The ‘Home’ Re-Framed: Interrupting Key Assumptions of the Home in Leisure Studies

Abstract

‘Home’ is often central to discussions of leisure as ‘home’ has potential to create a sense of place, facilitate personal control, and encourage creative self-expressions. Within leisure studies/sciences ‘home’ remains privileged and uncritiqued. This stable perspective assumes ‘home’ as a universal concept that is commonly known, understood, and taken-for-granted. Transdisciplinary scholarship articulates ‘home’ as having multiple meanings, and through the disruption of the standard template of ‘home’, other possibilities for living ‘home’ can be actively (re)created. Leisure studies may benefit from critical explorations of ‘home’ described in mobilities, diasporic and cultural/geography literatures. This article serves to conceptually dis-locate the ‘home’ and offer a revived starting point for its critique in leisure studies. To do so, we share a critical exploration of ‘home’ in leisure studies, articulations of its re-imagined formations using transdisciplinary literature, and present implications for conceptualizing ‘home’ differently.

Keywords:

• critical mobilities
• embodied home
• home
• leisure
• translocation

Notes

1 Aguilar Jr. (2015) helps us + to think about the diasporic home not simply as a home inhabited by people or families who resettle and migrate, but as an embodiment, affective, and relational (Jensen et al., 2015) space constantly processed, negotiated, and explored by translocating individuals.