Being home during this pandemic has me thinking about what the word ‘home’ actually means. I haven’t been ‘home’ for longer than two weeks in almost three years. Now that I am back for an indeterminate amount of time, I feel out of place and long to return to my home at school. I have many places I consider to be home: the house where I grew up, the house I moved into across the street from the house I grew up in, my high school, Hamilton, even a short section of the Appalachian Trail. 

In this mixed-media collage, I tried to capture the various aspects of this sense of home. 

• Environmental object: the physical structures and places that we reside and the meanings we attach to these objects
• Temporal: past, present, or future existence of home
• Spatial: the broader context of home within a town, state, country, etc.
• Social: interactions and relationships with people situated in and around our home
• Production: the act of homemaking and building a home around one’s identity (Coolen 2011)

Home usually associated with positive feelings, but when there are negative feelings/experiences associated with a dwelling it fails to be home and has detrimental effects on an individual (Coolen). Researchers suggest that creating a “school-relevant self,” or a sense of home within the school, leads to greater rates of success among college students (Stephens 2015). 

Home has many meanings, and thus is difficult to pin down. However, part of the beauty of the concept of home is its ambiguity. This allows people to hold multiple places as home, even if they only occupy one house or dwelling. It also allows us to adapt to the world around us and find identity in the places and situations in which we find ourselves. 

Coolen, H., & Meesters, J. (2011). Editorial special issue: house, home and dwelling. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 27(1), 1–10.

Fox, L. (2002). The Meaning of Home: A Chimerical Concept or a Legal Challenge? Journal of Law and Society, 29(4), 580–610.

Stephens, N. M., Brannon, T. N., Markus, H. R., & Nelson, J. E. (2015). Feeling at Home in College: Fortifying School-Relevant Selves to Reduce Social Class Disparities in Higher Education. Social Issues and Policy Review, 9(1), 1–24.