XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

731

Researching Home II: More Choices, Challenges and Opportunities

RC43 Housing and Built Environment (host committee)

Language: English

This session interrogates methodological choices, challenges and opportunities surrounding the study of “home"—not only understood as a location or background feature of everyday life but primarily as a complex social relationship with particular built environments, social settings and material cultures. In short, home is viewed as a privileged site for the study of place-making and belonging. As a concept, home illuminates a number of debates in social sciences. Those around the elusive emotion of “feeling-at-home”, or the design features that make a dwelling place “home-like” to its inhabitants are cases in point. However, much of the scholarly discussion of home tends to be abstract, selective or even ideological, rather than clearly examining what this notion means to whom, under what circumstances, and why. Likewise, much research tends to (over)rely on home-related experiential narratives instead of delving into the underlying social and political practices. While the privacy of domestic environments raises major practical, legal and ethical constraints, in recent years pioneering efforts have been made to reconstruct home experiences from within, via home tours, visual ethnographies, participatory or mobile methods, etc. This session is open to dialogue and comparison regarding these and other initiatives about various housing and home contexts, diverse research participants, as well as all global regions. We aim to bring together case studies and field-driven reflections of how people's experience of home is investigated and analyzed across a variety of disciplinary fields, including housing, urban, everyday life and material culture studies.