This paper explores the role of material culture in shaping a sense of home for migrants in a new place. Specifically, it focuses on display cabinets as material components within the homemaking practices of Syrian migrants. By doing so, it investigates how display cabinets contribute to the production of home among Syrians in displacement. Considering that the Syrian migration is a form of forced displacement, it has not always been possible for migrants to bring the belongings they wished to take with them. Consequently, they have made use of familiar objects available in their new environments or attempted to recreate a similar decorative setting. As decorative elements, display cabinets establish a sense of familiarity, and through the composition they form, they also reproduce the past and contribute to the temporal character of the home. Accordingly, display cabinets play a significant role in shaping emotional attachment to the home and fostering a sense of belonging.

Kitchens are more than functional spaces; they reflect and shape cultural values, technologies, and ideals of modern life. Framing the kitchen as an orchestrating concept that brings together images, materials, and competencies, this article examines how idealized settings and tools have produced shifting narratives of modernity and redefined meanings, functions, and everyday practices in Türkiye from the 1930s to the present. It highlights the transformation of the kitchen from a moralizing space to one of entertainment and creativity across three eras: the ordered workshop of the 1930s, the cozy living room of the 1970s, and the technological hub of the 2000s. Drawing on archival research from a larger project on the social history of domestic technologies in Türkiye, the article analyzes newspapers, magazines, TV commercials, social media, and films to reveal how domestic ideals have been negotiated through kitchen spaces.

This article explores stuff donation on an online marketplace interpreting the reorganization of the household materials as citizens’ creative waste management. The data consist of donation announcements collected in spring 2022 from a Finnish consumer-to-consumer (C2C) product resale platform. The study identifies three narratives for donations within the contemporary online market economy: ‘Someone’s trash is another one’s treasure’, ‘Getting rid of abundance’, and ‘(Almost) too good to be donated’. Results illustrate how the donation announcements were used to add meaning and value to surplus materials through descriptions of past use and imagined ways to maintain, repair, or recycle, as well as to propose potential functions for stuff no longer necessary for the donors. As conceptual and theoretical contributions, the article further develops the term material sense applying it in the analysis of novel empirical data, deepening its’ connections to new materialism, and dissecting it with material donations. Overall, we aspire to enrich discussions of alternative forms of consumption and understanding of sustainable human-material interactions as future citizenship skills.

The crisis of urbanization, marked by rising property values, a lack of affordable housing, and chronic homelessness in cities, has fueled experiments with sustainable alternatives such as shipping container architecture. Shipping container homes are more cost-effective, energy-efficient, ecologically sustainable, versatile, have a lower carbon footprint, and are more durable than conventional construction methods. This study uses semi-structured interviews with container modular firms in selected cities to demonstrate the potential and challenges of construction innovation and the diffusion of container architecture in urban space. The findings call into question the fetishization of environmental friendliness and the allure of rational, mass-produced container homes as a solution to the urban housing crisis. Instead, the study draws attention to the paradox of sustainability, competition, and opposition from the traditional real estate market, regulations, and planning permitting systems, and the standardization-customization divergence of container urbanism.

This article explores the representation of lived life in the house in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925). It uncovers how the house moves bodies and affects moods that create individual meaning but also reflect broader responses to modernity. The article argues, in line with recent architectural scholarship, that literature, especially “middlebrow” fiction that would reach a large audience, is productive for understanding atmospheres. Using Bille and Simonsen (2021) concept of “atmospheric practices” as a key theoretical framing, the article shows how interactions with the house are deeply dependent on moods (such as anxiety, curiosity, nostalgia), and that practices performed in and with the house (walking down the stairs, sitting working, opening windows etc.) transmit affects that, in turn, determines the body’s movement.

British domestic kitchens are a product of long evolution but went through a period of great innovation one hundred years ago. Some sections of British society started to take an interest in a space that had been largely disregarded. The “servant problem” and suburban building were factors in this changed perspective. By reference to period newspaper archives, the nature of those changes can be demonstrated in some detail. Although there was a narrative of efficiency, and design ideas from Europe and the United States, progress for British kitchens was piecemeal and conflicted by fuel-choice issues as well as the question of how to equip the space for personal use. Ideas that survived this period of experimentation were to form the basis of kitchen development in subsequent decades.

How do young people such as international students understand home, and “where” do they locate it, upon their transition into adulthood? Building on in-depth interviews with forty students in a dorm in Northern Italy, we explore their home-university transition, and the attendant relocations of home, at two levels: in everyday life environments, related to their material and dwelling circumstances, and in their self-narratives, which reveal a fundamental translation of home from spatial into temporal terms. We understand these spatial and temporal relocations of home in terms of continuity, situatedness, in-betweenness and open-endedness. By unpacking the students’ balancing acts between “ascribed” and “achieved” homes, we contribute to the debate on homemaking as a combination between fixed references and temporary or portable affordances, and on the routines and tactics whereby young people mediate the contrasting pressures of family expectations and individual self-realization. Even in transiency, the narrated and lived experience of home illuminates the students’ aspirations and concerns as they struggle to position themselves between different countries, social roles and biographical stages, from a particular accommodation in the here-and-now.

Despite a sizable literature on home and “place” in later life, few works have specifically focused on the intersection of home, “place,” ageism, and racism. Here, we therefore explore this intersection through a case study of Mr. M., a 69-year-old African American man living in Baltimore, Maryland. Mr. M described a lifetime of experiences with racism and later, ageism, that affected his everyday experiences with home and place. In his earlier life, he described being viewed as less capable by others because of his race. Later, he experienced ageism in his age-segregated public housing complex, where staff exerted control over his day-to-day life and often treated in childlike manner. Although the city provided Mr. M. with some important freedoms (e.g., choice of restaurants, attending a concert), racism and ageism were still present. Overall, the case offers important insight into some of the complexities of home and place and provides some early groundwork for future research.

Reviewed by RICHARD HARRIS The Kinks were the most self-consciously – and consistently – domestic of the successful British rock groups of the 1960s and 1970s, indeed of the whole postwar period. I...