The Complexities of Home in Social Work

Book excerpt: Home is a complex and multifaceted concept. This book revisions how ‘home’ is used in social work literature by showing how it is positioned as being discursively represented, materially experienced and embodied, and multiply imagined as symbolic and existential. Drawing on multidisciplinary understandings of 'home' and intersectionality, it analyses the privileging and disadvantaging social policies and complex interactional practices that contribute to one’s sense of home including homelessness, mobility and the politics and complexities of homeownership. Providing social workers with practice considerations for different areas of social work, this book analyses how to makes and build a sense of home and community belonging for a broad range of client groups. It will be of interest to all academics and students of social work, sociology, public policy, housing policy, gender studies and human geography.