Student geographies and homemaking: personal belonging(s) and identities

Studies of the ‘geographies of students’ have become increasingly prevalent across the social sciences and are particularly concerned with the predilection for young UK University undergraduates to be mobile in their institutional choice. A more recent focus within this work has been upon student identities, with attention given to how the spaces to which students move and in which they settle can have both positive and negative consequences for the evolution of the student identity, and how such identities are often framed within the context of social activities; learning environments; friendship networks; or other sociocultural factors. This paper contributes to these discussions by considering the role of student accommodation – a site which often remains on the periphery of discussions of student identities – in offering students opportunities to construct, adapt and manage their student identities. This adds to the important contemporary geographies of student accommodation, which are currently debating, among others, purpose-built student accommodation and the broad housing ‘careers’ and strategies of students. In contrast, this paper explores the micro-geographies of student accommodation (and more specifically, the bedroom) to highlight its value in providing young, mobile students with an anchor within which they can draw together their learner, social and domestic dispositions into one geographical location.     

A Britain that everyone is proud to call home? The bedroom tax,political rhetoric and home unmaking in U.K. housing policy

This paper explores the prominence of rhetorics of home in UK politics. Through the analysis of key prime ministerial speeches, I trace the lineage of home in political rhetoric, paying particular attention to the ways in which the imaginary of the homespace has been moralised through tenure type. The paper examines the ways in which both of the country’s major political parties have utilised rhetoric that places homeliness and homemaking at the centre of citizenship construction and nation-building, whilst simultaneously introducing housing policies that contribute to class-based acts of home unmaking. The final section of the paper examines the case study of the bedroom tax as an example of the power and influence of rhetorics of home. I draw on interviews with social tenants affected by the policy to highlight some of the consequences of the moralisation of the home, and the everyday impacts of home unmaking policies. Conceptually, the paper makes a dual contribution to social and cultural geographies. Firstly, I highlight the need for a stronger dialogue between critical geographies of home and geographies of housing literature. Secondly, the paper utilises home unmaking as an integral, and yet relatively underexplored, means of extending critical geographies of home literature.     

Prostitution,variegated homes,and the practice of unhomely life in China

This paper studies a group of female sex workers and their ambivalent experiences of home in Dongguan, China’s so-called sin city, before the local government technically cracked down on the city’s sex industry in 2014. It has two objectives. First, we explore these workers’ life journey: spatially from their rural hometown to Dongguan, socially from domestic migrants to sex workers, and subjectively from poor persons to extravagant spenders. Through this journey-based perspective, we show that the departure from one home opens a door to another home, but the door to the sex industry engulfs our respondents into a perpetual condition of unhomely life. Second, we analyze sex workers’ practices of (un)homely life in various spaces of working (sauna), dwelling (rented apartment), and consumption (shopping center) in Dongguan and their imagination of a new home. We argue that home is a liminal space of ambivalent experiences that revolve around dichotomous distinctions between privacy and publicity, friendship and segregation, marginalization and belonging. This paper contributes to the critical geographies of home by incorporating these ambivalent experiences of home into sex workers’ life journey of leaving and making home in the context of China.     

Homemaking in New Zealand: thinking through the mutually constitutive relationship between domestic material objects,heterosexuality and home

This article explores the homemaking practices of heterosexual couples who live in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand. Specifically, it examines the role of domestic material objects in the mutual production of heterosexuality and home. The article draws on data collected from joint and individual semi-structured interviews and self-directed photography with 14 heterosexual couples living in monogamous co-residential relationships. It offers an analysis of the ways in which heterosexual couples use ordinary household objects to constitute, consolidate and sometimes undermine their gendered and sexed subjectivities and interpersonal relationships. A focus on domestic material objects offers an opportunity for challenging normative assumptions about the relationship between heterosexuality and domestic space.     

Door Locks,Wall Stickers,Fireplaces: Assemblage Theory and Home (Un)Making in Lewisham’s Temporary Accommodation

This paper explores resident experiences of life in PLACE/Ladywell, a “pop-up” social housing scheme in London providing temporary accommodation for homeless families. Specifically, we consider barriers to, and assertions of, homemaking in this temporary setting through fixtures and fittings—a door lock, wall stickers, and a fireplace. The paper utilises assemblage thinking to understand homemaking within these time-limited and constrained circumstances. Despite their seeming banality, fixtures and fittings offer a material, politicised, and lively means of studying the attempted and thwarted production of home by residents living in PLACE/Ladywell. The absence of door locks reduces parents’ ability to maintain privacy and intimate relations; restrictions on hanging pictures and other decorative measures are circumvented by the use of wall stickers; and a defiant decorative fireplace establishes a sense of home in a temporary setting. Together, these objects constitute vital elements in negotiations between fixity and impermanence in temporary accommodation.