Product Description

An essential guide to studying home and domesticity, this book locates 'home' within wider traditions of thought across the social sciences and humanities, analyzing different sources, methods and examples in historical and contemporary contexts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #323503 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From the Back Cover

Home is a key idea in numerous traditions of geography as well as a key site and spatial imaginary in the contemporary world. This book provides a critical geography of home, from domestic to transnational scales.

Through an engagement with geographical, feminist, cultural studies and postcolonial scholarship, the book demonstrates the complex nature of home as a place and as a spatial imaginary: home can invoke a sense of belonging as well as alienation; ideas and emotions about home can be stretched across the world, connected to a nation and attached to a house; the spaces and imaginaries of home are central to the construction of people's identities and are materially manifested in a wide range of home-making practices. The argument is made through diverse historical and contemporary examples, including:

* the linking of home and nation in contemporary US politics;

* the historical experiences of the British in India;

* the social correlates of the suburban house and high-rise apartment;

* home as work and the transnational migration of domestic workers.

This book provides an essential guide to studying home and domesticity. Each chapter includes text boxes, research boxes and is well illustrated throughout with photographs and figures.

About the Author

Alison Blunt is in the Department of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London.

Robyn Dowling is in the Department of Human Geography at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.