For a place that is so familiar, home is peculiarly difficult to define and to research

Abstract
For a place that is so familiar, home is peculiarly difficult to define and to research. Based on an extended review of recent literature on home, the article shows that there is no place like `home' because people construct its image in memory and imagination. Home, it is argued, is imaged on many different levels. At a surface level, home is known in terms of its location, fabric, decoration, furnishing and amenity - it is a place that is known intimately. At a deeper level, home is defined in terms of the kinds of relationships people have, or would like to have, with others inside and outside of the home. Deeper still, home is a representation of cultural identity and provides a collective sense of social permanency and security. People rarely think about home at this level, it is argued, unless reappraisal is forced upon them by a significant life event like migration between cultures or because of cultural invasion from without. The article argues for an intensification of research that starts from the domestic sphere is order to explore how home life both shapes and reflects wider social continuities and changes.
... In studies of migrants and other types of mobile consumers, home forms a recurring conceptual motif. The conceptualisation of home across the social sciences encompasses polyvalent, overlapping and at times conflicting definitions (Ahmed, 1999;Chapman, 2001;Mallett, 2004): home as a place (e.g. a childhood house, a country of birth, a homeland), a social space (e.g. the intimate lived space of a household, the relational space constructed through a virtual diaspora), a set of practices (e.g. mundane socio-material practices of domestic organisation, possession rituals) and a subjective experience of being-in-the-world (e.g. ...
... feelings of security, comfort and belonging). Imaginaries of home are deeply contextualised (Moore, 2000), shaped by intersections between individual biographies, sociopolitical ideologies and cultural ideals (Chapman, 2001;Cieraad, 2010;Hill, 1991;Mallett, 2004;Moore, 2000). ...
... Home as being-in-the-world. Over and above home as practice, home is also a phenomenological experience, a multi-layered structure of feeling connoting security, orientation, order, comfort, refuge, privacy, intimacy, rootedness and belonging (Blunt and Dowling, 2006;Chapman, 2001;Mallett, 2004). As Blunt and Dowling (2006, p. 11) write: EJM [. . ...
... Most common are anxieties concerning stability and security of rental tenures, with renters often unsure about the duration of their tenancy. As such, renters may often feel discouraged from attempting to "put down roots and create a home" (McKee et al. 2017, 5), alienating them from cultivating a private, domestic space typically associated with familial intimacy and cultural identity (Chapman 2001). Research from the UK outlines the lack of control and autonomy experienced by renters, noting that tenants are often unable to personalise their space by hanging pictures or using their own furniture, while finding pet-friendly accommodation can be very difficult (McKee and Soaita 2018). ...