The Routledge Handbook of Home

This global, critical, and interdisciplinary handbook rethinks home as a material, emotional, and geopolitical site. It examines housing, displacement, domesticity, climate, care and the intimate labours, subjectivities, and practices of home. Across diverse contexts and with varied perspectives, including feminist, queer, and decolonial apprachers, the handbook chapters challenge romanticised ideals and illuminate home’s inequalities, exclusions, and possibilities.

Spanning 46 chapters across four parts (＂Theorising Home,＂ ＂Housing and Home,＂ ＂Domesticities and Everyday Life,＂ and ＂Global Challenges and Home Futures＂), this handbook blends conceptual innovation with grounded research. It offers global case studies, theoretical depth, and pedagogical tools on home’s entanglements with law, human rights, ecology, technology, violence, and more--making it indispensable for critical scholarship, teaching, and practice.

Designed for a broad audience, this handbook supports undergraduate learning, graduate teaching, and advanced research. It equips scholars, educators, activists, policymakers, and practitioners with essential insights and resources to engage with home as a site of power, identity, and struggle in a rapidly changing world.

Elaine Stratford is a professor in the School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences at the University of Tasmania, with interests in the geohumanities and cultural and political geography. Her research seeks to understand the conditions in which people flourish in place, in their movements, in daily life, and over the life-course. She is the author of several books, edited collections, and many chapters and articles. Her most recent monographs were published by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2019 under the title Home, Nature, and the Feminine Ideal: Geographies of the Interior and of Empire, and in 2023 under the titles Rethinking Island Methodologies, with Godfrey Baldacchino and Elizabeth McMahon, and Landscape, Association, Empire: Imagining Van Diemen’s Land, with Philip Hutch. Elaine is also an editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Home with Katie Walsh, and her next sole-authored book, Rethinking Life Course Geographies, is to be published by Edward Elgar. Work on that project is being supported by a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Writer’s Residency award. For the decade from 2015-2024 Elaine was the editor-in-chief of the international journal, Geographical Research, and is now its senior associate editor. She received the Institute of Australian Geographers’ Griffith Taylor Medal for Distinguished Service to the Discipline in Australia in 2022. When not working, she plants, harvests, and cooks, walks and works out, reads up a storm, and hangs out with loved ones.

Katie Walsh is Reader in Human Geography in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK, where she has developed an undergraduate module on home. Over the last two decades, Katie has published wide-ranging empirical research on home in relation to transnationalism, materialities, emotion, intimacy, family, ageing, Britishness, and migrant belonging. More recently, she has been exploring Mass Observation project data, using it to think through the embodied home and housing inequalities. Katie is also motivated in her work on home by personal experience of being a single parent household navigating the UK’s crises in building safety and leasehold home ownership. Among other publications, Katie is author of an ethnographic monograph on British migration to Dubai, Transnational geographies of the heart: Intimate subjectivities in a globalising city (Wiley, 2018), and has co-edited Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age (Routledge, 2016, with Lena Näre), British migration (Routledge, 2019, with Pauline Leonard), and The new expatriates: Postcolonial approaches to mobile professionals (Routledge, 2012, with Anne-Meike Fechter).