What does home mean to you?

WHERE, WHEN AND WHY O YOU FEEL AT HOME to what extent does your sens of home travel across different times, places and scales? In light of the multiple experiences of home in the modern world. Some may speak of the physical structure of their house or dwelling: others may refer to relationships or connections over space and time. You might have positive or negative feelings about home, or a mixture of the two. Your sense of home might be shaped by your memories of childhood, alongside your present experiences and your dreams for the future. Home as a sense of belonging or attachment is also very visible is one of the key characteristics of contemporary world: the historically unprecedented number of people migrating across continents as for instance refugees and asylum seekers. Notions of home are central in these migrations. Movement may necessitate or be percipitated by a disruption to a sense of home, as people leave or in some cases flee one home for another. Home is a place, a site in which we live. But more than this, home is also an idea and an imaginary that is imbued with feelings. These may be feelings of belonging, desire and intimacy (as for instance, in the phrase 'feeling at home') but can also be feelings of fear, violence and alienation. These feelings, ideas and imaginaries are intrinsically spatial. Home is thus a spatial imaginary; a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connect places. Home is hence a complex and multilayered geographical concept. Put most simply, home is home is: a place/site, a set of feelings/cultural meanings, and the relations between the two. Humanistic geographers focus on the meaning of home and the ways in which home is a meaningful place -- how people relate to and experience their dwelling as well as how how people create a sense of home in terms of comfort and belonging. Home was not necessarily a house or shelter for humanistic geographers, but was a very special place: an 'irreplaceable centre of significance' (Relph 1976: 39) and place 'to which one withdraws and from which one ventures forth' (Tuan 1971: 189) In investigatating people's experiences of the world and the place within it, humanistics geographers privilege the idea of home as grounding of identity, an essential place. For Dovey(1985) the term indicates a very special relationship between people and their environment, a relationship through which they make sense of their world. Home in this sense is much more than a house, and much more than feelings of attachment to particular places and people. Home is hearth, an anchoring point through which human beings are centred. Feminist frameworks have been important in developing geographical thinking on home. One of the reasons why there has been so much feminist thinking on home is because gender is crucial in lived experiences and imaginaries home. Cutting across the diverse definitions of home used in different frameworks is a recognition that home has something to do with intimate, familial relations and the domestic sphere. In addition to asserting that gender is critical in understanding home, feminists underline that home is a key site in in the oppression of women. For many women, home is a space of violence, alienation and emotional turmoil. As a symbolic representattion, home serves to remove women from the 'real' world of politics and business. According to Gillian Rose

(1993) points out, humanistic geographers' characterization of home as an essential grounding of human identity is masculinist, reliant on experiences of men rather than women. The notion of home as haven, as a sanctuary from society into which one retreats. may describe the lives of men for whom home is a refuge from work, but certainly doesn't descrive the lives of women for whom home is a workplace.