JS-44
From the Changing Idea of “the Family” to a Shifting Notion of Home? Spatiotemporal, Material and Affective Aspects of Contemporary Family Life
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC06 Family Research (host committee)
RC43 Housing and Built Environment
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
In family research current issues relating to mobility, multi-locality and fluidity in family life (e.g. migration, divorced families, blurred work-life boundaries, etc.) have brought up an increased interest in space and the notion of home – topics that have been marginalized for a long time.
The concepts of family and home have been strongly linked by the idea of the nuclear family (Hareven, 1991). However, the understanding of the family as a stable unit limited to a single house has been insufficient for capturing contemporary lives. Correspondingly, scholarly work introduced more complex definitions and multidimensional approaches to family life as well as to home and housing, notwithstanding the incorporation of the two realms still falls short and one has to ask whether the meaning of home has transformed along with the fading idea of ‘the family’ (James, 2013).
In this session, we wish to examine practices of doing family and home in various contexts, with focus on the temporal, spatial, material and affective aspects of everyday life. Our aim is to bring together different perspectives on “home” from mono-local to multi-local phenomena. We welcome papers that examine the shifting boundaries of home and family life and, more specifically, between private and public spheres, family, work and leisure or material and virtual spaces. The session seeks to capture family members’ (adults and/or children) “ways of living” (Schmitz, 2012), through the articulation between life spaces, mobility, sense of place and/or social relations as well as the emerging practical, legal and political constraints.
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