Publisher's Synopsis
Home is simultaneously both a place-bounded anchor and a spatially open structure that changes over time. It is a meeting place of inhabitants, culture, past and present -- a multidimensional spatial and temporal intersection. Within the domestic space private and public, personal histories and shared cultural meanings overlap. This original and timely book moves in the tense area between home as a dynamic space with leaking boundaries and a stable, intimate, and secure shelter of one's own. Instead of trying to define what home is, the book explores home both as an idea and location in a variety of contexts. It examines the questions of home, inhabiting and belonging by focusing on home as historical, cultural, material, emotional, technological, gendered, and sexualised space. This book challenges the prevalent notion of home as a static shelter and emphasises home as a dynamic process. Home and its meanings are formed in the movement and daily use of space. As a dynamic process, home is not a container of social processes; it is a social process. By analysing a variety of phenomena from art to the Internet and everyday spaces from the late nineteenth-century to the early twenty-first-century the authors offer tools for the re-conceptualisation of home.
