Home Cultures 

About: Home Cultures is an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Sociology & Materiality (auditing). It has an ISSN identifier of 1740-6315. Over the lifetime, 284 publications have been published receiving 3868 citations.

Multiple modernities: Kitchens for an African elite

Abstract: Meaning is inscribed in the material/built environment and this article considers the materiality of change in urban Africa, focusing particularly on the kitchens of a group of first-generation pro...

British Expatriate Belongings: Mobile Homes and Transnational Homing

Abstract: This article explores the mobile homes and transnational homing of British expatriates in Dubai. In the article, I analyze ordinary domestic objects that play a special role in the homemaking practices of their expatriate owners, drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic participant observation and home-based interviews. I argue that thinking about belonging through belongings is productive because it is empirically and theoretically attentive to the way in which home is experienced simultaneously as both a material and imaaterial, lived and imagined, localized and (trans)national space of belonging. Furthermore, the homes of expatriates make explicit the fluidity and multiplicity of home as process. This article focuses on three things found in British expatriate homes in Dubai: a painting, a plastic bowl and a DVD.

Orchestrating Concepts: Kitchen Dynamics and Regime Change in Good Housekeeping and Ideal Home, 1922-2002.

Abstract: It has long been recognized that users and consumers actively appropriate new products and technologies and assimilate them into existing regimes and frames of reference. Much less has been written about how these frames evolve or about how processes of integration and appropriation are sustained and transformed. In this article we analyze “the kitchen” not as a place but as an “orchestrating concept.” We subject “orchestrating concept.” We subject representations of the kitchen, as depicted in Good Housekeeping and Ideal Home (two of the foremost home magazines in Britain) from 1922 to 2002, to two types of analysis. We begin by showing how materials, images, and forms of competence “hang together” at different points in time and how kitchen regimes are formed. We then explore ways of characterizing transitions between one kitchen regime and another. The result is an account not simply of the elements of which kitchens are made but of the changing relations between these constitutive ingredients. The art...

Gay and Lesbian Couples at Home: Identity Work in Domestic Space

Abstract: Social research into gay/lesbian experiences of home has tended to posit domestic environments as alienating for gay/lesbian subjects, silencing their sexual identities. Meanwhile, work on the spatiality of sexual identity more broadly has largely focused on individuals or communities, not couples or households. In this context, this article aims to recover the importance of home for gay/lesbian couples. I explore how cohabiting gay/lesbian couples generate shared identities through domestic space, examining various ways in which these couples use homes to establish and consolidate their partnerships. Empirical data is drawn from twenty-three in-depth interviews with gay/lesbian Australians who are cohabiting, or have cohabited, with a long-term partner. The sample is largely limited to white, educated, middle-class gay men and lesbians living in urban Australia, providing an ethnographic window into the domestic identity-formation of a particular community of practice. Four key themes regarding “...