HOMInG’s Paolo Boccagni and Margarethe Kusenbach (University of South Florida) have recently published a theoretical piece on the sociology of home in Current Sociology, online first: For a comparative sociology of home: relationships, cultures, structures.

See the abstract below.

First Published June 12, 2020 Research Article

Home matters, for people’s everyday life and for social research, in ways that are still lacking a systematic sociological framework of analysis. As a contribution toward this framework, we define home as an emplaced relationship that prioritizes certain socio-material contexts over others, by virtue of the emotional, affective and practical values attached to them, in forms and degrees that change over space and time. This understanding highlights the interdependence between relational, cultural and structural aspects of home as a distinctive social experience. We then connect the sociological debate with the discourse on home across social sciences more broadly, with a particular emphasis on the heuristics, practices and multiscalarity of home. In terms of practical research, the methodological bases of ‘home studies’ are still in development, also regarding the prospects of translating and comparing home across socio-cultural and spatial contexts. Nonetheless, this Special Issue of Current Sociology opens up new ways to advance the field of home studies – theoretically in our opening paper, and empirically in the six articles that follow.