AAG 2025: Home-City Geographies and Processes of Homemaking in the Context of (Im)mobility

Soledad Àlvarez Velasco (Univ. of Illinois, Chicago); Ulrike Gerhard (Heidelberg Univ.), Solange Muñoz (Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville); Susanne Soederberg (Queens Univ., Kingston) Although concepts of home are one of the most complex and contested subjects in the social sciences, ‘home’ was historically ignored by social scientists, often relegated to what was considered the private domain of housewives and mothers. In the nineties, feminist geographers like Doreen Massey, Linda Peake, Gillian Rose, and others highlighted the importance of space in feminist and gender studies. However, it was only in the early 2000s, and later with the publication of Blunt & Dowling’s (2006/2022) canonical book “Home” that we began to see a large body of literature that specifically focuses on the complex, multiscalar and diverse meanings of home. Especially in the context of housing studies, home has gained political attention in relation to commodification, racialization and policy and thus has contributed to a rich variety of academic research and discussion. With the so-called global housing crisis as well as increasing migration and forced displacement, home and homemaking are becoming even more important – and contested. While home is still often thought of as a space of stability, these crises only highlight how it is increasingly experienced through precarity, displacement and loss. In these paper sessions we draw our attention to home and homemaking in the context of (im)mobility: practices, individuals and communities that engage in homemaking in conditions of precarity, displacement, migration, eviction, across borders, and everyday forms of forced mobility like commuting and their effects on time-poverty, mental and physical health issues etc. Building on Paolo Boccagni’s (2018) insightful research on home-making processes in migrant’s everyday lives we argue that homes and homemaking connect multiple scales of analysis, from dwelling, across neighborhoods and borders, the nation, and the world. Questions such as: How do people produce home when they are on the move? What is the situation in refugee camps? How do people produce home in their neighborhoods, even as rents and taxes continue to increase? How are these homes endangered by urban transformation processes? What role does climate change play for the production of home? How do migrants and marginalized communities create homes in societies that are increasingly hostile to their presence? Can home be created outside of the spatial? are just some of the questions we would like to address and discuss in our panels. We start from an urban perspective but also invite other angles of research on the meaning of homes and homemaking in the context of (im)mobilities. With this focus and by including contributions from all over the world, from different levels and forms of research (early-career researchers, qualitative or quantitative studies, interdisciplinary projects) we hope to continue and carry on the versatile discussion of home in a global perspective.

Please send abstracts and paper suggestions (around 250 words) to Solange Muñoz (solangemun@gmail.com and Ulrike Gerhard u.gerhard@uni-heidelberg.de or to any of the four chairs by October 20, 2024.