Home. As a highly trained human geographer, surely home should be a concept I know something conceptually powerful about? But I don't. I can't even remember who has theories of home/hearth/dwelling... Actually, when I picked up the dictionary of human geography, there is no entry for any of those terms - nor yet in my Oxford Companion to Philosophy! Introducing Human Geography indexes 'home improvements' but not 'home'. For a moment, I thought I'd discovered a gap in theory and was inspired to re-enter academia on a fiery steed (NOT). But it turns out (Amazon search) that 'Home' is one of the key idea in geography and there's a Routledge book of that title by Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling - too expensive to buy and read, of course, but maybe I'll try to borrow one. Home, specifically my home, is the topic of today's advent blog post. Coincidentally, just last night I read a story that resonated with me: 'Homing Instinct' by Dani McClain (in an anthology 'Octavia's Brood, which I'm enjoying much of). In the story, potentially confined to home by climate change legislation (yep, easy to see it's fiction, but good eco-authoritarian dystopian thinking nonetheless) the heroine of the story values mobility more highly than family, lover, community etc and so decides not to register and casts herself adrift in the adventure of not being confined to home. The story resonates with me even if I have absolutely no desire for travel as a modernist consumer durable. The 'right' or rather privilage to travel is, since my first car allowed me to escape the confines of home, forever equated with freedom. That said, after much debate this year, Lotte and I decided to opt for home and activist community - particularly Cor Gobaith - and to stay put rather than run for the sun or even edge closer to family... And it is a beautiful place that we live in (I didn't even photoshop the photo)
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AuthorI am he as you are he as you are me, and we are all together Archives
December 2022
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I said, hey what's going on?
A story, essay, lyric or rhyme with no reason almost every day... or at least sometimes, randomly