This global, critical, and interdisciplinary handbook rethinks home as a material, emotional, and geopolitical site. It examines housing, displacement, domesticity, climate, care, and the intimate labours of home. Across diverse contexts, it challenges romanticised ideals and illuminates home’s inequalities, exclusions, and possibilities through feminist, decolonial, and life-course perspectives.
Spanning 46 chapters across four parts ('Theorising Home', 'Housing and Home', 'Domesticities and Everyday Life', and 'Global Challenges and Home Futures'), and with contributions from authors from around the world, this handbook blends conceptual innovation with grounded research. It offers global case studies, theoretical depth, and pedagogical tools on home’s entanglements with law, ecology, technology, violence, and more—making it indispensable for critical scholarship, teaching, and practice.
Designed for a broad audience, this handbook supports undergraduate learning, graduate teaching, and advanced research. It equips scholars, educators, activists, policymakers, and practitioners with essential insights and resources to engage with home as a site of power, identity, and struggle in a rapidly changing world.
This global, critical, and interdisciplinary handbook rethinks home as a material, emotional, and geopolitical site. It examines housing, displacement, domesticity, climate, care, and the intimate labours of home.
Arvustused
"This scholarly and international contribution comes at a juncture in society when the value of home is challenged, yet its significance to how we live individually and collectively is being re-imagined. Shaped within a sharp analysis of the myriad social forces that mediate the experiences and meanings of home, this collection is groundbreaking."
Cameron Parsell, Professor of the Social Sciences, The University of Queensland
"In the context of a global housing crisis and numerous geopolitical crises , the notion of home is becoming more and more debated across and within disciplines. This handbook provides a comprehensive and insightful look into this field. A must read for anyone interested in this most basic of needs."
Loretta Lees, Director of the Initiative on Cities and Professor of Sociology, Boston University
"The Routledge Handbook of Home is packed with rich material reflecting the multi-layered, multi-spatial and multi-disciplinary concept of home. It offers critical insights into peoples diverse experiences of home and is an essential resource for understanding the complexities, challenges and crises of this fundamental aspect of humanity."
Jenny Hoolachan, Senior Lecturer of Criminology, Cardiff University
"This handbook of many interpretations of home and what it means to have a home is worthy of study. The diverse origins of its contributors also ensure the book has global relevance. This is a book to have to hand for everyone dealing with modern problems of housing and home."
Professor Brenda Vale, Victoria University of Wellington
"This handbook is impressive in its intellectual and geographical breadth. It encompasses the critical economic dimensions of housing, but also considers how we live within, and without, homes. It provides rich insights into how homes are made and unmade, with careful attention to both structural and individual factors."
Damian Collins, Professor of Human Geography, University of Alberta
"This timely collection critically examines housing as homeacross sites of belonging, exclusion, and unmakingthrough an intersectional lens. Accessible, comprehensive, and engaging, yet maintaining a sharp critical edge, it offers an essential overview of current thinking on home. A key strength lies in its amplification of emerging and established voices across disciplinary, methodological, and geographical boundaries, reinvigorating long-standing debates with fresh insight."
Özlem Çelik, University of Turku, Finland
An interdisciplinary tour de force which welcomes scholars to think more critically about the everyday complexities of home in a crisis-ridden world."
Katherine Brickell, Professor of Urban Studies, Kings College London, UK
1 Introducing and understanding home Part I Theorising home Part I
Introduction theorising home 2 Creatively researching home 3 Ethnography and
home 4 Eros sexuality and the home 5 Temporality race and home 6
Intersectional feminists reimagining home 7 Home and homelessness 8 Writing
against home 9 Domicide and home unmaking 10 The colonies of home 11 Home
housing and law 12 The global intimate in the climate emergency 13 Homing
with nature Part II Housing and home Part II Introduction housing and home 14
Global finance and the neoliberal home 15 Housing inequalities and home in
higher income countries 16 Home housing rights and housing inequality 17
Urban gentrification and domicide 18 Designs for home 19 Experiencing
homelessness 20 Home in refugee camps 21 Student accommodation and home 22
Community-led housing and home 23 Gated homes 24 Urban squatting and home
Part III Domesticities and everyday life Part III Introduction domesticities
and everyday life 25 The domestic interior 26 Gendered home lives 27 Domestic
violence 28 Neurodivergence and home 29 Housing for inclusive homes 30
Homeworking 31 Digital technologies and home 32 Home and religion 33
Consumption identity and home 34 Food practices and home Part IV Global
challenges and home futures Part IV Introduction global challenges and home
futures 35 Genocide war and home 36 Un/homing and diaspora 37 Citizenship
home and asylum 38 Diaspora and homeland development 39 The postcolonial home
and belonging 40 Situated performances of home 41 Global domestic labour and
home care 42 Code augment smart homes 43 Home urban 44 Tourism and home 45
Housing sustainability and home in the climate emergency 46 Earth as island
home
Elaine Stratford is a professor in the School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences at the University of Tasmania, with interests in the geohumanities and cultural and political geography. Her research seeks to understand the conditions in which people flourish in place, in their movements, in daily life, and over the lifecourse. She is the author of several books, edited collections, and many chapters and articles. Her most recent monographs were published in 2019 under the title Home, Nature, and the Feminine Ideal: Geographies of the Interior and of Empire, and in 2023 under the titles Rethinking Island Methodologies, with Godfrey Baldacchino and Elizabeth McMahon, and Landscape, Association, Empire: Imagining Van Diemens Land, with Philip Hutch. Elaine is also an editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Home with Katie Walsh, and her next sole-authored book, The Drowned, is to be published in 2025. Work on Rethinking Life Course Geographies has, in early 2025, been supported by a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Writers Residency award. For the decade from 2015 to 2024 Elaine was the editor-in-chief of the international journal, Geographical Research, and is now its senior associate editor. She received the Institute of Australian Geographers Griffith Taylor Medal for Distinguished Service to the Discipline in Australia in 2022. When not working, she plants, harvests, and cooks, walks and works out, reads up a storm, and hangs out with loved ones.
Katie Walsh is Reader in Human Geography in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK, where she has developed an undergraduate module on home. Over the last two decades, Katie has published wide-ranging empirical research on home in relation to transnationalism, materialities, emotion, intimacy, family, ageing, Britishness, and migrant belonging. More recently, she has been exploring Mass Observation project data, using it to think through the embodied home, housing inequalities, and ageing. Katie is also motivated in her work on home by personal experience of being a single parent household navigating the UKs crises in building safety and leasehold homeownership. Among other publications, Katie is author of an ethnographic monograph on British migration to Dubai, Transnational Geographies of the Heart: Intimate Subjectivities in a Globalising City (2018), and has co-edited Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age (Routledge, 2016, with Lena Näre), British Migration (Routledge, 2019, with Pauline Leonard), and The New Expatriates: Postcolonial Approaches to Mobile Professionals (Routledge, 2012, with Anne-Meike Fechter).