Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to examine how home is done, stretched between everyday life, practices, dreams, loss and cultural ideas of home. There are many homes and ways `to home oneself´. We may use different strategies in order to create a homely feeling and a certain sense of belonging.

Paper long abstract:

What is home? A building, a concept, a physical and mental phenomenon, an embodied experiences or practice? There are many homes and ways `to home oneself´. Many of us quite often dwell in other places than at home (as professional commuters between two places, as travellers staying in hotels, as children of divorced parents living one week with mom and one week with dad). We spend so much time in and between these movements and settings that we may even (have to learn how to) 'home ourselves'. In other words, we may use different strategies in order to create a homely feeling and a certain sense of belonging. This paper expands on the notion that home indicates more than a house, but also responds to the overuse of the concept home. The aim of this paper is to examine how home is done, stretched between everyday life, practices, dreams, loss and cultural ideas of home. My intention is not to remove home, but to revitalize it to prevent it from turning into a pell-mell or a zombie (Beck 1999). This is important because we are moving away from the hegemonic idea of one home to the tactics of feeling at home, even in more mobile ways. The study is cross-disciplinary, drawing on cultural phenomenology, material culture, the history of ideas and ethnographic fieldwork among commuters.