Homes- Physical & Social

Class discussion on Tuesday included some pretty interesting comments on what home means for us students. Some people said it was a place to go back to- their parent's house. Others identified multiple places and said it was Athens and their hometown. The use of the word "hometown" is now even on to consider. If where you leved as you grew up varied year to year, or every couple of years, then how do you specifically define your hometown- the town where your home is(/was) at?


All of our uses of home implied a permanence of place. For the majority of us, home is a space that we feel a connection to; to go back to. And this exists on different scales. A town may be your home if you have had multiple residences within it. A house may be your home- temporarily or the permanent one you grew up in. A lot of our definitions involved a past established relationship with a space and our identities are tied to it.

The articles in class, however, elaborated more on how home changes in time. For the homeless youth in London, establishing independence and temporary housing was a step on the way to establishing a more permanent house and therefore creating a future home. For the people of settlements in Columbia, "home-making" is a continual process of improvement.

For us students, we are just beginning to really define ourselves; attempting to find a 'place' in the world. For us, home can take on many meaning, but I think one that has been salient is the recognition that it can change across time and has multiply constituted meanings.

A song entitled "Home," by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, was released last year. The song is about two people who love each other and have had experiences which have defined their history together to shape what they call "home." Their chorus says:

"Home. Let me come home. Home is wherever I'm with you. Ah, home. Yes, I am home. Home is when I'm alone with you."

For this band, home is embodied not in a house, but in a person. Its definition rests solely on the social relationship built on personal connection, comfort, and love. I think this definition is at the heart of what home is for many people. Our social relations help shape our identities, and whether we chose to embody home in a house or a person, we are expressing what we find comforting and close to us.

So what do you think? Do we need a space to call our home, or does it make more sense for us to define it personally as our locations are more frequently changing? Do we need another person to have a home? How can we even study the home geographically if its definition doesn't involve a physical space?