Living Room: Rematerialising Home

In recent years there has been an explosion of scholarship around the concept of home. Extending well beyond traditional social and cultural geographical concerns with the public ^ private divide, this recent wave of home studies has teased out the complex meanings of home and its relationship to identity and subject formation. Notable here is the trend set by the journal Home Cultures; exemplary in this vein is the recent book Home (2006) by Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, who also contribute to the themed essays that follow in this issue. Among other things, scholarship such as this shows how home is a complex field of feelings and subjectivity: an anchor for senses of belonging, a mechanism for living with, and in, the experience of transnationalism, and a site for constituting and performing selfhood. Like other social and cultural geographies, this interest with the meaning of home is not untouched by a material turn. There has been, for example, a new appreciation of the coconstitutive relationship between the formal features of actual dwellings and the social life that inhabits them. In good part inaugurating such scholarship, anthropologist Danny Miller (1988) wrote of the way residents worked to appropriate the design features of council estates in an attempt ``to transform alienable goods into inalienable culture' (page 353). More recently, geographer Mark Llewellyn (2004) has shown how the residents of Kensal House enhanced its liveability by renegotiating the dictates of modernist living embodied in its architecture. In a similar material vein is a growing interest in the deployment of objects in the home as a means of expressing and constituting the self. This approach challenges essentialised understanding of home and identity by illustrating how objects extend the reach of home through time and across space. Divia Tolia-Kelly (2004), for example, shows how British Asians use the physicality of `home possessions' (ornaments, souvenirs, and sacred objects) to draw the memory of homes left behind into their experience of dwellings lived in today. Greg Noble (2004) shows, too, how the accumulation of objects into home is simultaneously an accumulation of being and a quest for recognition. There are then already established traditions working with the materialisation of home, and we hope that the themed papers in this issue elaborate and extend that scholarship in new ways. As a means of framing these essays, which can really speak for themselves, we use this editorial to offer some suggestive thoughts on the direction and meaning of the intellectual work of rematerialising home. To do this we revisit an old materialism, engage with a new one, and conclude with an idea about what to do next.