Stories of Home (eBook)

Home is viewed as a space and place and associated with feelings, practices, and active states of being and moving in the world. This collection explores how we experience home and what home says about the selves we have become. This book is of interest and use to students and scholars in the fields of communication studies, cultural studies, performance studies, geography, gender studies, diaspora studies, and anthropology, and stands as an exemplar in qualitative, interpretive, critical, and auto-ethnographic methodology courses.

---

Notions of home are of increasing concern to persons who are interested in the unfolding narratives of inhabitation, displacement and dislocation, and exile. Home is viewed as a multidimensional theoretical concept that can have contradictory meanings; homes may be understood as spaces as well as places, and be associated with feelings, practices, and active states of being and moving in the world. In this book, we offer a window into the distinct ways that home is theorized and conceptualized across disciplines. The essays in this volume pose and answer the following critical and communicative questions about home: 1) How do people ';speak' and ';story' home in their everyday lives? And why? 2) Why and how is homeas a material presence, as a sense and feeling, or as an absencecentral to our notion of who we are, or who we want to become as individuals, and in relation to others? 3) What is the theoretical purchase in making home as a ';unit of analysis' in our fields of study? This collection engages home from diverse contexts and disparate philosophical underpinnings; at the same time the essays converse with each other by centering their foci on the relationship between home, place, identity, and exile. Homehow we experience it and what it that says about the ';selves' we come to occupyis an exigent question of our contemporary moment. Place, Identity, Exile: Storying Home Spaces delivers timely and critical perspectives on these important questions.