Home-making or home harms: Perceived and experienced tensions between domestic materiality and ageing

Abstract

Home, as a physical place and psychological construct, is often thought of as being an important locus of ontological security across the life course. However, there is a growing awareness of a darker side to the home (see Gurney, 2021), and home-unmaking practices (see Baxter and Brickell, 2014) that challenge the assumptions of home being purely a place of shelter, comfort, and control and instead foreground the temporal, material, and spatial fluidity of the home, and tensions between privacy and the ability to engage in health-harming behaviours largely unnoticed. Here, a material gerontological approach enables a rethinking of how home, and the household objects contained within, can both promote and undermine well-being as we age.

Drawing from two qualitative studies, this paper focuses on the tensions created by the materiality of a home which can both support daily life (see Coleman et al., 2016) and the project of the self (Belk, 1988) and be at the heart of harmful behaviours and more risky living environments. The first study explores the experiences of older women living alone during the Covid-19 pandemic. It explores how, over time, the ontological security of home can be challenged as a result of events such as bereavement, changes to physical capabilities and external influences such as the Covid-19 pandemic. The meaning and materiality of home become reframed, through the lens of gender and age, during the lockdowns associated with the pandemic. The second study, examining a voluntary service supporting older people to declutter, shows how the reduction of possessions can help clear space for adaptations to the home, reduce chances of slips and falls, and create opportunities for therapeutic engagements with the past through reminiscence, but can also threaten the ‘affective scaffolding’ of the home.

These two studies illustrate the ways that materiality is enrolled in perceived and experienced tensions between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to age at home. The paper argues for greater acknowledgement of the grey area between idealised imaginings of the materiality of home and actual everyday experiences of ‘living with things’ (Gregson, 2007) in later life.