 10.
If you have any questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them to the GEOG 571 - General Discussion Forum. (That forum can be accessed at any time in Canvas by opening the Lesson 0: Welcome to GEOG 571 module in Canvas.)
Links
[1] https://www.youtube.com/citi
[2] https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/breaking-down-black-white-homeownership-gap
[3] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog571/node/432
[4] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog571/node/437
[5] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog571/node/495
[6] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog571/node/324