Homemaking

Homemaking: questions of authority and agency

Who makes a house or flat `home´, and how? What is the relation between the authority and vision of the architects, planners and other professionals who shape the house or apartment as built space, and the agency or aspirations of the occupant who moves in and turns that space into a dwelling, home? How do people taking up residency in houses and flats - whether mass, social housing distributed by the state, or commodified private houses - negotiate their material givens? For in the plan and built structures of housing are inscribed values and ideals - about the nature of the family, generational relations or gender roles, for example, or about relations between individual and society - that do not necessarily correspond to the practices of the occupants or to their consciously or unconsciously held assumptions about how to live. What is the relationship between objects in the home, and the narratives that surround them? Can we assume home as a site of material cultural practices (Eg Miller 2001; Pink 2004) or are homes imagined spaces where inter-generational narratives are played out and transformed in relation to the habitus of the everyday? (Bourdieu 1977; 1990).

As the locus of everyday life and a site of individual consumption, home tests the jurisdiction of specialists such as architects: it is a `turbulent sea of constant negotiation´(Daniel Miller, 2001, 4). What are the relations here between structure – taken literally to mean material/spatial structures of architecture - and agency, referring to the multiple agencies that act upon and interact in the space of the home? How are these relations played out in the material practices of homemakers?

The relationship between structure and agency may be seen as one of suppression and tyranny (Christopher Reed, 1996; Mary Douglas 1991); we are still learning from the great experiments in the creation of domestic space in the 20th century where architects have poignant stories of failure, compromise and constraints they imposed on the dweller.

Alternatively, does the poetics of space come with hindsight - can time lead to appreciation of the imposed order? How different is the relationship between architect/maker and occupant in the creation of mass housing, where the future tenant is unknown, and in a house made specifically for a known individual?

Bourdieu, P. (1977) trans. Nice, R., Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1990) trans, Nice, R., The Logic of Practice. Cambridge:
Polity Press.

Douglas, Mary (1991) 'The Idea of a Home: a Kind of Space', Social Research, Vol 58, no. 1 (spring )

Miller, Daniel (2001), ed., Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors (Oxford: Berg).

Pink, S (2004) Home Truths: Gender, domestic objects and everyday life. London: Berg

Reed, Christopher ed. (1996) Not at Home: The Supression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (Thames and Hudson)

Contacts:
Susan Reid s.e.reid@sheffield.ac.uk
Prue Chiles p.chiles@sheffield.ac.uk
Kate Pahl k.pahl@sheffield.ac.uk