Browse Hierarchy GEG6102: Geographies of Home

This module investigates geographies of home on scales ranging from the domestic to the global. Conceptually, the module considers the long-established 'suppression of home' (Reed, 1996), and its more recent revival in research across the humanities and social sciences. The module begins by tracing the celebration of home by humanistic geographers as a site of authentic meaning, value and experience, imbued with nostalgic memories and the love of a particular place. But humanistic geographers failed to analyse the home as a gendered space shaped by different and unequal relations of power and as a space that might be dangerous, violent and alienating rather than loving and secure. More complex and contested spaces of home have come to be studied by cultural geographers, often inspired by feminist and postcolonial theory. One central theme of this work has been an interest in the politics of home and identity, and the ways in which geographies of home are shaped not only by gender, but also by race, class, sexuality and age.