‘Mapping’ and ‘doing’ critical geographies of home

I Introduction: Geographical histories of home

Once cast as a uniform space of safety and familiarity, the home is now established as a far more problematic entity across the social sciences. Building on the work of humanistic geographers writing in the 1970s and 1980s, the home was hailed in the geographical canon as a site of authenticity and experience, provisioning a sense of place and belonging in an increasingly alienating world (Moore, 2000). With this, the modern home:

became constructed not only as a line separating the inside from the outside (a house), but also as the epitome, the spatial inscription of the idea of individual freedom, a place liberated from fear and anxiety, a place supposedly untouched by social, political and natural processes, a place enjoying an autonomous and independent existence: a home. (Kaika, 2004: 266, emphasis in original)

This ‘house as haven’ thesis was subject to fervent critique in the 1990s, with interdisciplinary calls for a ‘gloomier tale’ to be told in light of the ‘upbeat’ literature on home (Porteous, 1995: 152). Most critics took exception to, and focused their arguments on, one or more of the binary oppositions (inside/outside, male/female, work/home, public/private, safe/unsafe) underpinning a once purely optimistic notion of home. Pursued through case studies that highlighted disparities between ideals and lived realities of home (a key example here being the 1999 edited collection Ideal Homes? by Tony Chapman and Jenny Hockey), understandings of home space were increasingly brought under scrutiny. This was particularly evident in feminist analyses that emphasized the domestic not as an individual and homogenously experienced unit of harmony, but as a potential site of struggle and conflict (Badgett and Folbre, 1999; Olwig, 1998; Young, 1997). ¹ The domestic was instead reconceptualized as a continuous process of negotiations, contracts, renegotiations and exchanges (Folbre, 1986; Harris, 1981; Lawson, 1998). ² This recognition of potential conflict between the agency expressed by individuals and by the household permeated disciplinary boundaries, with anthropologist Daniel Miller (2001: 4) pointing out how the private had become viewed as ‘a turbulent sea of constant negotiation rather than simply some haven for the self’. ³

What has followed in the past 10 years is a further strengthening of the domestic as characterized by contrasting connotations (Blunt, 2005; Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Blunt and Varley, 2004; Domosh, 1998; Duncan and Lambert, 2004; Varley, 2008; Young, 1997). Summarized by Nicole Schröder (2006):

It makes much more sense to view home as a site of and for ambiguity since its protective functions are interconnected with its limiting characteristics. Feelings of solidarity, safety, and protection are often achieved by severe acts of exclusion and regulation, which are in turn oppressive. (Schröder, 2006: 33)

II Towards ‘critical’ geographies of home

Responding to the growth of ambiguous and contradictory analyses of home, Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2006) proposed the term ‘critical geographies of home’ in their seminal book Home. Here three cross-cutting components to a critical geography of home were drawn: ‘home as simultaneously material and imaginative; the nexus between home, power and identity; and home as multi-scalar’ (p. 22). The first component – the ‘material and imaginative’ – evokes home not only as a physical location in which people reside but also as an imaginative and metaphorical space of emotion and belonging (Al-Ali and Koser, 2002; Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Rapport and Dawson, 1998). The second – ‘home, power and identity’ – ties into debates concerning the domestic as a locus of personality, belonging and meaning to which people are differently positioned, and differentially experience according to age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class. Finally, the third – ‘multi-scalar’ – emphasizes the porosity of home as the personal relations it plays host to transect public and political worlds. Doreen Massey (1992: 14) elaborates that the identity of home derives ‘precisely from the fact that it had always in one way or another been open; constructed out of movement, communication, social relations which always stretched beyond it’. ⁴ Taken together, Blunt and Dowling (2006: 22) propose a ‘critical geography of home’ which moves beyond a binary of exclusionary or idealized space to show the ambiguity of this ‘spatialized’ and ‘politicized’ space (emphasis in original).

Taking this as a point of departure, this paper evaluates and prospectively calls for work that furthers ‘critical geographies of home’. The paper questions where research in geography goes from here in terms of (re)visioning a more complex and fluid understanding of the home which emerges from deliberate or unintentional disruptions to home places and sentiments at different scales and times. Considering in more depth what the ‘critical’ in ‘critical geographies of home’ implies, and how as researchers we ‘do’ this geography, I take my lead from the insightful review of Home by Cathrine Brun (2008: 565) who sets out a challenge, that ‘we should perhaps ask what our responsibilities as researchers in doing critical geographies of home are?’ With critical geographies of home requiring much fuller elucidation, this paper tackles negative experiences of home on two main grounds.

First, as Blunt and Dowling (2006) argue, there is a politics to home. In fact, the term ‘critical geographies of home’ was initially developed to understand the politics of home reflected in events occurring at the time of writing Home, from Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami, to the domestication of the war on terror in the United States. In this sense, the home is a vital space for understanding the micro-geographies of social and spatial uncertainty which influence, and are influenced by, wider structural forces of unhomeliness, alienation, and homelessness. While the home has been constructed as a radical political space in itself (see hooks, 1994), it is nevertheless a vulnerable crucible to wider political processes. Focusing on these processes remains of the utmost importance, especially in light of some scholars’ belief that it is still far too easy to fall into an idealized visioning of home. As John Rennie Short (2006) has voiced in respect to feminist concerns:

it is no accident, I feel, that in recent years the home has been seen as a sanctuary just at a time when domestic tensions are increasing. We are losing our sense of the fairness of the polity but hanging on to the notion of a domestic harmony. The image of a serene home life haunts our collective and individual imaginations. (Short, 2006: x)

I find that ‘doing’ home and feeling at home can usefully be thought of as some kind of balancing act: between private and public, domestic and civic, alienation and belonging, local and global, material and imaginative, and so on. This, of course, begs the question of what determines our abilities to achieve a balance that represents home to us. (Setten, 2008: 558–559)

This paper argues that although pursuing a ‘critical geography of home’ can be justified on these grounds, greater consideration needs to be paid to what difference uncovering negative experiences of home has. This query chimes with debates more broadly in ‘critical’ human geography, namely that scholars in their prioritization of empirical production and theoretical sophistication have failed to offer imaginative or practical guidelines for ‘doing’ something (Cloke, 2002; Pain, 2003). Rob Kitchin and Phil Hubbard (1999: 195) were among the first to highlight this deficiency: ‘it appears that many social and cultural geographers are happy to survey (and ‘map’) the exclusionary landscape, but rarely do much to change that landscape apart from the occasional nod to planning and policy recommendations’. Such criticism has been the catalyst in part for the growing number of activist geographers whose emphasis on participatory action-research seeks to struggle for a better world (a commitment I turn to later). ⁵ Such potential criticism is something I am also increasingly aware of in the context of my own research concerning the historical and contemporary realities of gender inequalities and domestic life in Cambodia (Brickell, 2007 in general, 2008 on domestic violence, 2011a on migrant homes, 2011b on housework) and Vietnam (Brickell, 2011c, on home-related proverbs). ⁶ Even though the research was prefaced by the need for feminist academics who are based in western institutions to ‘produce research agendas that do not merely address what is theoretically exciting or trendy here, but also what is considered politically imperative by the communities we work with or are committed to over there’ (Nagar, 2002: 184, emphasis in original), I question whether this is really enough to claim my work ‘critical’. Again, following Brun (2008: 566), ‘what consequences would taking those responsibilities into consideration have for pushing the ideas of critical geographies of home further?’

The remainder of the paper considers this question in more depth. It does so in two parts: the first considers how ‘extreme’ and ‘everyday’ domestic disruptions have been ‘mapped’, and the second highlights where geographers and other social scientists have sought to ‘do’ something about the exclusions identified. While I utilize this dualistic structure as a heuristic device to organize the analysis that follows, note should (and will) be given to the blurring between these two modes shaping the development of critical geographies of home.

III ‘Mapping’ critical geographies of home

Geographers have been particularly active in their surveying of mutations to idealized versions of home which emerge from sudden, gradual or routine exigencies of daily life. This section is divided into two interconnected sections which both explore what has (not) been ‘mapped’: ‘extreme’ and ‘everyday’ geographies of home. John Porteous and Sandra Smith (2001: 21) originally used the prefix ‘extreme’ in connection to the neologism ‘domicide’ (the deliberate destruction of home) which is ‘generally infrequent, massive, abnormal’ and involves ‘major, planned operations that occur rather sporadically in time but often affect large areas and change the lives of considerable numbers of people’. The other prefix ‘everyday’ was harnessed to make reference to domestic discontinuities that occur ‘continuously all over the world’ and which come about from the ‘mundane operation of the world’s political economy’ (p. 106). In this paper, I treat these prefixes loosely, as a continuum, and in an interdependent manner, moving (back and forth) from acute circumstances of material domestic loss to disruptions of home emerging out of the operations of daily life and life course transitions. I demonstrate at a range of levels how critical geographies of home have been championed and neglected by research that illuminates home as simultaneously material and imaginative, as a locus of power and identity, and as manifest across scales.

2 Everyday geographies of home

The home is a powerful location for, and arbiter of, life course transitions that are both dynamic and flow across time. Geographers have accordingly made valiant moves to map the domestic as a major site of life events as well as everyday practices that can be simultaneously rewarding but also constraining for its diversely positioned inhabitants. As Leeke Reinders and Marco Van der Land (2008) argue:

disruptions in the physical or social environment seem to hit those with few means the hardest. Because of restricted means and few alternative options, for some social groups such as elderly people, low-income households, home often means a fixed geographically delineated place. Displacement or changes in the social and physical environment have most impact on them, as they cannot move, while others can and do. (Reinders and Van der Land, 2008: 8)

With reference to disability, Rob Imrie (2004) has concentrated on the unsuitability of people’s homes with the onset and development of bodily impairment which makes ideal domestic habitation always conditional and contingent. The difficulty of meeting people’s needs is also reflected in the growing literature that plots transitions to old age and which emphasizes that because of restricted physical means and few alternative options home becomes an increasingly delineated place. Considering these situations in more depth, Christine Milligan (2000: 54; see also 2003) elucidates that even when care is administered within old people’s own homes, the ‘blurring of public and private space can mark a change in the meaning and experience of home where carers and cared-for experience an increased dislocation from the home-space’ as living rooms take on features of the hospital ward and health professionals and care-workers move in and out, governed by time constraints (see also Dyck et al., 2005, on the home as the site of long-term care; Bhatti, 2006, on the garden as a means to recreate home in later life). Equally, in urban Mexico, Ann Varley and Maribel Blasco (2000) show how the home does not automatically function as a space of familiarity and comfort for retired men. Alienated within a territory viewed as feminine and divorced from a breadwinning identity, men’s unhappiness is rooted in a lack of privacy from family members.

Taking such home-transitions one step further, research has demonstrated how moving into an institution for the elderly or infirm is accompanied by feelings of loss or even banishment with such homes bearing none of the characteristics of a private home (Fairhurst, 1999; Hockey, 1999; Parr et al., 2003). Denial of home, rather than exclusion felt within it, takes precedence as, even though one’s image of home remains, control over its manifestation may become compromised and even lost. Of note here is the research of anthropologist Fiona Parrott (2005) which movingly brings into view the refusal of patients residing in a medium secure psychiatric unit to decorate their walls. With bareness a signification of home, it is illustrated that the strong temporal connections made between home-making and permanence makes this practice only suitable as a subject for future contemplation. Here then it could be argued that the unit’s patients are themselves ‘doing’ a critical geography of home by tactically resisting and denying themselves to submit to a supposed and ever-present home-making urge. This contemporary research is also complemented by new unpublished historical research on the design, decoration and furnishing of 19th-century residential institutional spaces, questioning to what extent inmates were able to achieve privacy and feel ‘at home’ (Hamlett et al., 2010). ⁹

Such acts or experiences of severance between homes links into mounting theoretical interest surrounding the events and processes via which a home is demoted to a mere house through divestment. In other words, while place can acquire deep meaning through ‘the steady accretion of sentiment’ (Tuan, 1977: 33), why and how does the dis-accretion of sentiment occur? Jean Sébastien Marcoux (2001) has examined the divestment rituals performed by elderly people in Montreal (Canada) moving from a home into care, a process that is called casser maison (literally ‘breaking the house’). In instances such as these, it is argued that what follows within residential homes are attempts to mask evidence of deterritorialization and death which otherwise in a ‘literal sense would be profoundly disruptive in that, as visible manifestations of human mortality, their presence within that setting transgresses the boundaries through which life and death are customarily kept apart’ (Hockey, 1999: 118). On death, other research has considered the social meanings associated with the passing on of houses via inheritance. Janet Finch and Lynn Hayes (1994) outline how ‘the process of clearing out the home involves a further dismantling of one’s relationship with the deceased, who “lives on” in the home which they have created until the home is broken up’ (p. 431). Developing conceptual insights by geographers such as Nicky Gregson (2007; see also Gregson et al., 2007) should encourage more explicit mapping of divestment and accumulation in line with the cautionary words of Daniel Miller and Fiona Parrott (2009: 510) that ‘there is no single sequence of distribution and divestment about which we can generalize, but a complex pattern of accumulation, sorting, and divestment that utilizes objects to help create a long-term, processual relationship to the loss’.

A key domestic disruption that has so far been largely ignored in the geographies of home and divestment literature (along with repossession as aforementioned) is marital breakdown and divorce (as a phenomenon that is seeing successive annual increases in the UK, see Anthony, 1997; see also Brickell, 2011b, in Cambodia). James McLean (2008: 564) urges further work on critical geographies of multiple homes that have been ‘fragmented, fractured, and flung across space by divorce’ including work on children whose material and imaginary home occupy (at least) two sites (parental/caregiver homes) and each with a unique set of sociospatial relations of power and identity. Equally, John Watkins and Amy Hosier (2005: 202) suggest that ‘divorce may result in a move back to the early-life influence sphere in young adulthood, or more generally independence, with remarriage causing yet another transition to codependent influence, but with a new spouse’s sense of home to negotiate’. Given then that homes ‘always involve encounters between those who stay, those who arrive and those who leave’ (Ahmed, 1999: 340), marital breakdown and resultant moves are an important dimension of understanding these increasingly normative journeys which households and individuals experience. Exemplifying this in Figure 1, my own research in Cambodia powerfully illustrates the significance that separation and divorce has for women’s home lives in rural areas.

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Figure 1.

Kalliyan’s absent home

Twenty-nine-year-old Kalliyan was abandoned without any explanation two years earlier by her husband who fled taking one son and never returning. ¹⁰ Sitting looking over an empty field, she spoke of the marital home loaded onto a lorry by her husband and driven away. Now alone, and fearful of rape on account of her diminished status, Kalliyan’s new wooden house was strategically positioned nearer to her parents’ to symbolize renewed membership of a family unit. With other women in the study forced to watch their homes being loaded onto a lorry, taken away by their husbands, and left with a patch only of bare land, the research dramatically highlights the importance of mapping home not only in its presence, but also in its absence. This project, along with previous work on domestic violence (Brickell, 2008) shows how such disruptions are thought to surface from the ‘normal’ (tomodah) business of everyday life. In proverbial terms, the home in Cambodia is not one traditionally constructed as timelessly harmonious but one in which domestic life is presented as conflictual. The commonly used proverb in interviews, ‘plates in a basket will rattle’, inplies that family members, like plates, often collide with each other in the home. Indeed, this conception of the household relates to one of the most serious and perhaps alarming aspects of marital breakdown, and domestic violence, in Cambodia – the culture of impunity and tacit acceptance surrounding it (UNIFEM et al., 2004: 13).

In thinking about other work produced more widely on domestic violence, it is not so much the discourse of normalcy that is the subject of concern, but its invisibility. Research has emphasized how ‘the ideological scripting of home as intimate and safe makes violence against women difficult to see’ with women often tolerating violence so as not to signal a deep failure or collapse of home (Price, 2002: 40). Paula Meth (2003) has shown, however, how this invisibility is manifest quite differently for homeless women who, she argues, are overlooked in analyses given the assumption that domestic violence is connected to formal material home spaces. Furthermore, while women may feel ‘homeless at home’, domestic violence can ultimately lead to homelessness in an objective sense as they escape (or are ejected) from their violent homes (Wardhaugh, 1999; see also Warrington, 2001, on refuges as non-homes of security). Ultimately, the diverse work showcased on the ‘mapping’ of critical geographies of home has signposted the powerful influence that the ideological choreographing of home has by different actors, be they scholars, planners, policy-makers or others. Such variant scripting has a significant bearing not only on what transgressions to home and its inhabitant(s) are identified, but also to which injustices are responded to. More than this, though, it is the improved understanding of these negative expressions of home that are in themselves ‘critical’ to the ‘doing’ of a critical geography of home.

IV ‘Doing’ critical geographies of home

This second part of the paper more directly considers the nature of geographers’ engagement in the ‘doing’ of a critical geography of home. In Rachel Pain’s (2003) paper on action-oriented research, she highlights three overlapping modes to approach a critical social geography through activist, participatory and policy research. Rather than take each mode in turn, I highlight two main characteristics of critical geography research on home that connects to this suite of praxis. I go on to show, however, that while the emphasis of action-oriented research tends to err on the making public of domestic injustices with a view to being able to do something about them, with respect to home ‘doing’ can be understood through a third characteristic. Namely, ‘doing’ could be seen to rest, in part, on the personal attempts made by academics to enact or reflect upon change in the space of their own intimate lives.

The first characteristic of current work on the ‘doing’ of a critical geography of home is that the ‘private’ injustice being focused upon tends to be relatively ‘public’. Homelessness, for example, is a forefront issue in the sharpening of interest in activism as an explicit strategy and outcome of research (see, for example, Paul Chatterton, 2002, on his squatting of derelict buildings in Newcastle city centre as a ‘brief intervention’). In fact, this visibility was what first propelled Paul Cloke (2002: 588) to study homelessness: ‘when I came to Bristol from Lampeter in 1992, I encountered on-street homelessness for the first time in my everyday life, and it was these sites/sights of homelessness which gave grounded expression to the politics and ethics of resisting injustice’. Work on this issue has accordingly highlighted the possibility for, if not active experience of, feeding people’s experiences of homelessness into town planning, councils, public and private businesses (Doyle, 1999; Robinson, 2002; Veness, 1993), through the use of creative methods such as auto-photography to ‘map’ the ‘hidden’ spaces that that do not typically feature in public (or academic) imaginations of the subject (Johnsen et al., 2008). In this way, we can see how ‘mapping’ and ‘doing’ are again integral to one another.

A second related characteristic of ‘doing’ a critical geography of home has been to challenge the exclusionary processes identified through ‘mapping’ the domestic by bringing these into the public realm. Here so-called ‘private’ issues are deterritorialized, rendering them public(ized) and thus (strategically) disruptive of the public/private divide. Exemplary of this move, Geraldine Pratt has developed a long-standing relationship with domestic workers in Vancouver spanning back to the early 1990s (see Pratt, 2004). She argues that ‘our commitment should be one of opening doors for communication’ by ‘creating trouble’ and ‘making visible boundary constructions and the production of difference’ so as to be politically productive (Pratt, 1999: 164). To this end, through collaboration with the Philippine Women Center of BC, Caleb Johnston and Geraldine Pratt (2010) took conventional research materials and turned them into a performance installation using the testimonies of familial separation by Filipino mothers and their children. Stimulating interest around an important social issue, at the same time as evoking an emotional visceral response from audience members, this innovative approach demonstrates how novel pathways could be furthered by scholars of home who are keen to consider the transformative potential of their research in order to lobby for change (see also Blunt et al., 2007).

The power of performance in the remaking of public space as one where ‘private’ issues can become visible and contestable is aptly demonstrated by Richa Nagar’s (2000) research with a grassroots feminist theatre in Chitrakoot, India. As Nagar reflects, the theatre performances represented spatialized acts in which women, many of whom had suffered violence against them, ‘literally moved the discourse on these subjects – first, from the privacy of women’s homes to the spaces of the organization, and later, from the organization to the male-dominated public spaces of the community’ (Nagar, 2000: 359, emphasis in original). In this way, methodological approaches which bring out people’s private lives into public require continued and complex consideration given the ethics, sensitivities and potential consequences of doing so.

While research has highlighted the significance of ‘stories’ produced through intensive interviewing for avoiding the disembodied voice of the researched, the two preceding examples of theatre show how this method does not constitute the only type of knowledge that may promote political change (Hubbard, 1999). With research regarded more ‘critical’ when it creates knowledges produced by (rather than about) marginalized groups, my own research in Hue, Central Vietnam, sought to use participatory video (PV) to allow community members to document, and reflect upon, their domestic lives. ¹¹ Notwithstanding critiques that such engagements are deluded in thinking that they circumvent power or enable empowerment (see Kesby, 2007, for review of this debate), I tried to collaboratively generate knowledge and informed action through two PV workshops (including body mapping, storyboarding and the filming of role plays) which equipped participants with the skills and confidence to video an annual event held by the commune’s Women’s Union. The ‘Happy Family’ competition involves women competing in the cooking of nutritious food and flower arranging, both viewed as important components of home-making (men are usually only judges and audience members). Stemming from previous research which engaged with the Women’s Union, the project was devised jointly and chose to publicly include men as participants with women for one of the first times in the commune’s history (Figure 2). ¹² Paper-edited with the help of participants and the Women’s Union leader (Figure 3), the finished film is currently being piloted as a gender training tool by the Union in their efforts to encourage greater household equality.

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Figure 2.

Example of men and women competing together in the flower-arranging round

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Figure 3.

Paper-edit of participatory video in Women’s Union leader’s home

Explained at the start of the paper, I have become increasingly self-critical of my own home-oriented research. In this specific project it remains to be seen – and indeed surveyed – what implications (if any) the research and other interventions will have for the future strategies used by the Women’s Union to encourage greater male participation in family life. Certainly, however, the project at this initial stage indicates the importance for future research on home that aims to be ‘critical’ to account for the multilayered coordinates of control and translation that operate. In the case of the Hue study, a complex flow of power dynamics was initiated that warrants further interrogation. This included bringing out participants’ ‘private’ lives into the semi-public workshops; publicizing them further through the very public event day (Figure 2); privatizing these experiences again through the final editing process in the home of the Women’s Union leader (Figure 3); and finally screening the film to the commune and wider academic and policy communities in years to come. Put otherwise, ‘doing’ critical geographies of home also demands careful ‘mapping’.

The third and final characteristic to note concerning the ‘doing’ of a critical geography of home is that such public politicization of domestic issues can and should be complemented by academics’ efforts to transform or at least make sense of their own negative or challenging experiences of home(s). Two examples in the literature resonate deeply here. First, via an ‘interlude’ about her unconformist mother, Iris Young (1997) painfully recounts how her mother’s dream of a suburban existence turned into a nightmare. Giving up a high-flying career to become a stay-at-home mother in 1958, Young describes how as a child she was ‘mortified’ by the ‘weirdness’ of her mother, ‘sitting in her chair reading and writing, instead of cooking cleaning and mending like a real mom’ (p. 145). When Young’s mother died, however, over 20 years later, the author rethought her mother’s refusal to do housework as passive resistance to the stifling world of suburban morality she had become subsumed within, and harshly judged by, after her husband’s death when she was accused of child neglect based almost solely on evidence of drinking and a messy house. Yet despite Young experiencing repeated bouts of time in care as a consequence, the author powerfully brings to the fore the tensions and ambiguities that feminists contend with between romanticizing home and rejecting it as an ideal.

The need to be wary of rejecting home despite its potential for damage chimes with the second example of autobiographical work which traces Ann Varley’s (2008) emotions and coping strategies associated with her father’s dementia. The research heart-wrenchingly documents Varley’s anguish at her father’s repeated pleas to return home from his specialist one, leaving the author feeling overwhelmed by a sense of loss and betrayal further accentuated when the time came to sell his home. As Varley eludicates:

Having seen how being at home helped my father sustain his narrative of self, and how not being able to go home now causes him and some other residents of his care home such distress, I can no longer read denunciations of the dysfunctional home without feeling a chill of unease. We are none of us autonomous at home, but there may come a time in our lives when we too desperately wish we were. (Varley, 2008: 61, emphasis in original)

V Concluding thoughts: Towards ‘critical’ geographies of home … again

This paper’s primary purpose has been to appraise the state of play concerning the ‘mapping’ and ‘doing’ of critical geographies of home and to question what difference uncovering negative experiences of home has. It has revealed both empirical avenues for further inquiry, such as repossession and divorce, and theoretical paths from the sensory to temporal that are equally deserving of greater attention. More profoundly, though, the paper has shown how the scholarly modes of ‘mapping’ and ‘doing’ cannot be always separated but should be viewed in a mutually constitutive manner. First, while critical geographers must arguably devote more energy to moving beyond the pursuit of empirical production and theoretical sophistication, the paper indicates that ‘mapping’ remains an important prerequisite for ‘doing’ if interventions or otherwise are to be appropriately tailored and actioned, especially when dealing with the intricacies and politics of domestic life. Second, the review suggests that the mounting professional onus on academics to directly ‘get out there’ and ‘do’ something (Castree, 1999) to challenge negative expressions of home needs to be balanced against their bringing to light of affected people’s own forays into the politicization and publicization of domestic issues. This could be furthered, I argue, by future work which examines campaigns about domestic issues such as homelessness and domestic violence at a range of (non-)organizational scales but which also provides ‘real’ life insight into academic engagements with, and contributions to, these endeavours. Third, and finally, this paper shows that, in line with feminist approaches, the ‘doing’ of a critical geography of home can also extend itself to self-reflection by scholars themselves on how their own home histories, experiences and actions shape, and are shaped by, the domestic worlds and issues that they choose to research.

Our responsibilities as critical geographers of home then (to respond to Brun’s question at the start) are through innovative and collaborative research methods, to support, report and even become participants in spatial acts of resistance that have the potential to spark positive change in people’s home(less) lives. It is these challenges to ingrained exclusionary practices and hegemonic discourses of home that have the capacity to rally further understanding of how social change at the domestic level comes about at differing levels of permanency and adequacy. Now is the time that the burgeoning interest in, and catalogue of research on, home is capitalized upon by pushing towards a critical geography of home that simultaneously illuminates and catalyzes the addressing of domestic injustice.