Designer's Corner Centring the Home in Research

Abstract

The Oxford dictionary includes in its definitions of the home (a) "the place where one lives; the fixed residence of a family or household," and (b) "a dwelling-house." This core space of everyday life, embedded in a legacy of ideas of the home as a haven of domesticity, separate from the harshness of the public world of paid work, is, however, being shown to be a far more complex concept and reality than a simple dictionary definition suggests. Geographers, particularly those working from a feminist perspective, have challenged accepted notions of the distinction between public and private, of "family home," and of the home as necessarily a safe space for women and children. An array of findings demonstrate, for example, a multiplicity of family forms and living arrangements accompanying demographic and social change, and a blurring of the boundaries of home and work as women's engagement in different forms of domestic and paid work in their own or others' homes is recognized. Furthermore, the influence of normative heterosexuality and notions of the private, nuclear family are being shown to marginalize certain family forms, such as the lone parent or the gay/lesbian household, and to shield domestic violence (see Bowling & Pratt, 1993, for an overview of geographical studies).1 In sum, "the family home" is a complex spatial and social institutional arrangement that needs considerable unravelling if it is to be fully understood. Certainly, the diversity of families, household arrangements, meanings of home, locations, and spatial arrangements of homes suggests that integrating the home into research can contribute to our understanding of the connections among everyday lives, health, and the management of illness and disability.