The Complexities of Home in Social Work (Routledge Advances in Social Work) [1 ed.] 0367469820, 9780367469825

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The Complexities of Home in Social Work

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 make 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. Carole Zufferey is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work, University of South Australia (Justice & Society). She has been researching home, housing, homelessness, social work and intersectionality since 2001. She has published one sole authored book, Zufferey, C. (2017). Homelessness and Social Work: An Intersectional Approach, and two edited books with Routledge, Zufferey, C. & Yu, N. (eds) (2018). Faces of Homelessness in the Asia Pacific Region and Zufferey, C. & Buchanan, F. (eds) (2020). Intersections of Mothering: Feminist Accounts. Christopher Horsell is a Lecturer in Social Work, University of South Australia (Justice & Society). He has been researching, teaching and publishing in the areas of homelessness, social inclusion and disability for over ten years.

Routledge Advances in Social Work

Women, Vulnerabilities and Welfare Service Systems Edited by Marjo Kuronen, Elina Virokannas and Ulla Salovaara Post-Anthropocentric Social Work Critical Posthuman and New Materialist Perspectives Edited by Vivienne Bozalek and Bob Pease Rights-Based Community Practice and Academic Activism in a Turbulent World Putting Theory into Practice in Israel, Palestine and Jordan Jim Torczyner Social Work, Young Migrants and the Act of Listening Becoming an Unaccompanied Child Marcus Herz and Philip Lalander Assessing Culturally Informed Parenting in Social Work Davis Kiima A New History of Social Work Values and Practice in the Struggle for Social Justice John H. Pierson Understanding System Change in Child Protection and Welfare Edited by John Canavan, Carmel Devaney, Caroline McGregor and Aileen Shaw The Complexities of Home in Social Work Carole Zufferey and Christopher Horsell Social Work, Social Welfare, Unemployment and Vulnerability Among Youth Edited by Lars Uggerhøj, Vibeke Bak Nielsen, Ilse Julkunen and Petra Malin

The Complexities of Home in Social Work

Carole Zufferey and Christopher Horsell with Kathryn Burgess, Amy Cleland, Kalpana Goel and Deirdre Tedmanson and

First published 2022 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Carole Zufferey and Chris Horsell with Kathryn Burgess, Amy Cleland, Kalpana Goel and Deirdre Tedmanson The right of Carole Zufferey and Chris Horsell with Kathryn Burgess, Amy Cleland, Kalpana Goel and Deirdre Tedmanson to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zufferey, Carole, author. Title: The complexities of home in social work / Carole Zufferey [and five others]. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021041662 (print) | LCCN 2021041663 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367469825 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003032489 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Social service. | Home--Social aspects. | Home--Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC HV40 .Z84 2022 (print) | LCC HV40 (ebook) | DDC 361.3/2--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041662 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041663 ISBN: 978-0-367-46982-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-20282-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03248-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489 Typeset in Goudy by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of contributors 1 Stolen Homes: Prologue

vii 1

AMY CLELAND AND CAROLE ZUFFEREY

2 The complexities of home in social work: Introduction

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CAROLE ZUFFEREY AND CHRIS HORSELL

PART 1

Revisioning home in social work 3 Home, social work and intersectionality

25 27

CAROLE ZUFFEREY

4 Home, homeownership and housing policy

45

CHRIS HORSELL

5 The subjectivities of home

60

CAROLE ZUFFEREY

PART 2

Practice considerations 6 Without a house and home: Homelessness

79 81

CAROLE ZUFFEREY AND CHRIS HORSELL

7 The safety of home: Violence against women

98

CAROLE ZUFFEREY

8 Imagining family homes CAROLE ZUFFEREY

111

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Contents

9 Belonging, home and young people

122

CAROLE ZUFFEREY AND DEIRDRE TEDMANSON

10 Multiple, dislocated homes

136

CAROLE ZUFFEREY AND KALPANA GOEL

11 Classed mobilities, older generations and home

151

KATHRYN BURGESS, CAROLE ZUFFEREY AND CHRIS HORSELL

12 Disability, social work and home

169

CAROLE ZUFFEREY AND CHRIS HORSELL

13 Sexualities, home and social work

183

CAROLE ZUFFEREY AND CHRIS HORSELL

14 Revisioning home in social work: Conclusion

199

CAROLE ZUFFEREY AND CHRIS HORSELL

Index

205

Contributors

Kathryn Burgess is a Social Work honours graduate from the University of South Australia. She completed her honours thesis in 2018 on the Meanings of home for baby boomers and grey nomads. She has considerable expertise working in planning for local communities. Amy Cleland is Program Director for Social Science (Human Services) and a Lecturer at the University of South Australia (Justice & Society). Amy teaches across social work, human services, psychology, criminology and health programmes, in courses specifically related to working in Aboriginal contexts. Amy identifies as an Aboriginal woman and a descendent of the Larrakia Nation of the Northern Territory. Amy researches the dynamics in the coloniser and colonised relationship and discourses on colonialism. Kalpana Goel is a Lecturer in Social Work at the University of South Australia (Justice & Society). She has both practice and teaching experience in the field of social work, community development and mental health. Her research focuses on ageing population, aged care workforce, migration, gender issues, student engagement and curriculum in higher education. She is a member of the Australian Association of Social Workers and Refugee and Migration Research Network. Deirdre Tedmanson is Dean of Programs (Justice & Society). Her research background and experience are in community development, management, social and public policy and political theory. She is co-author on a Routledge book: Essers, C., Dey, P., Tedmanson, D. & Verduyn, K. (eds) (2017). Critical perspectives on entrepreneurship: challenging dominant discourses. Routledge, UK.

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Stolen Homes Prologue Amy Cleland and Carole Zufferey

Introduction To begin this book on home, we acknowledge that it is written on Stolen Lands. The British invasion of the Australian continent illegally dispossessed and murdered Aboriginal Peoples on the ‘legal fiction’ of terra nullius, that the land ‘belonged to no one’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2003, pp. 33–35). Before the invasion, Australia was already a multicultural country, with over 500 different Aboriginal language groups and ontological connections to country or land tracks as ‘home’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2003, p. 31). We use the term Aboriginal in respect of the decision of local Aboriginal people whom Amy works with, who request the term Aboriginal be used, while appreciating that language cannot do justice to diversity (Cleland & Masocha, 2020). Colonial discourses and practices shape what home means in a non-Aboriginal context. There is much that white social work colonisers do not know about and will never know or experience of racism in Western societies. It is important for non-Aboriginal social workers to reflect on this power and privilege. Eurocentric service systems, institutional racism, racial discrimination and state surveillance contributes to the ongoing marginalisation of First Nations Peoples across the world, including Aboriginal Australians (Fredericks et al., 2019). Across the world, First Nations Peoples’ homes were and continue to be Stolen. Legal and political state institutions are imbued with colonial discourses and white race privilege that continue to enact state violence beyond massacres and into state policies that define what home means from a Eurocentric perspective. White people’s ignorance and racism is thus maintained and left unquestioned (Sullivan & Tuana, 2007). This includes Carole’s own ignorance as a white migrant coloniser writing this book on home (Zufferey, 2013). This prologue is an edited conversation about this book on home between Amy and Carole using a ‘yarning’ research methodology (see also Walker et al., 2014). It began when Carole was writing the chapters of this book and had an overwhelming feeling that something was amiss. She spoke to a colleague who had recently worked in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands about her book on home, who said: ‘have you got a chapter from the DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-1

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perspective of Aboriginal people in Australia?’ We did not. Carole was struck by this insight and the absurdity of two white, Western, middle class social workers, as migrants and colonisers, writing this book on home in the Australian context. How to include Aboriginal knowledges on home, she wondered. She then approached her colleague Amy Cleland for her thoughts. Their conversations highlighted that all that we do, including writing this chapter on Stolen Homes, occurs in the context of the invasion or colonisation of Australia. Colonialism is an ‘unfinished project, one that still lives with us each and every day’ (Cleland, 2015, p. 40). We invite the readers to reflect on this key message that homes are lived in the context of colonial invasions across the globe. This needs to be acknowledged here, at the beginning. Carole and Amy have been yarning for numerous years about many different things. This yarn is Amy and Carole’s yarn about home. It is drawing on Amy’s knowledges, it is not presenting ‘Aboriginal Knowledges’ or ‘Indigenous Australian perspectives’. Amy has long been writing about displacing ‘discourses of colonialism and Eurocentrism’ in the social work discipline, which requires ‘an analysis of Indigenous contexts’ and more so, an ‘analysis of the non-Indigenous or White contexts’ (Cleland, 2015, p. 43). Amy introduced Carole, a white migrant coloniser, to a Turtle Island story of the Raven. The story is about a white professor looking for the answers located in non-white ‘other’ people (on his/her own terms), rather than engaging in a critical reflection on him/herself (Dumbrill & Green, 2008; Cleland, 2015, p. 48). The Inuit word for Europeans is ‘qallunaat’ and ‘qallunology’ is the study of white people, which reverses the colonial gaze (Rasmussen, 2001, p. 108). Homes were Stolen by ‘homeless Europeans’ who arrived in the Americas, Africa and Australia, supported by fictions associated with land ownership, labour, money and corporatisation (Rasmussen, 2001, p. 108). Carole has previously reflected on how white power and privilege constitutes her experiences as a social worker (Zufferey, 2013). This conversation with Amy contributes to her lifelong learning about challenging colonial mindsets and practices, focusing on home. To set the historical context being referred to in this yarn, a few points need to be made about the Australian context. Homes were Stolen in Australia through the invasion, as well as colonial segregation and so-called protectionist and assimilation policies. Since the late 1700s, Aboriginal families were massacred and forcibly displaced from their homelands and segregated onto missions, reserves and stations across Australia, under institutional practices intending for the eradication of Aboriginality. The extensive powers of legislation, such as the Victorian Half Caste [sic] Act 1886 and the Western Australian Aborigines [sic] Protection Act 1886, legislated state violence and the removal of Aboriginal children, with racially segregationist intent. Please note that these terms such as ‘half caste’ and ‘Aborigines’ must not be used by white social workers because they are outdated, disrespectful and offensive. Generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly removed from their families and

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communities, creating what is now known as the Stolen Generations, which continued until the 1970s. From 1939, ‘exemption certificates’ were introduced and continued until the 1960s (see Aberdeen et al., 2021). If an Aboriginal person qualified for an exemption, they had to show it to authorities to leave reserves, to move ‘freely’ in ‘white’ society, to be able to vote, enter hotels, schools and be exempt, to some degree, from protectionist laws. However, these exemptions were granted only if they relinquished their connections to basic human rights, to home and belonging, to connections to culture, heritage, family, language and identity. ‘Exempt’ people were no longer allowed to stay in reserves and missions and needed to seek permission to visit close family there (Aberdeen et al., 2021). The privileges of white colonial migrants stand in contrast to the state violence experienced by First Nations Peoples in Australia and non-white migrants. The ‘White Australia’ immigration policy can be traced back to the 1850s when Australia favoured British applicants. The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 provided the legal means to restrict immigration and remove ‘prohibited migrants’, which continued until the 1970s (Zufferey, 2013, p. 666). Carole migrated to Australia during this period in the late 1960s with her family from Sierra Leone, West Africa. Her mother recalled how the family was called into the ‘immigration office’ because the ‘officials’ wanted to ‘have a look at us’. She said that because we were coming from Africa, they thought that we were black. When we attended the ‘interview’ and they saw that we were white, they just looked at us and ‘signed the papers’ (Zufferey, 2013, p. 666). The family migrated to Australia because of Carole’s father’s employment at a mine owned by multinationals being built on Stolen Land (see Zufferey, 2013). This was one year before the 1967 Referendum that changed the Australian Constitution, to allow First Nations Peoples to be included in the Census count. However, the Australian Constitution still does not acknowledge that Aboriginal people were ‘the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent’ (Reynolds, 2021, p. 4) and that sovereignty was never ceded. Through the failures of the Constitution and numerous colonial policies, legislation and practices, homes and identities were, and continue to be, Stolen.

Talking about Stolen Homes This prologue is presented as an edited themed conversation from the yarn that unfolded between Amy and Carole about Stolen Homes. Everything is fundamental to colonisation Amy: I am thinking pragmatically about your book, I think this idea of just having an acknowledgement of pretty much that…everything everyone does here is on Aboriginal land and should always preface Aboriginal people and centre that understanding, that everything that has come forth from here

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on, is because of colonisation. And so, I also think that those complexities of thinking, that an Aboriginal perspective is a one thing…any ways to challenge that in that message, even around Aboriginal knowledges, epistemologies…it is not just the one thing…that is why it is so hard…mine today is not knowledge of culture, it is knowledge and experience of colonisation…and how that connects with cultural understandings of home and place…but absolutely everything is fundamental to colonisation because nothing here would exist without this taking place. Many Stolen Homes Carole: Homeland was stolen from you in a sense? Would you say that connections to homeland was stolen by the state? Amy: But when you say Stolen Homes, it depends on the way you define home, if you define home as country…people refer to homelands, we have gone back to ‘homelands’…people do say it is going back home to country. But what that means for that person, whether it is where they were displaced, or whether they know they are originally from, where their Dreaming and totemic relationships are, or whether it is where other family are, so it would just depend on how the person would define that home. Who I am today Carole: What would be your perspective, Amy? Your story or thoughts about home and how it is portrayed? In your own family? As a colonising idea? Amy: I would say I can only offer it from my own perspective. The colonising idea is where it starts. We could be moved anywhere. In terms of my family’s story, it traverses heaps of different countries, countries on the one continent…my family being shifted and moved all over the place…my family has been decimated is the only word that comes to mind. When we talk about a discrete Aboriginal identity, that is quite rare in this day and age, you would be represented in a number of nations. And overseas influences as well. But in terms of the story of one of my grandmothers, just a number of places that she was moved around, created all sorts of new stories for her, new relationships for her and that is, of course, who I am today, as a result of all that journey. Family is home Carole: So, when you think of home, what do you think of like? Amy: At this point for me, I think anywhere that family is, is what I think first about home. My family story, people created communities, people created families based on where they ended up. Just made a shitty situation as good as it possibly could be because whichever mob you were from, you were going through the same stuff. That deliberate attempt to disperse

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everyone is seen in the way a sister was moved there, a brother was moved there, or a Mum was taken there, and her kids were moved down there, that was very much obvious where people were taken and placed. And the types of institutions, like one for adults and one for children and there are images you can get from schools and there would be parents setting up camps outside of the school, just in the hope to see their kids. Carole: Kids were stolen? Being classified Amy: Yeh and if you were exempt, you weren’t allowed to go to missions…all of these rules were designed to separate people and keep people separated. It was all about getting rid of the race. Carole: So, the whitening of the race? Amy: Yeh even white enough in character, not only skin colour, white in character…the different policies to assimilate changed over time, but those initial days of killing people, moving people out of the way, is where it all started with my family, as soon as the late 1700s, I can trace my family back that far. Carole: Yeh and how they were moved around? Amy: And classified! So, one of my grandmothers at some point was given an identity as a ‘half caste’ and so, therefore, was subject to the rules and laws that governed ‘half castes’. Violence of the state Amy: Yeh we have had lots of yarns and lots of academics write about the violence of the state, that was abuse by the state on Aboriginal people, and it hasn’t been seen that way, except by people who experience it. So, there is this blaming now of Aboriginal people about the situation that a lot of Aboriginal people are in, when it was created, that anarchy was created. So, I call myself a ‘nearly’ assimilated Aboriginal person. I am a product of that – but it does not mean that I am better off for it. And I think it is that difference between, ‘we had good intentions’ – but no, they didn’t. ‘We thought we were doing what was best for you’, but it wasn’t best. Reflexive partnerships Carole: Yeh and navigating white system and Aboriginal ways? Amy: Yeh which is why partnership is the key…it really does matter that partnership….The willingness of the people with the resources, the white people (Carole: in power) to respect the decisions and recommendations from people on the ground. To do what is in their power, there is policies and rules but there is still a lot of flexibility around how people apply things. …I am trying to understand, is it the racism that stops people from hearing

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Aboriginal people? If you look at a black face or even non-black face and think they don’t know what they are talking about because they are black, well of course they are not going to listen. Until a white person is willing to reflect on that, come to terms with that and accept that we do things differently, nothing will change. It is awfully complex – but I do think that the core for any change is people analysing their values about Aboriginal people and colonisation, and values are hard to shift, that is why it is so hard. You can’t just tell people that they have to do things differently, because it has not done anything up until now. Unconscious bias Carole: It must be so much a burden on you? Amy: Yeh it makes me racialised everyday! I can’t just be an academic. I am an Aboriginal academic. And I am happy to wear that because it is important. I don’t mind the work, it is more of the racism that I experience, the discrimination, the presumptions…number of ignorant comments that I hear all the time, and you have to pick and choose your strategies, around how to respond to that, every single day…we have to remember that we have all experienced colonisation, and that even though you put your professional hat on, when you go to work, who you are at home does infiltrate in, simple as that, you cannot turn off who you are…society generally has unconscious bias towards Aboriginal people…even in the words that social workers would say to me…they just saw Aboriginal people as different…weirdly. Carole: I would like to admit that I have done that too as a white person… that is why I wanted to come and talk to you, I would say things like ‘what would be the Aboriginal perspective on this?’ But there is a lot of different perspectives…sort of addressing my own I don’t know racism…totalising all Aboriginal people… thinking about that… Amy: I am really trying to theorise another word that better captures what you’re describing, I think that racism does not label what you are experiencing, whiteness has come up as a term that is close, but again I think that it is too exclusive that word… Carole: Ignorance in a sense? Amy: It is not about power, I don’t think you are trying to get ‘one up’… by asking around that, yeh so ignorance is teaser, another word…but what is the difference? Maybe whiteness breeds ignorance and manifests in racism in a myriad of ways, innocent or otherwise…very complex. I think my resulting work…would be coming up with something, a word that replaces racism for what you are describing, because there is so many forms of racism, and I also think it is a word that people, as soon as they hear it, get turned off, they don’t want to be called a racist. Power, to me, is central to racism…Yes, ‘cause paternalism can be a form of power, saying ‘I want to help’, that is positioning – but intent for doing harm and willingness to shift is important too.

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Calling into question everybody’s feet on this country Amy: Any time that I can be Aboriginal, I feel absolutely whole. I feel beautiful. I feel 100% on top of the world. All the other times in life, not so much, because you are pretending to be something that you are not. But also, there is something there, especially about race relations, and that is why my research focuses on that because I really want to understand it. We already talked about legislative things that created that tension. But how it continues to permeate, even into someone born today. This continues in the ways that people blame Aboriginal peoples for poverty, for disadvantage, for not engaging…in western education systems, for wanting to retain culture and language, and wanting to maintain a separate identity. Just that lack of understanding as to why that is and having respect for those choices. But, if we were to, as the country of Australia, really truly acknowledge Aboriginal people, it disrupts absolutely everybody, because it calls into question everybody’s feet on this country. I think that is what people don’t want to do. Keeping spirit strong Amy: Again, this diversity in Aboriginal populations, there is so much strength for people to survive, and do so well, against every attempt to kill you…you know decimate…but also that connection to the wisdom of the world…such an old culture…that is something really cool. Carole: Yeh and that must be so important to you and your sense of belonging? Amy: Yeh and pride…I reflect on my own journey…everything just happens…I think that is also an Aboriginal methodology, is to not force stuff… and allow the destiny to just present itself. Carole: Yeh as you said connecting with that old wisdom, feeling wisdom, what I am hearing is that there is an embodied spiritual connection that is hard to express in words, to home, belonging, comfort… Amy: A lot of people would laugh at it…spirit is the one thing that this world can’t touch, it can try and break it…you know you can take someone’s house, you can take food, you can take clothes, you can take family, but you can’t take someone’s spirit. You can break it and fuck it up – but it is one thing that stays really strong in what connects people to country and to each other. That resonates with me a lot.

Conclusion This is one story, Amy’s story, which she generously shared in her yarn with Carole. Coming back to the story of the Raven, Carole’s story as a white migrant coloniser is a different story. It is a story of her European family being skilled migrants and colonisers, complicit with colonisation, being sponsored to come to this country to work for colonising multinational companies who

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destroy the land (see Zufferey, 2013). Her family were not massacred, forcibly separated and her land and home were not Stolen. The family migrated to Australia by their own free will and did not experience the violence of the colonial state. More details about Carole and Chris’s reflections on home are presented in the next chapter, and in Chapter 10, Kalpana Goel reflects on her story of migration and home as a skilled migrant from India. This yarn between Amy and Carole is just the beginning of the story of Stolen Homes in the invasion of this land, on which this book is written. It begins to inform readers about the effects of colonialism and colonial policies, how homes and families were and continue to be Stolen, in the Australian context. This can resonate with the experiences of First Nations Peoples across the world, whose many families and homes were decimated by colonisation. Although understandings of home can be diverse and relational, the perspectives of non-Aboriginal social workers are dominant, with associated conscious and unconscious racial bias. Critical reflection by social workers about the destruction of homes serves to point the gaze back to the status quo and the powers and privileges of the ‘qallunaat’ (Rasmussen, 2001, p. 108). Thus, as non-Aboriginal social workers, it is important to continue to reflect on how to validate, dialogue with, hear and listen deeply to different ways of knowing, being and doing, which relates back to social work ethics of social justice and lifelong learning. The effects of state power and colonialism on Aboriginal homes have been discussed but more needs to be done to render visible the diversity of First Nations voices on home and most importantly, the knowledge of what needs to change.

References Aberdeen, L., Jones, J., Ellinghaus, K., Francisco, A., Horton, K., Marsden, B., Maynard, J., Robinson, K., Stevens, L. & Wickes, J. (2021). Black, white and exempt: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives under exemption. Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press. Cleland, A. & Masocha, S. (2020). Centring Aboriginal epistemologies: Development of a 3D simulation for social work education. Advances in Social Work and Welfare Education, 21 (2), 8–21. Cleland, A. (2015). Maybe it is rocket science! Still questioning what’s needed in preparing human service practitioners to work effectively with Indigenous Australian people (pp. 37–53). In Fejo-King, C. & Poona, J. (eds) Emerging from the margins: first Australians’ perspectives of social work. Torrens, ACT: Maggie Goose Publishing. Dumbrill, G.C. & Green, J. (2008). Indigenous knowledge in the social work academy. Social Work Education, 27 (5), 489–503. Fredericks B., White N., Phillips S., Bunda T., Longbottom M. & Bargallie D. (2019). Being ourselves, naming ourselves, writing ourselves: Indigenous Australian women disrupting what it is to be academic within the academy (pp. 75–96). In Thomas, L. & Reinertsen, A. (eds) Academic writing and identity constructions. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Moreton-Robinson, A. (2003). I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society (pp. 23–40). In Ahmed, S., Castaneda, C., Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (eds). Uprootings/Regroundings Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Rasmussen, D. (2001). Qallunology: a pedagody of the oppressor. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 25 (2) 105–212. Reynolds, H. (2021). Truth telling. History, sovereignty and the Uluru Statement. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Sullivan, S. & Tuana, N. (eds) (2007). Race and epistemologies of ignorance. New York: State University of New York Press. Walker, M., Fredericks, B., Mills, K. & Anderson, D. (2014). “Yarning” as a method for community-based health research with Indigenous women: The Indigenous Women’s Wellness Research Program. Health Care for Women International, 35 (10), 1216–1226. Zufferey, C. (2013). ‘Not knowing that I do not know and not wanting to know’: Reflections of a white Australian social worker. International Social Work, 56 (5), 659–673. Zufferey, C., Yu, N. & Hand, T. (2020). Researching home in social work. Qualitative Social Work, 19 (5–6),1095–1110.

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The complexities of home in social work Introduction Carole Zufferey and Chris Horsell

Introduction The notion of home is multiple and contested. This book contributes to social work scholarship by making visible the complexities of home in social work. The book interrogates notions of home in social work by expanding on previous social work literature about the embodied home visit and home as a dwelling or residence (see also Zufferey et al., 2020). It draws on multidisciplinary and intersectional perspectives on home, where home is imagined and experienced in movement, as multiple and complex (Ahmed et al., 2003). Throughout this book, we acknowledge that the building of a sense of home is disrupted by experiences of violence, abuse and forced dislocation. The rebuilding of home and ontological security in situations of displacement and disruption is pertinent in social work (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014). This book gives voice to diverse subjectivities and experiences of home, to inform social work research, policy making and practice. Social workers must dialogue with community members most affected by unjust state policies and practices, about the remaking and rebuilding of a sense of home, to contribute to social change and shift how home is imagined and understood in social work. Home is imagined, subjectively and materially experienced and influenced by changing temporal, discursive, historical, cultural and sociopolitical contexts (Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Mallett, 2004; Somerville, 1992). Recently, especially during the current Covid-19 global pandemic, the notion of home and ‘staying home’ has been further examined in social work literature. This includes arguing for centring the emotional and spiritual significance of home in social work practice and broadening our understanding that not all houses are homes (Buckland, 2021). As well, the public health message to ‘Stay Safe, Stay Home’ or in New Zealand, to ‘Stay home, stay safe, stay strong and be kind’ has ignited diverse reflections on home by social workers (Aaslund, 2021, p. 74; Munford, 2021), including about displacement, loneliness, rekindling community (Sethi, 2021) and being ‘a long way from home’ (Aaslund, 2021, p. 74). Home is multifaceted and ‘profoundly political’ (Mohanty, 2003 p. 126). In colonised and invaded countries, it is important to acknowledge the DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-2

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dispossession of First Nations Peoples, which has occurred across the globe. As discussed in the previous chapter, the sense of place, home and belonging experienced by colonisers and migrants exist because of the invasions of First Nations Peoples’ homes, who were denied their legal rights to home under ‘international customary law’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2003, p. 23). The stealing of homes by colonisers are important considerations when interrogating notions of home in social work research, policy making and practice. As Amy Cleland explained in the previous chapter, First Nations Peoples’ connections to homes were decimated, including by white social workers. The role of social workers in enacting state violence and alienating people from their homes requires ongoing critical social work reflection.

Intersectionality, home and social work This book situates intersectional complexities of home in social work. An intersectional lens considers how home and belonging are constituted by people’s intersecting social locations, which includes identifications and emotional attachments to collective identities and groups that are variously valued and judged (Yuval-Davis, 2011). Intersections of home that are discussed in this book are associated with indigeneity, age, class, gender, race, culture, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, mobility and migration. The central aims of intersectional research are to focus on everyday lived experiences; to make visible intersecting identifications and diversities; to explore the complexities of oppressive and privileging processes; to examine social inequalities and injustices that manifest in interconnected domains of power relations, and to promote social change (Hulko, 2015; Murphy et al., 2009). Social work scholars have advocated for incorporating intersectionality in social work practice, research, policy and education (Murphy et al., 2009). Intersectional social work research on home can situate social change and activism (Nayak & Robbins, 2018), in the context of diverse fields of social work practice. In this book, we examine how home is subjectively experienced and imagined; socially constructed and represented (such as in housing policies) and influenced by social structures such as state institutions (see Winker & Degele, 2011). Consistent with Hulko’s (2015) intersectional approach that considers both privileges and oppressions, this book interrogates and reflects on both the privileges of homeownership and oppressions associated with home and belonging, which, we argue, is pertinent to a socially just social work. We discuss how home and homelessness are imagined and homeownership is constructed in housing policy responses in Western countries such as Australia, the UK and USA (Chapter 4). This book covers broad areas of research on the subjectivities of home, including the voices of First Nations Peoples about how their homes were Stolen (Chapters 1 and 5). The second part of the book discusses home and belonging, as relevant to different social work fields of practice (Chapters 6 to 13). This includes how home is

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disrupted in homelessness, gendered violence, the abuse of children in families, systemic barriers experienced by young people, heteronormative and disabling policies and practices, and forced migration and dislocation. Chapters 10 and 11 highlight transnational homes and the experiences of skilled migrants and their sense/s of home/s, as well as the classed privileges of baby boomers and ‘grey nomads’ who are homeowners. In the spirit of intersectional social work reflexivity, we provide our own reflections on home in this chapter and Kalpana Goel discusses her experiences of home and migration from India to Australia in Chapter 10.

Significance of this book Home has been extensively researched and theorised across numerous disciplines but less so in social work. This book expands the analysis of home in social work, revisioning how ‘home’ is used in social work literature. Social workers have a broad remit to research multiple understandings and experiences of home. Home as a concept is symbolic, discursively represented, materially experienced, embodied, imagined and existential. This book draws on multidisciplinary understandings of ‘home’ and intersectionality, to advance social work research and practice responses to home (Chapter 3). The book highlights privileging and disadvantaging policy processes that contribute to the unequal distribution of housing and homeownership (Chapter 4). It also covers intersecting social inequalities that contribute to a sense of being without a home, including in the context of homelessness (Chapter 6). It argues that reflecting on our own social privileges, including the politics and complexities of homeownership, are centrally important to enhancing a reflexive social work scholarship on home. The book aims: 1 2 3 4

To broaden how home is understood in social work research, practice and in policy, To provide an intersectional analysis of home in the discipline of social work, To examine privileging and disadvantaging social policies that contribute to one’s sense of home, To engage with the complexities of home in different fields of social work practice.

This book is a research monograph that is written for students, researchers, scholars and professionals in the discipline of social work, as well as in social science, sociology, public policy, housing policy, gender studies, migration studies, queer studies, cultural studies, geography, anthropology and any persons interested in advancing concepts of home, intersectionality and social work. This book has national and international appeal and is relevant to social justice ethics as outlined by professional social work bodies, such

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as the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW); National Association of Social Workers (NASW); Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) and British Association of Social Workers (BASW). It contributes to social work knowledge on building safe homes and communities, enhancing social justice, addressing social inequalities and advocating for social change. Each chapter highlights implications for broadening social policy and social work research and/or practice.

Reflexivity In the spirit of intersectional research, researcher reflexivity is important. As authors of this book, we came to our thinking about home through our research on homelessness. We also came to this book with different personal experiences of home and migration. Intersectional research approaches focus on the interdependence of social positionalities, which requires researchers to continually reflect on the social practices of positioning (including their own social positioning) and to analyse implications for academic knowledge (Carstensen-Egwuom, 2014, p. 265). In this section, we write our own reflections on family and home and acknowledge that they are socially constructed narratives written during one moment in time. There has been some critique about stating a detached and ‘absolute’ social position, as being a ‘narcissistic’ and ‘confessional’ narrative and lacking in relationality (Carstensen-Egwuom, 2014, pp. 269–270). Nonetheless, this is not the spirit in which we share our reflections. We acknowledge that all social positions can be ‘negotiated, questioned or challenged’ (Carstensen-Egwuom, 2014, p. 269), including the shifting and changing positionalities on home. Social work is imbued with gendered, classed, white race privilege and professional ‘expert’ power (Zufferey, 2017). This understanding of unequal power relations is important when reflecting on being social workers and academics and writing about home. Next, we reflect on our own privileges associated with home, to make visible our own positions of housing privilege and histories of both home and migration. This is Carole’s reflection: I have reflected on the privileges of being a ‘middle-aged, middle-class, white woman, a first generation Australian of Swiss background’ in an invaded country such as Australia and as a social worker working in child protection (Zufferey, 2013, p. 660). I am a white, middle class, female migrant coloniser who came to Australia with my biological family when I was 2 years old. My family was a two-parent heteronormative nuclear family. My parents were both born in Switzerland. They moved to Sierra Leone in West Africa, for my father’s work in the mines, where I was born, at Mattru Hospital, Mattru Jong. Then, they migrated to Australia, and we went directly to

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The complexities of home in social work live in Gove (Nhulunbuy) in the Northern Territory, to also work on the mines. This is in the Northeast Arnhem Land, the traditional home of the Yolngu people, with multiple clans, languages and two main kinship groups, called Dhuwa and Yirritja. The land rights movement began in this region, with the ‘bark painting protest’ in 1963, a petition from 17 tribes from the Yirrkala area to the Federal Government in Canberra. This petition protested the stealing of the local people’s tribal homes by the government, to give to the bauxite mining company, which my father worked for. Whilst this is not my story of home, it was a time of significant protest about Stolen Homes in Australia. As the then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in 2013, the bark painting petitions ‘are Magna Carta for the Indigenous peoples of this land….an assertion of rights against the crown’ (The West Australian, 2013). Before the Nhulunbuy Primary School opened, my sister and I attended the Yirrkala Mission School for a short period. I remember playing with my friends at school, ignorant of the broader politics and land right protests (see Zufferey, 2013). Whilst in Africa, my parents purchased a chalet in a small mountain village in the French speaking part of Switzerland, which was where my father lived and called ‘home’ as a child. My understanding was that our journey to Africa and Australia was temporary, and that someday, we would ‘return home’. Every two years we did ‘return home’ to visit family, which was funded by the company that employed my father. I remember going ‘home’ to Switzerland, speaking French, and then having to readapt to speaking English back at school in Australia. Our family eventually moved to a farm near Adelaide, South Australia in the late 1970s. I then went to university in Adelaide and have intermittently lived there ever since. I have remained in Australia for over 50 years, and in my currently ‘fully owned’ house in Adelaide for over 20 years. Yet, the Kaurna lands on which I live have been Stolen. As a migrant and coloniser, Australia can only ever partially be my home. However, I can say this with the security of the ‘ownership deeds and papers’ from white institutions that ‘prove’ that this is my house and ‘home’.

This is Chris’s reflection: I am a middle aged, middle class male coloniser born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia. Adelaide is situated on the lands of the Kaurna people. My parent’s formative early years were in the Depression of the 1930s which I believe had an important influence on their ideas about home. Both came from working class backgrounds and my grandparents on both my parent’s sides, but particularly my mother’s side, were greatly impacted by the perceived deprivations and experiences from this period. Neither set of grandparents owned their own home at any point and lived in South Australian Housing Trust accommodation, which in those days was part of a well-resourced public housing sector in South Australia. There was little or no money for travel. I

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suspect that the material insecurities experienced by my parents at various points, combined with a strong commitment to the Catholic and Anglican traditions of the Christian faith, and a general compliance regarding the dictates of the state, contributed to a value base solidly embedded in ideas about homeownership as a sign of social progression. This was also associated with ideas about the role of the nuclear heteronormative family as providing social and emotional security. My parents purchased land and built a house on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people with little or no awareness of the land as stolen. Some three kilometres away, however, was the site of Colebrook Home where First Nations children from the Stolen Generation were placed, which now includes memorials and sites of mourning. My parents stayed in this house which became a home for the best part of 45 years. This house as home exemplified some of the key themes explored in this book, of home as safety, security (both emotional and economical) and a sign of ‘superior’ social status, comparative to other housing tenures. While for a significant part of my life I have undertaken personal and professional critiques from a vaguely leftist perspective of the vagaries and inadequacies of the housing market as a means of distributing housing resources, I too have bought a house on stolen country. I too have been co-opted into the view that owning one’s home is a good financial move, an inalienable right, and a source of ontological security. At the risk of generalisation, I, as one of hundreds of thousands living in Australia today, have been compliant with the ideology of neoliberal inspired governments, to purchase a home for a range of reasons that will be explored in greater depth in Chapter 4 on homeownership. But as Kemeny (1983) highlighted many years ago, the dream of homeownership operates more as a mundane narrative construction rather than being anything innate and primordial. However, the hegemony of homeownership in housing policy has marginalised many who are unable to meet this perceived material requirement for social participation. It lends urgency to engaging in critical scrutiny of housing policy informed by neoliberal principles in what have become troubling and challenging times.

We pose some questions for the readers of this book: What is your family history of home? What does home mean to you? Where is home? Do you feel connected to multiple homes? How has home been disrupted? How does home continue? Why are these reflections important for social workers?

We write these reflections in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic when across the world we are forced by our governments to ‘stay at home’ and ‘go home to your family’, otherwise we risk being severely penalised with hefty fines. However, what is forgotten in this language and notion of the fixed ‘home’ is that some people do not have a home and family, some people are itinerant travellers, living in cars, in caravans, under bridges and in

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temporary shelters that are not a ‘home’, in circumstances where they cannot ‘go home’. It raises questions about how people who are homeless can possibly ‘stay at home’, with absurd reports that homeless people are being fined for not being ‘at home’ during this time. There have been media reports about the fining of homeless people from across the world, which shows how the materiality of private houses and assumed safety of family is seen to be ‘home’. The idea that home cannot be in ‘public places’ supports the notion of a singular fixed home being in a house, with a family. For example, in March 2020 during the French lockdown, it was reported that the French police have been ‘accused’ by homeless charities of ‘issuing fines to rough sleepers for failing to comply with coronavirus lockdown’ conditions, such as not carrying an exemption certificate, which obviously requires access to the internet and a printer (France 24, 2020). As reported by Euronews (Bock, 2020): ‘those who have no place to stay find themselves in a catch-22 situation: they have nowhere to go, but they cannot stay in public places’. These common understandings about home being a physical house and homeownership as a preferred housing aspiration have also infiltrated social work language and practice, rendering invisible homes that are not physical houses or mobile and temporary homes.

Overview of book This book starts with an acknowledgement in Chapter 1 that the book is being written on Stolen Homes in the colonial Australian context, which is presented as a themed ‘yarn’ between Amy and Carole. It reminds nonAboriginal readers or the ‘qallunaat’ (white people) about critically reflecting on their own power, privilege and complicity with the destruction of homes (Rasmussen, 2001, p. 108). This introductory chapter (Chapter 2) presents our own reflections on home, the aims of the book and chapter summaries, highlighting the complexities of home for social work. We expand on previous social work research literature (see also Zufferey et al., 2020) and reflect on our own privileged social positions and understanding of home. The book is positioned within an intersectional frame that considers how home can be diversely experienced, imagined and understood. There are important social work considerations associated with building a sense of home, especially when home is disrupted by experiences of violence, abuse and forced dislocations. The book has two sections: ‘Revisioning home in social work’ and ‘Practice considerations’.

Revisioning home in social work The next chapter, Chapter 3, discusses intersectional and multidisciplinary research on home, contrasting this broad literature with how home is used in social work literature. It interrogates notions of home in social work and expands on previous literature about the embodied home visit and home as

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a dwelling or residence (see also Zufferey et al., 2020). Multidisciplinary and intersectional perspectives on home as imagined and experienced in movement present home as being multiple and complex (Ahmed et al., 2003). This book builds on previous research and published literature by social work authors who advocate for interrogating home in social work (Zufferey et al., 2020). Previous social work research has positioned home as being beyond the ‘residential fixity’ of imagined homes in child welfare (Forsberg & Pösö, 2011). It has also discussed building civil society and a sense of place in migration and refugee resettlement work (Määttä, 2018). In some studies, the idea that social workers co-constructed a sense of home in collaboration with their clients is examined (Ranta & Juhila, 2020). Taking an intersectional approach to home in social work, this book explores how multidisciplinary literature has used intersectionality in their accounts of home. It argues for broadening definitions and responses to home in social work through a multidisciplinary and intersectional lens. Then, Chapter 4 explores home, homeownership and housing policy, providing a critique of the neoliberal rationalities that have informed the development of housing policies and scrutinising ideas about social inequalities and the normative home (see also Christophers & O’Sullivan, 2019). This chapter interrogates ideal imaginings of home in housing policy responses that support homeownership, highlighting social inequalities in Western contexts. It traces historical and ideological influences on the development of housing and homeownership policies, particularly focusing on Australia. Classed and socioeconomic social privileges pertaining to home are produced and maintained in policy making processes, with unequal social consequences and effects. Chapter 4 interrogates the imagined normality of homeownership, and highlights housing policy responses to Australia’s First Nations Peoples. As outlined in Chapter 5, the lived experiences and subjectivities of home often stand in stark contrast to how home is understood in policy debates, as highlighted in Chapter 4.Chapter 5 discusses the relevance of a situated intersectional analysis and trans-locational subjectivities of home, in the context of intersecting global/local, social, economic and political inequalities (Yuval-Davis, 2015). It covers diverse subjectivities and experiences of home, commencing with the voices of First Nations Peoples in Canada and Australia, who were alienated and stolen from their homes through abusive colonial state policies. This is followed by a discussion of research on the subjectivities of home in migration, through the life course and about intersections related to gender, sexuality, disability and cultural belonging. As reflexive social work researchers, we can also interrogate our own social positions of privilege and connections to home, which includes researchers’ complicated connections to a place, a country and political or cultural identity (Coloma, 2008).

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Practice considerations of home for social work This second section of the book discusses research about the complexities of home in homelessness, gendered violence, family and child welfare, young people, migration, aged care, disability and sexuality. It highlights learnings from research, to contribute to policy and practice responses that aim to build a sense of home, community and belonging, and to advocate for social and systemic change. The first chapter of this section (Chapter 6) discusses the complexities of home and homelessness. This chapter reflects on homelessness, home and social work. Policy definitions of homelessness differ to a sense of being or feeling home-less. A house has cultural, normative, psychological and moral meanings. Yet, home is more than a house. Home can mean different things to different people. Identifications with home for people defined as ‘homeless’ can be multiple, spatial, material, imagined, symbolic, cultural and temporal. To draw implications for home in social work means moving beyond fixed ideas about housing and homelessness. By acknowledging the intersectional complexities of home, this can shape social work practice and inform policy making in the field of homelessness. Many people may experience only a partial sense of home and belonging in a society with intersecting structural and systemic practices of white race privilege, homophobia, ableism, gendered, cultural, ethnic, religious discriminations and power inequalities (Crenshaw, 1991). Chapter 6 discusses First Nations Peoples’ sense of place and home in New Zealand, Canada and contested definitions of home and homelessness in Australia. It acknowledges that homelessness is gendered and classed, that gendered violence affects a sense of home, as well as the complexities of homes and housing for refugees and asylum seekers. It then highlights research about home and homelessness in the field of sexuality, and ableist assumptions that contribute to ‘othering’ people with a disability. Finally, it points to research on home and the potential of Housing First approaches, drawing policy and practice implications for social work. Chapter 7 takes an intersectional feminist approach to domestic violence and home. It argues that a sense of home is culturally, materially, socially, politically and economically constituted and experienced differently by different women. Domestic violence disrupts women’s sense of safety and home (Zufferey et al., 2016; Franzway et al., 2019). However, representations of home in domestic violence research are culturally and geographically embedded. Previous studies in South Africa have challenged how home is imagined in domestic violence through Western assumptions; the connections made between domestic violence and private material home spaces, and the spatial imaginings of home in domestic violence (Meth, 2003). The chapter argues that certain groups of women who experience domestic violence, such as Aboriginal and migrant women and women with a disability, can be further disadvantaged in their attempts to rebuild a safe home after escaping violence, within the context of broader social inequalities and ethnocentric services and support systems.

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Chapter 8 discusses how family and childhood homes are imagined and shape young people’s sense of home and identity, drawing implications for social work practice. The family home is commonly viewed by psychoanalysts as ‘where we come from’ and as shaping an ‘internal’ and ‘external’ sense of home (see Winnicott, 1990). Anthropologist Cieraad (2010; 1999, p. 11) describes home as ‘the emotionalisation of domestic space’, which is inextricably linked to memories and the idealisation of family. The contradictions in these ideal imaginings of the family are that domestic violence and child abuse predominantly occur within the family and the privacy of home. In social work, there has been research on the embodied ‘home visit’ in child protection work, highlighting the experiences, knowledge and practices of social workers and the home as a ‘resource for creative change’ (Ferguson, 2018, p. 79). Previous social work research has also challenged the assumed residential fixity of childhood homes, when children may have multiple family homes and their connections to home can be fluid, complex and contested (Forsberg & Pösö, 2011). This chapter highlights care leaver’s voices about ‘out of home’ care and debates about home and state institutions, including ideas that state institutions and orphanages can never be a ‘home’. In summary, it discusses social work’s complex engagement with families and children in their physical homes, fixed notions of the ‘home visit’, psychoanalytical understandings about an internal sense of home, and the perspectives of children in ‘out of home’ care, who may feel ‘at home’ (or ‘homeless’), drawing implications for social work. Chapter 9 builds on the previous chapter about children in family homes by focusing on state supported interventions aimed at assisting young people to transition into further education and employment. It discusses multidisciplinary research by Zufferey and Tedmanson that gathered the perspectives of young people and their teachers about the challenges they faced in attending an educational opportunity. The power of the state can mask social and economic inequalities that young people in welfare systems experience, which is inextricably linked to young people’s sense of home and belonging. Deficit constructs of welfare identities can exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, social harms (Malloch & Rigby, 2020). The notion of ‘home’ can be understood to be a ‘physical place or a state of mind’ (Davies & Rowe, 2020, p. 117). Taking the argument beyond home being affected by abuse and violence experienced in the domestic space as discussed in previous chapters, this chapter focuses on how the responses of social welfare institutions can contribute to young people’s ‘state of mind’, affecting their sense of social inclusion, home and belonging. This chapter focuses on young people’s perceived relationships with their employment case managers, whose responses are shaped by mutual obligation policies. Social workers and human service workers play an important role in negotiating smoother transitions for young people into education and employment because how services are delivered influence young people’s collective sense of home and community belonging.

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Chapter 10 on multiple dislocated homes also takes the notion of home beyond the fixity of the locale, to explore the movement of home across transnational borders (Ahmed et al., 2003). This chapter includes the making of home/s in situations of skilled migration as well as forced dislocation as experienced by asylum seekers and refugees. Mobility and migration can affectively, materially and symbolically transform understandings of home and belonging (Ahmed et al., 2003, p. 4). In the making and unmaking of transnational homes and hybridised cultures, homes can be multiple and fluid, blurring distinctions between the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ (Ahmed et al., 2003, p. 4). This chapter presents research that moves beyond assumptions about the residential fixity of home, to a sense of home as being imaginings from the past in the revisioning of the future, which includes classed experiences of skilled and commuter migrants. In the spirit of social work academics reflecting on their own privileges and movements of home, Dr Kalpana Goel discusses her changing sense of home and belonging when migrating from India to Australia. Migration experiences are embodied and exist within unequal power relations, at the intersections of ethnicity, religion, nationality, race, gender, sexuality and class, to name a few. This chapter also covers research on forced dislocations from home/s as experienced by refugees and asylum seekers, which is central to considering how racism persists and imbues social work (Masocha, 2015). It points to social work involvement in transnational homes, the reconstitution of home post migration in resettlement work, and the traumatic effects of estrangements from a home country, in situations of violence, war and alienation. Building on the discussion about classed privileges of homeownership in Chapter 4, Chapter 11 shows how homeownership shapes meanings of home for Australian baby boomers and grey nomads. Drawing on a study that gathered the perspectives of a small group of baby boomers and grey nomads in South Australia (Burgess, 2018), Chapter 11 discusses aged and classed privileges associated with homeownership, the romanticising of mobility for grey nomads and their sense of returning home after travelling. Research on a sense of home and older people has tended to focus on physical buildings (such as houses) and care environments (such as nursing homes), as well as the governance of retirement housing and communities (Power, 2017). Even the homeowners who travelled for large periods of time (self-identified ‘grey nomads’) recounted a new-found perspective and sense of emotional connectedness when ‘returning home’ to the sanctuary of their house and local neighbourhood (Burgess, 2018). A classed situated sense of home is associated with homeownership and a sense of choice and control about future housing options. This resonates with Bauman’s (1996) concepts of ‘tourists’ and ‘vagabonds’, highlighting social inequalities in mobility across national borders. This chapter draws implications for social workers who are working at building a sense of home for people as they age in local communities and neighbourhoods and includes considerations about ‘ageing in place’, a ‘lock up and leave home’ and the safety of homes and neighbourhoods.

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Chapter 12 covers disability, home and social work, which is under researched in social work literature. The notion of disability is contested. This chapter discusses policy debates in the field such as medical and social responses to disability, ableism and disabling policies and practices that shape disabling homes and communities (see also Pease, 2010). For people with disabilities, home can be a physical environment, such as a residential house or institutional care setting, as well as an interactional and relational space that provides for a sense of home and belonging (Imrie, 2004). The places and spaces that can contribute to a sense of home and belonging for some people can be inaccessible and threatening to people with a disability. Research in the UK has found that there are ‘tensions between ideal conceptions of the home and the material, lived, domestic realities of disabled people’ (Imrie, 2004, p. 760). People with a disability are at a higher risk of violence and abuse within their own ‘homes’ and in the community, compared to non-disabled adults. More social work attention needs to be paid to how people with a disability can experience ‘dignity enabling homes’ (Gibson et al., 2012). The final field of practice chapter focuses on sexuality and home, which responds to the call for making visible the invisibility of everyday sexuality in social work research, practice and education (Dunk, 2007; Rowntree, 2014). Multidisciplinary authors, including in social work (Bywater & Jones, 2007; Rowntree & Zufferey, 2017), geography (Gorman-Murray, 2012) and history (Cook, 2014), have argued that sexuality is central to one’s experience of home. Heterosexual domesticities and the ‘queer home’ intersect with gendered, racialised and classed social relations and are subject to scrutiny, including by social workers. Sexuality in social work has been examined across the life course, including focusing on disability, sexual health, sexual abuse, mental health and sexual exploitation (Bywater & Jones, 2007). The normalising practices of social work are imbued with heteronormative assumptions and their intersections with unequal racialised, abled, classed and gendered power relations that shape how home is experienced and understood. The queering of social work and research can reveal and disrupt heteropatriarchal power and normalising intervention strategies (Self, 2015). This chapter examines social work responses to home and sexuality, which includes highlighting lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) and queer identified people’s experiences of home and community. Finally, the concluding chapter (Chapter 14) draws together the threads of the book associated with intersectionality, home and social work. The book concludes with implications for social work research, practice, policy and education, to expand how home and belonging is responded to in social work.

Conclusion This book is a comprehensive examination of home in social work focusing on diverse experiences and different fields of practice. It highlights that lived experiences and subjectivities of home are inextricably linked to intersecting

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systemic and structural inequalities that contribute to disconnecting and dislocating people from a sense of home. This book revisions home in social work by broadening how home is diversly imagined, experienced and responded to, reflecting on our own unearned privileges and advantages that shape home. The next chapter discusses multidisciplinary and intersectional research on home, drawing implications for social work. It is followed by a chapter that examines housing policy debates in a discussion on home and homeownership.

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Ferguson, H. (2018). Making home visits: Creativity and the embodied practices of home visiting in social work and child protection. Qualitative Social Work, 17 (1), 65–80. Forsberg, H. & Pösö, T. (2011). Childhood homes as moral spaces – New conceptual arena. Social Work & Society: International Online Journal, 9 (2), 1–4. Fozdar, F. & Hartley, L. (2014). Housing and the creation of home for refugees in Western Australia. Housing, Theory and Society, 31 (2), 148–173. Franzway, S., Wendt, S., Moulding, N., Zufferey, C. & Chung, D. (2019). The sexual politics of gendered violence and women’s citizenship. Bristol UK: Policy Press. France 24 (2020). French police accused of fining homeless amid virus lockdown. France 24. 21 March 2020. Accessed 7 June 2021, www.france24.com/en/ 20200321-french-police-accused-of-fining-homeless-people-amid-virus-lockdown. Gibson, B.E., Secker, B., Rolfe, D., Wagner, F., Parke, B. & Mistry, B. (2012). Disability and dignity-enabling home environments. Social Science & Medicine, 74 (2), 211–219. Gorman-Murray, A. (2012). Experiencing home: Sexuality (pp. 152–157). International encyclopedia of housing and home. Netherlands: Elsevier. Hulko, W. (2015). Operationalizing intersectionality in feminist social work research: Reflections and techniques from research with equity- seeking groups (pp. 69–89). In Wahab, S., Anderson-Nathe, B. & Gringeri, C. (eds). Feminisms in social work research. New York: Routledge. Imrie, R. (2004). Disability, embodiment and the meaning of the home. Housing Studies, 19 (5), 745–763. Kemeny, J. (1983). The great Australian nightmare: A critique of the home ownership ideology. Melbourne: Georgian House. Määttä, T. (2018). Broadening social work’s framework on place and belonging: An investigation into identity processes intersected by experiences of migration. The British Journal of Social Work, 48 (6), 1594–1610. Mallett, S. (2004). Understanding home: A critical review of the literature. The Sociological Review, 52, 62–89. Malloch, M. & Rigby, P. (2020). The complexities of ‘home’: Young people ‘on the move’ and state responses. Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 59 (2), 158–173. Masocha, S. (2015). Asylum seekers, social work and racism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Meth, P. (2003). Rethinking the ‘domus’ in domestic violence: Homelessness, space and domestic violence in South Africa. Geoforum, 34 (3), 317–327. Mohanty, C.T. (2003). Feminism without borders. Decolonizing theory. Practicing solidarity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2003). I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society (pp. 23–40). In Ahmed, S., Castaneda, C., Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (eds), Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers. Munford, R. (2021). Reflections from Aotearoa New Zealand: Stay home, stay safe, stay strong and be kind. Qualitative Social Work, 20 (1–2), 110–115. Murphy, Y., Hunt, V., Zajicek, A.M., Norris, A.N. & Hamilton, L. (2009). Incorporating intersectionality in social work practice, research, policy and education. Washington, DC: NASW Press. Nayak, S. & Robbins, R. (eds) (2018). Intersectionality in social work: Activism and practice in context. London: Routledge.

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Pease, B. (2010). Undoing privilege. Unearned advantage in a divided world. London: Zed Books. Power, E.R. (2017). Housing governance and senses of home in older age: The provider scale. Journal of Housing for the Elderly, 31 (3), 193–212. Ranta, J. & Juhila, K. (2020). Constructing a sense of home in floating support for people using drugs. Qualitative Social Work, 19 (4), 685–700. Rasmussen, D. (2001). Qallunology: A pedagogy of the oppressor. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 25 (2) 105–212. Rowntree, M. (2014). Making sexuality visible in Australian social work education. Social Work Education, 3 (33), 353–364. Rowntree, M. & Zufferey, C. (2017). Lesbians’ embodied and imagined homes: ‘It’s an internal journey. Sexualities, 20 (8), 943–958. Sethi, B. (2021). Will someone knock on my door? COVID-19 and social work education. Qualitative Social Work, 20 (1–2), 116–122. Self, J. (2015). Critical feminist social work and the Queer query (pp. 240–258). Chapter 15 in Wahab, S., Anderson-Nathe, B. & Gringeri, C. (eds) Feminisms in social work research: Promise and possibilities for justice-based knowledge. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Somerville, P. (1992). Homelessness and the meaning of home: Rooflessness or rootlessness? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 16 (4), 529–539. The West Australian (2013) Australian PM vows referendum to recognise Aboriginals, The West Australian. 10 July 2013. The 1963 Yirrkala bark petitions. Accessed 7 June 2021, www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/land/the-1963-yirrkala-bark-p etitions. Winnicott, D.W. (1990). Home is where we start from: Essays by a psychoanalyst. London: Norton. Winker, G. & Degele, N. (2011). Intersectionality as multi-level analysis: Dealing with social inequality. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18 (1), 51–66. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging. London: SAGE. Yuval-Davis, N. (2015). Situated intersectionality and social inequality. Dans Raisons Politiques, 58 (2), 91–100. Zufferey, C. (2013). Not knowing that I do not know and not wanting to know: Reflections of a white Australian social worker. International Social Work, 56 (5), 659–673. Zufferey, C. (2017). Homelessness and social work: An intersectional approach. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Zufferey, C., Chung, D., Franzway, S., Wendt, S. & Moulding, N. (2016). Intimate partner violence and housing: Eroding women’s citizenship. Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, 31 (4), 463–478. Zufferey, C., Yu, N. & Hand, T. (2020). Researching home in social work. Qualitative Social Work, 19 (5–6), 1095–1110.

Part 1

Revisioning home in social work

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Home, social work and intersectionality Carole Zufferey

Introduction This chapter discusses multidisciplinary and intersectional understandings of home, contrasting this broad literature on home with how home is used in social work literature. The multidisciplinary body of work on home discussed in this chapter can advance social work scholarship, by expanding the lens of social work research to focus on different aspects of home. It extends on research and published literature by social work authors who advocate for interrogating home in social work. For example, social work research that moves beyond the ‘residential fixity’ of home in child welfare (Forsberg & Pösö, 2011); that focuses on building civil society and a sense of place in migration, especially for refugees and asylum seekers (Määttä, 2018); social workers who co-constructed a sense of home in collaboration with their client groups (Ranta & Juhila, 2020) and rethinking the notion of home in the Covid-19 global pandemic (Buckland, 2021; Aaslund, 2021; Munford, 2021; Sethi, 2021). Over the last 30 years there has been a significant amount of research on what home means, in disciplines such as sociology (Mallett, 2004), psychology (Moore, 2000), nursing and gerontology (Sixsmith et al., 2014; Andrews et al., 2012; Oswald et al., 2006; Rubinstein, 1989) and architecture (Despres, 1991). Home is commonly thought of as being a physical structure (such as a dwelling or house) where people reside with family, which includes the material aspects of people’s lives. Rowles (1983) use of the concept of ‘social insideness’ refers to home as a place that provides social interactions, a sense of connectedness and relationships (with family, community and groups) that contribute to one’s identity and sense of belonging. Home is socially and historically constructed through a person’s cultural and biographical experiences (Mallett, 2004). It can be a place and a space in which people actively produce, organise, script and invest in their daily life (Cristoforetti et al., 2011). Home can provide a sense of belonging, connect place to identity, be an emotional attachment and a feeling of satisfaction (Eyles & Williams, 2008). Home can also be fluid, multiple, dislocated, uprooted and estranged, through, for example, being in exile and migration. It can be reconfigured in DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-4

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the remaking of communities in a new country and collective acts of remembering (Ahmed, 1999; Ahmed et al., 2003), as well as being associated with ‘stasis’ and ‘fixity’. Home can be negatively experienced and imagined as homelessness. However, common feelings of estrangement from home can also create collective political spaces that make activism possible (Ahmed, 1999, p. 344).

Home and social work The residential fixity of home tends to be the dominant social work imaginary of home. In social work, home is often understood in relation to social institutions, such as housing and accommodation services for people with disabilities, people who are homeless, women escaping violence, in aged care (‘nursing homes’); family and childhood homes, including ‘out of home’ care such as foster care or residential care homes; as well as home as a country of origin or ‘homeland’ (Zufferey et al., 2020). The ‘home environment’ in longterm institutional care is well researched. For example, Canadian research on what constitutes dignity-enabled home environments for young people with a disability highlighted key social justice issues associated with home: …the ability to form and sustain meaningful relationships, access to community and civic life; access to control and flexibility of daily activities; access to opportunities for self-expression and identity formation; access to respectful relationships with attendants; access to opportunities to participate in school, work or leisure; access to physical, psychological and ontological security. (Gibson et al., 2012, p. 211) The numerous social barriers and policy constraints affecting people with a disability have implications for housing, health, social care and political reform, as further discussed in Chapter 12. South Australian social work scholar Lorna Hallahan (2010, p. 118) reflects on her own lived experiences of disability and social work, encouraging us to embrace our status as ‘constructive troublemaker’ in the disability movement. In aged care, social work scholar Lewinson (2015, p. 702) explored meanings of home from the perspective of older people living in an aged care facility, to co-construct a shared narrative of home and plan for changes to the aged care facility. As well, a Finnish study examined how workers constructed a sense of home in collaboration with formerly homeless drug users in a Housing First program, arguing that supporting clients’ attachments to their current living places can prevent future homelessness (Ranta & Juhila, 2020). In social work literature, home is also referred to as a country. This includes research with Western trained social workers ‘returning home’ to practice social work in their countries of origin (Wehbi et al., 2016) as well as the lived experiences of refugees and ‘tragic’ exiles from one’s home country (Kumsa, 2007).

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The word ‘home’ is predominantly used in social work practice when referring to the ‘home visits’ of social workers in different practice settings (Winter & Cree, 2016). These studies include the idea that a ‘home visit’ is a mobile and embodied experience, such as research in Israel that presents an institutional ethnography of the bodily aspects of home visits (Muzicant & Peled, 2018). As well, in child protection, in the UK, the embodied experiences, knowledge and practices of social workers conducting home visits is highlighted, positioning the home as a ‘resource for creative change’ (Ferguson, 2018, p. 79). The practice of home visits in child protection work has also been researched in a mixed-method study from the UK using Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking, diaries and interviews to explore the emotional nuances of stillness/mobility in child protection home visits (Disney et al., 2019). Critical social work literature in child welfare has called for social workers to critically reassess how we use the term home. This includes challenging how social workers assume a moral position on the residential fixity of childhood homes, even when children may have multiple family homes and their connections to home can be fluid, complex and contested (Forsberg & Pösö, 2011).

Intersectionality The strength of this book is its theoretical orientation of intersectionality that attends to the discursive, the material and the imagined, showing how home is complex and multidimensional. The use of intersectionality in non-essentialising and non-universalising ways allows for a nuanced focus on home from the perspectives of different groups in diverse areas of social work practice. This builds on previous social work research from an intersectional lens that examined intersecting social inequalities and unequal socioeconomic power relations in the field of homelessness (see Zufferey, 2017). The term ‘intersectionality’ was first coined by legal professor Kimberlie Crenshaw (1991) to highlight how gender and race functioned as intersecting systems of discrimination in American law for African American women. It has since been expanded to examine the positions of ‘any grouping of people, advantaged as well as disadvantaged’ (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 201). Privileging and oppressive power relations of home are embedded in social locations, associated with class, gender, race, ethnicity, ability, age, sexuality and other markers of identity including migration, which intersect to constitute social meanings and practices of ‘home’ (Christensen & Jensen, 2012). The central aims of intersectional research are to focus on synergistic relations between inequalities grounded in everyday lived experiences (such as of home); to make visible intersecting social identifications and diversities (that, for example, can shape understandings of home); to explore the complexities of oppressive and privileging policy processes (that, for example, contribute to homeownership); to examine social inequalities and injustices that manifest in interconnected domains of power as they relate to home,

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and to promote social change (Hulko, 2015; Dhamoon, 2011; Christensen & Jensen, 2012; Lykke, 2010; Thornton Dill & Zambrana, 2009; Thornton Dill & Kohlman, 2012; Murphy et al., 2009). Winker and Degele (2011) focus on both material experiences and symbolic representations and advocate for a multilevel intersectional analysis that incorporates social identities, social structures and symbolic representations. Home is materially experienced, socially imagined and discursively represented, through, for example, policy assumptions about homeownership (see Chapter 4). A socially situated intersectional analysis can highlight the complexities of home and social work, which are implicitly intertwined with intersecting power relations (Lykke, 2010), including the social inequalities associated with homeownership.

Multidisciplinary accounts of home There are multidisciplinary differences about how home is imagined and understood. The concept of home has been variously associated with conceptualisations of the house, family, self, journey, gender and safety (Mallett, 2004). The International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home (Smith, 2012) includes contributions written by different authors who draw on research in economics, finance, psychology, social policy, sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture and law – but not in social work. This section of the chapter discusses multidisciplinary engagements with the notion of home and housing, including in geography, health, sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies, architecture and interior design, psychology, philosophy, English literature, feminist, housing, migration studies and sexuality. This multidisciplinary research is then expanded on in Part 2 of the book, which includes fields of social work practice, such as homelessness, gendered violence, family, young people, migration, disability, sexuality and home. Feminist geographers have for a long time examined power relations in public and private spaces such as work and home, which include the gendered domestic world of the household (Domosh, 1998; Dowling & Pratt, 1993). A sense of home is inextricably linked to emotional wellbeing, which is impacted when women live in or leave a domestically violent relationship (Franzway et al., 2019), as further discussed in Chapter 7. Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling published a comprehensive book on home and domesticity titled Home (2006). Feminist geographers have constructed home as being a gendered domestic place, a ‘spatial imaginery’ and an imagined ideal (Blunt & Dowling, 2006). Housing policies associated with homeownership as discussed in Chapter 4 are also classed and gendered. In Australia, early work in geography, such as the book Home Truths (Badcock & Beer, 2000), challenged the Great Australian Dream of homeownership, which can both enrich or entrap. Focusing on America, the book called Geography of Home examines the architecture, psychology and history of the spaces and places of the house as home, as ‘where we live’ (Busch, 2003). As further discussed in the next chapter, housing and homeownership is connected to a sense of

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home and has psychological significance and cultural, normative and moral meanings (Dekkers, 2011, p. 296). In health and dementia care, de Witt et al. (2009; 2010) found that interviewees differentiated between ‘being here’ (living alone in their own homes), ‘being there’ (in a nursing home) and ‘being out’ in the community and neighbourhood. In palliative care, four interpretations of the metaphor ‘coming home’ were found: to one’s own house or homelike environment; to one’s own body; in the psychosocial environment (akin to psychological and emotional wellbeing), and when engaging with the spiritual dimension, such as in the process of dying (Dekkers, 2011, p. 292). Building on ‘lifeworld led health care’ (Todres et al., 2007), Dekkers (2011, p. 299) draws on phenomenological philosophers such as Heidegger (1973), to examine diverse notions of dwelling, spatiality, house, home, images and lifeworlds, to develop an account of ‘home led health care’ in dementia. In philosophy, the term Lebenswelt (or lifeworld) was first described by Husserl (1970), which related to everyday temporality, spatiality, intersubjectivity, embodiment and mood (Dekkers, 2011), as well as Habermas’s (1981) sense of being in the realm of critical communicative action. These notions of the lifeworld have provided new ways of thinking about health care and intersubjective and inter-relational experiences of belonging and home. Lifeworld studies have included research that explored the perspectives of human service professionals (such as social workers) about their survival in everyday crises produced by systemic pressures and the effects on their emotional wellbeing and ontological health (Prosser et al., 2013; Todres et al., 2007). Sociological notions of home and belonging are commonly attributed to feeling at home (or leaving home), as related to a family, country, community or neighbourhood. Sociologist Paul O’Connor published the book titled Home: The Foundations of Belonging (2019), which focused on home as a ‘foundational sociological and anthropological concept’ and positioned home within global and local contexts, arguing that ‘a shared home’ is ‘the foundation for community and society’. In the Canadian context, Anderson et al.’s (2016) collection on the Sociology of Home focused on belonging, community and place as the micro-meso-macro aspects of home. It included sections on the micro-level of domestic space and homemaking, such as homemaking on the margins through the experiences of youth who are homeless and lone parents. The meso-level of home was related to urban planning, housing in neighbourhoods and urban and rural communities (Anderson et al., 2016). The macro-level of home was associated with political ecology, highlighting gendered, class-based, racialised and Indigenous voices (Anderson et al., 2016). An older book on Ideal Homes (1999), edited by sociologist Tony Chapman and social anthropologist Jenny Hockey, focused on home, social change and domestic life. The book examined the ‘ideal home’ as it is imagined and lived; the changing images of home; mobility and transitional homes; homes in danger (including when living in domestic violence); changing perceptions of home (including related to gender roles) and alternatives to ideal homes (Chapman & Hockey, 1999).

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In anthropology, home is often associated with domestic spaces and objects as well as everyday rituals and routines. For example, Irene Cieraad’s edited book At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space (1999 [2006]) examined the domestic space of home practices and the cultural symbolism of home in Western societies. Cieraad (2010, p. 85) argued that home is ‘not fixed in time and space’ but is temporally reinvented in different locations over the life course. At the material level of homemaking, domestic objects revive memories of past homes, with psychological attachments to home being represented in discursive constructions about the transitions of home (Cieraad, 2010, p. 85). More recently, Lenhard and Samanani (2020) have edited a book on ethnographic studies about home in anthropology, arguing that how home is understood shapes how ethnography is undertaken. The complexities of home are highlighted by anthropologists Lenhard and Samanani (2020, p. 17) who point out that, on the one hand, ‘home is the space, the practice, or the imagined idyll where alienation might be undone’ but on the other hand, ‘home may be a site of displacement, a place where one is made to feel out of place, an ideal that has not yet arrived, or something which is subject to continual improvement’. Furthermore, in cultural studies, Wise (2000, p. 295) explored the idea of home as a space of comfort amidst fear, such as a child’s repetitive song as establishing personal territories in the search for a place of comfort. Home is emotionally, culturally and historically embedded. Wise (2000, p. 295) argued that ‘subjectivity is a product of territorializing, identity is territory…grounded in habit; the repetition of action and thought establishes home’. Home, like cultural identity, can be ‘constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth’, as continuous and discontinuous (Hall, 1990, p. 226). In media studies, Morley (2000) examined ideas of home, homeland, nation states and new patterns of migration and communication technologies, arguing that technologies transgress private and nation state boundaries. Home has been related to the microstructures of the gendered home, the family and domestic realm and contemporary debates about the nation, community and cultural identities (Morley, 2000). In cultural studies (such as in the International Journal of Cultural Studies), notions of home and homing are commonly used in migration as referring to a place or a country, in placemaking approaches that connect people and places and the development of a sense of belonging through social citizenship. Migrating across countries includes being home, leaving ‘home’, returning home and resettling in a new home (Ahmed, 1999). Home (like identity) is not fixed but can be fluid and contested. The making of homes and nations occurs through the movement of bodies and communities that can be uprooted and re-grounded (Ahmed et al., 2003, p. 1). However, First Nations scholar Moreton-Robinson (2003, pp. 23–24) has noted that the dispossession of First Nations Peoples from their homes, lands and social, political and legal rights has rendered the original owners of invaded lands as homeless, out of place and not belonging (see Chapters 1, 5 and 6).

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In architecture and interior design, the domestic spaces of home are particularly focused on the relationships between bodies and buildings, consumption, material culture, domestic objects and spatial relations, across time and cultures, as evident in articles from the multidisciplinary journal titled: Home Cultures: The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space. Architectural research on the residential house as a home has combined an analysis of the physical aspects of the house (dwelling) with psychological and human aspects of home, that includes social identities and personal values (Stoneham & Smith, 2015). Architectural design knowledge, on its own, cannot create a sense of home without knowledge about human connection (Stoneham & Smith, 2015). Also in architecture, Madigan and Munro (1991) examined how physical forms, historical developments, changing ideologies, architectural norms and house designs mediate meanings of home and structure gender relations. In environmental psychology, the concept of home has tended to encompass environmental, experiential and personal domains of the physical dwelling. There has been a shift towards social and cultural identifications, meanings of home and a context-sensitive focus on the experiences of home (Moore, 2000). Early research on the meanings of home in environmental psychology presented five attributes of home: centrality; continuity; privacy; self-expression and personal identity and social relationships (Tognoli, 1987). The connections between emotions, identity and the home environment (the residential space) have been examined in psychology by mapping psychological ambiances of 18 spaces or rooms found in an ideal house or home, connecting these to emotional regulation for 200 participants (Graham et al., 2015 p. 350). These researchers identified six broad ambiance dimensions in a house: restoration such as relaxation, kinship such as family connection, storage such as organisation, stimulation, intimacy and productivity, with differences across rooms in the house (Graham et al., 2015, p. 346). They argued that an analysis of residential space can contribute to psychological research on emotions and that conceptual connections to an ideal home are psychological processes (Graham et al., 2015). Also in environmental psychology, the place of residence and place attachment in urban and rural locations was examined by surveying 600 participants in bushfire risk areas in Western Australia (Anton & Lawrence, 2014, p. 451). They found that rural residents and homeowners reported higher place identity and dependence, with greater attachments to one’s home and location (Anton & Lawrence, 2014, p. 458). The book Place and Identity: The Performance of Home (2019) by UK author Joanna Richardson connects housing, home and homelessness. She argued that home is a network and negotiated conflict between place, space, identity, land, ancestry and culture (Richardson, 2019). Home is connected to a sense of place and identity as well as to everyday rituals, performances and emotional conflicts. The Housing Studies journal has over a thousand articles that mention the word ‘home’, which covers housing, homeownership,

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home and homelessness, such as when working with care-leavers (Natalier & Johnson, 2015) and in disability (Imrie, 2004). As early as the 1980s, seminal housing authors in the UK such as Saunders and Williams (1988) argued that home as a ‘locale’ is subjective and varies with social relations, such as gender, age, social class and geographical context. Housing, home and identity have also been aligned to the sociology of consumption, including how residential locations (such as suburbs and neighbourhoods) can be associated with classed symbolic values that influence the choice of home (Gram‐Hanssen & Bech‐Danielsen, 2004). The concepts of home, place and identity have been discussed in housing research using the work of Heidegger (1973) as a ‘way of being’ in the world and the rootedness of Bourdieu’s (1979) habitus, which related to knowledges, habits, predispositions and tendencies. Previous work had advocated for broadening the scope of housing research about place and home beyond individual households to regional, national and international contexts (Easthope, 2004). In Christchurch, New Zealand, Winstanley et al. (2002, p. 818) explored how people created and experienced home and made decisions about housing and geographical locations associated with work, leisure and social interaction. They found that residential mobility (and immobility) is complexly intertwined with identity, home and place attachment. Individuals ‘construct their sense of identity through social and place-specific interrelationships’ that cannot be ‘isolated from cultural, political and economic contexts’ (Winstanley et al., 2002, p. 829). In contrast to localised place attachments, international mobility studies on migration and home highlight transnational connections marked by multiple and hybrid identities and allegiances to home/s (Chan, 2012). Home and housing are intertwined. The material, social and symbolic significance of one’s home, homelife (or the ‘homescape’) is also associated with changes in housing tenure, homeownership, rental, public housing or housing estates (Wilson, 2016). In her book Home in British Working-Class Fiction (2016), English Literature scholar Nicola Wilson examined representations of ‘abstract homes and concrete housing’ (p. 15) in working class literature in the 20th century. Since private property (or the lack of) has historically determined one’s ability to vote, with homeless people only having the right to vote since the 2000s in the UK, owning property and homeownership are intrinsically linked to classed and gendered parameters of home (Wilson, 2016). Drawing on interviews with older New Zealand homeowners, early sociological housing studies by Dupuis and Thorns (1998, p. 29) noted four themes about the ontological security of home and housing: the constancy in the social and material environment; the space for the establishment of routine; housing as a ‘refuge from the outside world’ and ‘as a secure base’ around which people construct their identities and social status. Beyond examining middle class homeownership, the ontological security of home has also been associated with other forms of housing, which has included: the benefits of ‘housing first’ models compared to more transitional housing for people who are homeless with a

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mental illness (Padgett, 2007); renting in social housing compared to the private sector because of the lower rents and tenure predictability (Hiscock et al., 2001); the security of tenure for Australian public housing tenants in affordable housing (Mee, 2007); and the sense of ontological security experienced by permanent residents of caravan parks (Newton, 2008). Easthope (2014) argued for focusing beyond the benefits of homeownership in the relationship between home and dwelling, to building the experiences of home for private rental housing tenants. Compared to other countries such as Germany, Australian legislation, its housing policies and the housing market places limits on private tenants’ sense of control over home (Easthope, 2014, p. 579). A wider debate is needed about the importance of home, the impact of social norms on housing tenure and housing policy, highlighting the rights and wellbeing of private tenants (Easthope, 2014, p. 579). In their extensive research on family relations and housing in Europe, North America and Australia, Mulder and Lauster (2010, p. 434) explored issues of space, safety, flexibility and housing quality, arguing that people ‘living in high-quality housing tend to have had parents who also live (or lived) in high-quality housing’. In this body of work, ‘housing quality’ is understood to encompass the presence or absence of features including ‘heating or insulation, leakages, moisture, noise…privacy, status, comfort, and luxury’ (Mulder, 2013, p. 362). Some housing research can be politicised for promoting the ‘comfort’ and ‘luxury’ of home but ignoring the classed privileges that exist within unequal power relations (Rossdale, 2015). The idea of ‘feeling at home’ is a ‘contingent space’ that can also be a ‘marker’ of social exclusion and inclusion (Rossdale, 2015, p. 375). Nonetheless, research has found that even for homeowners or aspiring homeowners, the ontological security and ‘ontological’ anxiety of owning a home in contemporary uncertain times is ‘two sides of one existential phenomenon’ (Colic‐Peisker & Johnson, 2010, p. 368). Colic‐Peisker and Johnson’s (2010, p. 352) research with 73 middle class homeowners or aspiring homeowners in Melbourne at different stages of their ‘housing careers’ identified ontological insecurities and anxieties in diverse housing situations, including renters planning to purchase, people in ‘mortgage stress’ and outright homeowners, who were concerned about their children’s ability to purchase a home (Colic-Peisker & Johnson, 2010). In Denmark, Jørgensen (2016, p. 99) discussed the ‘entanglements of emotional and economic investments’ by families buying their first house, focusing on ‘subjective meaning-making, family negotiations on economic decisions and sense-making’ in the context of ‘uncertain’ economic conditions. They found that homeownership as ‘an emotional investment’ for the future of the family can elicit feelings of security and insecurity, as it is ‘saturated with love, desire, fear, anxiety and hope’ (Jørgensen, 2016, p. 98), which is gendered. Feminist geographers Dowling and Pratt (1993, p. 464) noted that home is complicated for feminist activists who aim to unmask power relations and break the dualisms between work and home, reproduction and production

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and public and private relations. The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s was an important precursor to much multidisciplinary feminist work on home. This commenced with Betty Friedan’s (1963)’s critique about women’s confinement to the domestic sphere of home, as traditionally tied to ‘femininity, intimacy, familial and affective relations and domesticity’ (Longhurst, 2012, p. 158). In the fields of home and homelessness, Wardhaugh (1999, p. 91) argued that the homeless woman is a contradiction, a ‘gender renegade’, who has rejected or been rejected because home is constructed through gendered social order. In the 1980s and 1990s, liberal and socialist feminists highlighted gendered and capitalist structures of home. Radical feminists challenged constructions of the violent home as ‘a haven’ because ‘geographies of home change for women and children when they feel unsafe in their own private space’ (Longhurst, 2012, p. 160). When the violence of child abuse and domestic violence is experienced within one’s family home, there can be a loss of a sense of a safe home and community belonging, as well as homelessness and housing instability associated with the material effects of leaving a violent relationship (Zufferey et al., 2016). The experience of being ‘homeless‐at‐home’ is often expressed by women who ‘experience abuse, violence and the suppression of self within the supposed safe haven of the domestic home’ or ‘prison’ (Wardhaugh, 1999, p. 91). However, some black feminist activists such as bell hooks (1991) have also argued that black women experience the private and public realms differently and that home (or ‘homeplaces’) can also serve as a resistance to a racist society. As evident from research in South Africa, the gendered experiences of domestic violence, home, home spaces and housing instability are situationally and culturally embedded (Meth, 2003), which is further discussed in Chapter 7. Queer theory (see Self, 2015) and feminist poststructuralist understandings of home have contributed to home being constructed as multiple and fluid, shaped by gender and sexuality and ‘a number of other axes of embodied subjectivity such as ethnicity, nationality, age, and social class’ (Longhurst, 2012, p. 162). There are emotional and material effects on home because of intersecting social inequalities associated with heteronormativity, racism, sexism, ageism and so on. For example, homophobia in the family home and the wider society has been found to affect young people’s risk of experiencing homelessness (Dunne et al., 2002). Young people may flee unsupportive family homes in the process of ‘coming out’ to more freely express their sexual identity (Pilkey, 2013, p. 159). In Kent UK, Tunaker (2015, pp. 250–252) found that lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual young people (aged 16–25) in the ‘liminal space’ of a homeless hostel perceive being estranged from family as being ‘properly homeless’. Institutionalised heteronormativity and homophobic practices can also contribute to the loss of home and the onset of homelessness (Gold, 2005). As further discussed in Chapter 13, the heterosexual, nuclear family home is often promoted as the ‘emblematic model of comfort, care and belonging’ (Ahmed et al., 2003). In her book Home and Sexuality: The ‘Other’ Side of the Kitchen (2017), anthropologist Rachael Scicluna explored the meanings and

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experiences of home among a group of older lesbians, who over the past five decades have sought to create alternative intimate and public living spaces. These older lesbians experience intersecting social inequalities through the hegemonic institutions of heteronormativity and patriarchy (Scicluna, 2017). Rowntree and Zufferey (2017) explored how nine lesbian women in Australia embodied and imagined ‘home’ using a visual methodology and found that collective homes were embodied as an internal journey and associated with a sense of belonging, feeling worthwhile, valued, safe and blessed. Waitt and Johnston (2013) studied lesbian mobilities and homemaking in Townsville, Australia and found that feelings of ‘home’ are also connected to a sense of belonging to different geographical locations. Kawale’s (2004, p. 565) study of lesbian and bisexual women in London found that emotions work is central to the ‘institutionalization of heterosexuality that regulates emotional behavior and perpetuates spatial inequalities between sexualized groups’. Early work by Egerton (1990), Johnston and Valentine (1995) and Elwood (2000) examined lesbians’ access to a home and housing and found that lesbian women (akin to single women) can experience discrimination and financial disadvantage in the housing market. Also further discussed in Chapter 13, in the UK, Brett Pilkey (2013, 2014) examined the spatial mobility and homemaking imaginaries of eight Londoners who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) in their narratives and imaginings of past, present and future ‘homes’. His research shows that nostalgic imaginings of the childhood family home is important in the creation of present homes and hopes for future homes; parental homes can be an isolating space where sexual identity is often closeted or modified, and that adult or ‘new homes’ provide opportunities to express sexuality differently (Pilkey, 2013, 2014). Gay and lesbian meanings of home and queer domesticities (Cook, 2014) can challenge and reinterpret heteronormative ideas about privacy, identity, family and home (Gorman-Murray, 2007). As well, support provided to young people in heterosexual family homes can also become sites of resistance to wider practices of heterosexism (Gorman-Murray, 2008). The ‘making’ of home involves an embodied negotiation between ever shifting experiences of belonging and alienation as well as resistance and conformity (Gorman-Murray, 2012, p. 2). To contribute to the revisioning of home in social work, this chapter has covered multidisciplinary research about how home is experienced and imagined, highlighting that home intersects with unequal power relations and can be envisioned differently, depending on different disciplinary traditions and fields of research and practice.

Implications for social work This chapter has broadly highlighted multidisciplinary literature on home, including in the disciplines of sociology, feminist geography, gerontology, English literature, media studies, migration and mobility studies, cultural

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studies, anthropology, architecture and interior design, housing studies, environmental psychology, disability, women’s studies and sexuality. Previous literature on home in social work has positioned home as it relates to institutional settings, family homes, home visits, a country and current living places. Home is also associated with the material aspirations of homeownership in a ‘correct suburb’; emotional connections to multiple homes; as a place to be with family, related to cultural, ethnic and religious identifications (Zufferey et al., 2020). Migration, classed social boundaries, access to employment, income levels as well as age, gender and experiences of racism intersect to shape meanings of home (Zufferey et al., 2020). Social work understandings of home can be expanded by arguing that intersecting power relations associated with heteronormativity, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism and nationalism socially includes and excludes different groups of people, which influences their capacity to achieve a sense of home and belonging. Home tends to be narrowly used in social work literature, as for example in the language of ‘home visit’. However, social work research literature has also included a critical examination of the notion of home, such as challenging the fixity of home and examining the policy and state rhetoric about ‘home’ in the pandemic (Buckland, 2021; Aaslund, 2021; Munford, 2021; Forsberg and Pösö, 2011). Meanings and emotions of home can be associated with connections and disconnections from private spaces (such as in the house) and public places (such as in the community). When thinking about home, social work researchers can reinstitute an interest in concepts of place and space as ‘temporal and sensory, imaginary and affective’, which speaks to ‘affect and sensory experiences as well as shifting relationships of belonging/identity and attachment’ (Bryant & Williams, 2020, p. 321). The social work profession is an evolving one that operates within global and local contexts constituted by wide-ranging power dynamics within an everchanging environment (Bent-Goodley, 2014). These global and local concerns are invariably connected to a sense of home and belonging. Social workers across the world are working with refugees and asylum seekers who are rendered ‘homeless’ and stateless through war and violence. Globally, migrants and refugees are building a sense of belonging and home post migration in a new host country (Cuthill, 2019). Building a sense of home and ontological security is centrally connected to the ethical principles of social work based on a commitment to human rights, social justice, dignity and worth of the person and the importance of human relationships (IFSW, 2018). When considering the human rights and social justice mission of social work, social workers play an important role in advocating for addressing intersecting social inequalities that contribute to social exclusion practices, which invariably affects one’s sense of home and belonging.

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Conclusion Home is complex and multidimensional. This chapter has argued for the broadening of social work research knowledge and practice responses to home in social work. It has drawn on an intersectional social work approach to discuss multidisciplinary constructions of home. Intersectionality is important to understanding home in social work because home is diverse and intersects with unequal power relations. Home can be diversely imagined, materially and emotionally experienced and discursively constructed as multiple and fluid. This chapter has advanced social work scholarship on home by engaging with multidisciplinary research and constructions of home. The next chapter critically examines how social privileges are maintained through dominant housing policy discourses that focus primarily on homeownership.

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4

Home, homeownership and housing policy Chris Horsell

Introduction This chapter traces the historical and ideological influences on the development of policies supporting homeownership and the idea of home. The archetypal idea of home as a house and of homeownership was associated with major social and economic changes, including the Industrial Revolution, increased urbanisation and consumerism and the transformation of the family from an economic unit of survival to a symbol of human emotional investment (Flanders, 2014). Associated with these developments is the privileging of values and beliefs about housing and home as the sites through which life is lived. Over the past three decades there has been an emerging literature of home as a special place made manifest in material possessions including in a house (Allon, 2008; Allon, 2011; Allon & Parker, 2016; Atkinson & Blandy, 2016; Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Clarke, 2001; Cook et al., 2016; Dewilde & Ronald, 2017; Doling & Ronald, 2010). For many, the words ‘house’ and ‘home’ are conflated to mean a retreat from the complexities of the ‘external world’ through an accumulation of desirable consumer products. This chapter on housing policy discusses how government initiatives tend to focus on supporting homeownership. The language of ‘home ownership’ then treats ‘house and home as synonymous’ (Dovey, 1985, p. 33), which is only attainable for certain privileged groups. The chapter situates housing policy within the broader questions associated with home and the extent to which social policy amplifies and entrenches social inequalities or is used to achieve greater levels of equity (Bacchi, 2009; Piachaud, 2008). This necessarily involves addressing issues of ideology and politics. The substandard and problematic housing options for those people on low incomes have been highlighted in recent events, including the tragedy of Grenfell Towers in the United Kingdom and the gross inequities experienced by those living in Housing Commission flats in Victoria (Australia) under Covid restrictions. These two examples are stark reminders of the intersectional discriminatory impact of residual housing policy. The Grenfell Towers fire made visible the housing conditions of ‘racialised groups, persons with disabilities, women, children, the elderly, and migrants’, framed within a ‘political discourse as sites for the poorest and neediest people’ (Sánchez, 2019, p. 3). DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-5

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As Bacchi (2009) highlights, social policy is active in the construction of social problems through the normalising processes of the state. From this perspective, housing inequity can be traced to the failure of governments to intervene in addressing the power exercised by financial and housing markets in generating wealth at the expense of socially disadvantaged groups. Economic, social and housing policies have maintained and enhanced the wealth creation that occurs through homeownership and real estate speculation, at the expense of addressing major social issues such as homelessness (Allon & Parker, 2016). While the focus of this chapter is housing policy in Australia, comparisons are made with other countries including the United Kingdom and the United States, noting that international comparisons need to be qualified. However, housing policy is developed in the context of and in response to a globalised economy, which allows for some generalisation. The chapter begins with a brief discussion regarding what is meant by housing policy, as the very use of the term assumes some deliberate coordinated action (or inaction) to achieve housing outcomes.

Housing policy Globally, housing policy plays a pivotal role in the way social opportunities and divisions are reinforced and maintained (Donnison & Ungerson, 1982; Carson & Kerr, 2020). This chapter acknowledges the importance of understanding that the housing system functions within specific political, social, economic and cultural contexts. To a large extent, access to housing and home is dependent on policy trajectories. The chapter focuses on the pivotal role of government in housing policy based on the assumption that the state is central in the outcomes of the housing system. Housing policy takes both direct and indirect forms. Direct forms include specific policy actions such as state provision of public housing and rental subsidies to assist in accessing the private rental market. Indirect policy includes less obvious but nonetheless critical interventions such as through the taxation system. There are unintended consequences of government policies and unequal outcomes for different population groups, including access to housing, transport and social welfare (Carson & Kerr, 2020). There have been significant changes in the priorities of housing policy from the 1950s to the present day. In the 1950s in countries including the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US) and Australia, housing was a key social service with governments promoting both public housing and homeownership (Jacobs, 2019). Numerous authors have highlighted the increasingly unstable foundations of all forms of housing tenure within the existing policy framework that is unable to sustain equitable housing for all (Jacobs, 2019; Yates, 2008; Nicholls, 2014; Daley et al., 2018; Dalton, 2014; Birrell & Healy, 2018). This chapter highlights the increasingly influential role of neoliberal thinking in this debate. It examines key themes in housing policy debates against the backdrop of ideas that have underpinned the

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development of much social policy over the last several decades, in Australia specifically. While the emphasis in the chapter is on the hegemony of neoliberal ideas in housing policy, some attention is focused on attempts to provide solutions to the current problems facing housing policy, from a more progressive social democratic perspective. What is housing policy? The use of the term housing and policy assumes at least some consensus about what both terms mean and how they are employed. There are complexities about what is meant by housing policy because a range of meanings are attached to housing policy, including the production, consumption and maintenance of housing stock (King, 2009). As well, ‘housing policy’ alludes to the sustained action of designers and governments to affect housing conditions and influence housing outcomes (Clapham, 2018), including issues of supply, spatial distribution, housing characteristics and social distribution of housing stock. Housing can mean a component of or a hybrid of the following: a space of shelter, a place of home, an investment, a store of wealth and a social symbol. Cook et al. (2016, p. 1) see housing as a ‘meeting ground in which intensive practices, material and meanings tangle with extensive financial, environmental and political worlds’. In contrast, King (2017, p. 1), while recognising the broader context, prefers to adopt a phenomenological approach to housing, as ‘the only thing which is not subsidiary to anything bigger’, which leads to a consideration of how meanings of home are created by day to day uses, as one metaphorically closes one’s door to the external world. This raises questions about what constitutes home. Similarly, to talk of housing policy raises questions as to what constitutes policy, who makes it and how it is made and implemented (Clapham, 2018). For the purposes of this book, housing policy refers to any actions by government or government agency to influence the processes or outcomes of housing (Clapham, 2018, p. 164). While it could be argued that there are many organisations that contribute to developing and implementing housing policy the assumption underpinning this chapter is that the state plays a pivotal role. The concept of governance (Jacobs, 2019) is useful in highlighting the way governments at different levels manage housing policy, and to recognise that many agencies are critical in the policy making process, including industry, and not for profit organisations. In the Australian context, this can include independent authorities such as the Reserve Bank and the Productivity Commission (Milligan & Tiernan, 2012). Housing policy is an important component of social and economic practices that constitute contemporary neo-liberal forms of capitalism, including homeownership. During the post-World War 2 period until the 1970s, many Western governments committed significant resources to address social issues, poverty and unemployment. As noted by several authors (Harvey, 2010; Peck, 2010), a broadly neo-liberal ideology has since informed

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policy makers’ planning and decision making. This has led to significant cuts to social welfare and prioritised the role of the market in housing and resource allocation, with governments committed to promoting an ideology of competition and individual self-reliance. A central concept in most analyses of housing policy is housing tenure, which provides the conditions (usually legally defined) on which people occupy their homes, setting the parameters between actors and the market. Housing tenure typologies are usually differentiated according to status in relation to property ownership, as ‘owner occupier’ or ‘renter’ (ABS, 2017). Within this typology there are several crucial segmentations that increasingly differentiate specific groups and associated social and economic opportunities. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS, 2016) highlighted three main forms of tenure in Australia: private ownership, private rental and social housing. Historically, and commensurate with Australia’s alignment as a liberal welfare regime, the preferred form of tenure has been private rental or homeownership. Despite this, over the last two decades there has been significant decline in homeownership and increase in private rental.

Homeownership – the history of an ideal The idea of homeownership has historical origins in the early modern period from the 16th to 19th centuries during pivotal social, economic and philosophical changes. Homeownership was associated with the Industrial Revolution, commercial changes, population increases, the movement of agricultural labourers to cities, the expansion of shipping and the philosophical concept of free trade. This was combined with the emergence of ideas regarding the autonomy of the individual and the sanctification of worldly success to promote the idea of house as home (Braudel, 1973). These trends gathered pace throughout the 18th century, particularly in the Netherlands and England where the division between social classes became more fluid in the wake of these changes. There was an increasing dominance of a cash economy and the associated role of financial instruments in enabling commercial credit and borrowing (Flanders, 2014). These social changes contributed to increased power for middling classes comparative to the declining power of aristocratic privilege. Social barriers and status gaps were presented as being more permeable. Increasingly, social privileges became less based on previous knowledge, kinship and land, and more strongly linked with a presentation of self that is based on housing possessions and the creation of a nuclear family home as a household. The creation of new households of couples, with cash to spend, drove demand for the early manifestation of home, as a private space for the nuclear family. The transformation of the family as an economic unit of survival to a symbol of human emotional investment drove demand for the creation of spaces devoted to greater levels of privacy that we now embrace in ideas about home and homeownership (Flanders, 2014).

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In the post-World War 2 period, homeownership has been a consistent feature of housing policy in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Governments prioritised homeownership as a favoured tenure through tax inducements and subsidies to homeowners and investors. As Smith (2008) highlights, this initially led to a significant increase to the numbers of people owning their own home relative to housing stock. Forrest and Hirayam (2014) argue that neoliberal inspired governments have consistently sought to promote householders to purchase their homes since World War 2 for several reasons. First, subsidies provided by government make it likely that profits can be accrued over time by homeowners. Second, homeowners need to pay a mortgage, which for the most part requires employment and a level of compliance regarding the operations of capitalism. Third, homeownership confers a level of success as an individual, reinforcing the culture of responsibilisation. However, this trend reversed in recent years in the US where the proportion of first-time buyers has declined from 69.4% in 2004 to 63.6% in 2017 (US Census, 2017). In the US, UK and Australia, housing has become increasingly attractive to investors (Nicholls, 2014; Pawson et al., 2020). While there are important ideological drivers that have prioritised homeownership in countries such as Australia, the UK and the US, the popularity of homeownership is reinforced by a lack of alternatives with renting in both private and public sectors offering minimal security and no possibility of investment return (Jacobs, 2019). The benefits of homeownership for some comes at significant cost for others. Homeownership in Australia Housing options in Australia have been dominated by the private market, with public and social housing remaining a marginal status and homeownership being the preferred form of housing tenure. There are challenges to the ‘great’ Australian Dream of homeownership. First, there are tensions between expanding suburban homeownership and the development of highdensity inner city living. Second, there is declining access to homeownership, particularly for young people and middle-income earners, when considering substantial rises in property prices in a context of stagnant wages growth. Third, there is significant concern regarding housing affordability and then subsequent impact on economic productivity when workers are locked out of the labour market. A central policy focus is on tax subsidies linked to homeownership and property investment (Yates & Bradbury, 2010), which privileges home as being associated with homeownership. In the Australian context, Kemeny (1981) has traced the myth of homeownership. Badcock (2000) highlights that from the 1950s to 1960s in Australia almost 90% of households owned a dwelling. Homeownership was influenced by the strong economic growth through this period characterised by full employment and the facility to commit to long-term borrowing (Paris, 1993); post war expansion of the housing finance system (Beer, 1993); the lack of

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alternative tenures (Kemeny, 1981; Bourassa et al., 1995) and government policy prioritising homeownership (Eslake, 2013). Australia continues to have a high rate of homeownership, which was 67% in the latest census by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW, 2021). The period immediately after World War 2 saw a rapid housing growth associated with rapid suburbanisation and significant involvement of the Commonwealth Government in both the provision of public housing stock and financing of homeownership. From 1956 to 1973, the Commonwealth Government through the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement (CSHA) explicitly encouraged homeownership, by permitting 30% of CSHA funds to be used for home loan finance to those who could not obtain finance through the private market (Flood & Yates, 1987). There has been implicit government support for homeownership in Australia through numerous measures, including interest rate regulation, subsidised home lending and home deposit assistance grants (Bourassa et al., 1995). Government assistance in the form of interest rate regulation, subsidised home lending, Home Deposit Assistance grants (Williams, 1984) and early government schemes such as the Home Savings Grant Scheme (Bourassa et al., 1995) underpinned a priority for homeownership. Since the 1980s there have been pressures on homeownership rates, particularly for younger households considering affordability constraints and changing preferences, although aggregate homeownership has remained relatively stable in Australia and other Anglophile countries, primarily due to the tendency for homeownership rates to increase with age. Hulse et al. (2010) highlight that social and economic changes since the 1970s, the oil crisis and resultant institutional responses have contributed to affordability pressure. High inflation contributed to a significant increase in housing prices and high interest rates leading to an overall reduced capacity to borrow. High inflation also contributed to an increase in the value of tax concessions to homeowners. Within the Australian context, constraints on affordability from the mid1980s to mid-1990s were amplified by an increase in real interest rates and housing prices making homeownership more expensive for first-time buyers. From the mid-1990s economic restructuring led to an increasing polarisation of incomes and levels of economic security impacting younger households (Hulse & Yates, 2017). A key change in the role of housing finance was the deregulation of the finance market and subsequent impact on mortgage markets. Specifically, the entry of new finance providers led to an increased availability of housing credit to existing homeowners and the relaxation constraints regarding deposit requirements (APRA, 2008). Until 2008, this resultant increased level of available credit was paralleled by an increased willingness to borrow. From the 1980s to the 1990s there was significant increase in real and nominal interest rates and housing prices, making homeownership more difficult for first-time buyers. From the mid-1990s economic restructuring led to income polarisation and income insecurity, which for many young

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households amplified concerns regarding access to the housing market and for some being priced out of the market, rental accommodation became a more viable option (Hulse & Yates, 2017; Simon & Stone, 2017). After minimal assistance throughout the 1990s, particularly for first-time buyers, some measures were taken in the early 2000s to assist many aspiring home purchasers, including First Home Buyer Schemes (Rodrigues, 2003). Some observers raised doubts about the efficacy of such schemes suggesting they did not add to the uptake of homeownership (Nicholls, 2014; Pawson et al., 2020) and added to the demand for housing and the trend in upward housing prices. Overall, there was a disproportionate decline in homeownership in lowand middle-income earners due to the borrowing constraints, a declining share of low-cost dwellings and an increase in income inequality. Home buyer grants can only be taken up by those least in need of assistance and do not increase housing affordability overall (Daley et al., 2018). Policy reforms are set against the backdrop of a neoliberal economic system in which those who have access to economic resources are less likely to become ‘homeless’. Additionally, such reforms highlight a resistance to more fundamental reform that could be undertaken by government to remove the tax subsidies that permit homeowners to make significant profits from owning property. However, as Sheppard et al. (2017) highlight, given the decline in share of social rental housing and the insecurity of private rental housing, it remains unsurprising that Australian homeowners chose emotional security, stability and belonging as one of the main reasons for choosing to buy. This section has argued that over the last four decades there has been an emerging housing affordability problem in Australia (Yates, 2008; Pawson et al., 2020) that has been exacerbated by housing policies underpinned by a neoliberal logic. This neoliberal logic aims to minimise government involvement in the provision of housing, foster conditions under which a competitive market can operate and promote market-based solutions to the allocation of housing resources in Australia. The position taken in this book is that access to housing, a safe home and experiencing homelessness is associated with social inequities stemming from the failure of governments to provide low-cost flexible housing for poorer and more vulnerable groups in society. As further discussed in Chapter 6 on homelessness, governments are increasingly committed to programs that are underpinned by individualist explanations of homelessness and are active in creating and perpetuating the problem they purport to be solving (Wacquant, 2016). Social programs tend to assume a binary between being homeless and housed. There is a constructed dichotomy between the comfortable home as housing with the nuclear family and the streets as a place of chaos and abandonment. Public housing policy in Australia In Australia, the importance of establishing public housing authorities at the state level in the 1920s and 1930s highlighted the priority given to housing

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issues, for those on low income and in public rental housing. As part of post war reconstruction, the Commonwealth Housing Commission (CHC) was established in the 1940s which developed an integrated vision of urban planning and increased public housing supply. The main work of the CHC was the development of Commonwealth State Housing Agreements which until the early 2000s provided the foundation for Australian housing policy and programmes. These Agreements highlighted a delicate balance between investment in public and private housing, as the public housing system developed together with growth of homeownership, as the dominant form of housing tenure in Australia (Troy, 2012). The first major Commonwealth housing policy was enshrined in 1945 when the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement (CSHA) was first finalised. It was introduced to address the impact of the financial strain on people from the effects of the Great Depression and World War 2. Funding for the CSHA was broken into different areas: grants, pensioner rental housing, Aboriginal rental housing, mortgage and rent assistance, crisis accommodation and Community Housing programs (Nicholls, 2014). Since the 1970s, there has been a significant shift in Commonwealth Housing policy (Berry & Dalton, 2004), in the context of a resurgent neoliberal ideology and market driven micro economic reform and a focus on deregulation and growing inequality (Whiteford, 2015). By the end of the 1980s only 15% of CSHA funds accounted for housing provider schemes and there was a growing financialisaton of housing associated with the privatisation of housing providers through housing finance (AIHW, 2018). The National Affordable Housing Agreement (NAHA) was introduced by the national Rudd Labor Government in 2009. This policy replaced the preexisting CSHA policy that started in 1945 and was designed to improve commonwealth, state and local government responses and access to affordable housing, while also improving responses to homelessness (COAG, 2008). These policy measures included the provision of government financial incentives to non-government organisations, property developers and community housing providers. The government expressed dissatisfaction with how the NAHA was performing, indicating that in 2016, three out of the four identified benchmarks were not met (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2016). Government dissatisfaction with the NAHA became one of the main drivers towards the introduction of the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement (NHHA) in 2018. While the NHHA aspires to focus on all aspects of homelessness from crisis housing to homeownership, it does little to challenge the hegemony of the homeownership ideal and the associated social divisions that this perpetuates (Pawson et al., 2020). The priorities of the NHHA were to provide Australians with improved access to affordable and social housing; to support the variability of the community housing sector, tenancy reform, homeownership, and planning and zoning reform initiatives (NHHA, 2019). One of the primary downfalls is the underfunding of public and social housing. Over the years, funding for

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social housing and homelessness has significantly decreased. Government housing policies reduced affordable public housing stock and increased access to low-income homeowners. Overall, the main concern for housing in Australia is the lack of affordable housing. However, homelessness is not a phenomenon that has recently occurred. Colonial state policies have contributed to creating ‘homelessness’ since colonisation when First Nations Peoples were massacred and systemically removed from their homelands (see Chapter 1 on Stolen Homes). From the mid-1970s housing policy in Australia has been the subject of significant debate underpinned by major shifts in thinking. Key issues have included the affordability of housing and private rental and growing demand for the public housing sector, with proposed solutions reflecting emerging debates between neoliberal and more socially democratic values. Broadly speaking, debates about the distribution of housing include, that public housing is over consumed, and support should be dealt with through welfare and income support rather than through the direct provision of housing; that government policy should pay more attention to the inequities and inefficiencies produced through subsidies accessible through homeownership; and that welfare and public housing have limited housing choices for some lowincome groups (Pawson et al., 2020). Housing affordability has emerged as a particular concern in Australia, shaping the uncertainties of building a stable and permanent home. When taking a social democratic perspective, the importance of balancing the virtues and limits of varying forms of housing tenure has been noted (Stretton, 2005). In South Australia, the past success of the more expansive public housing system and the social and economic benefits accrued to homeownership were emphasised, so long as there were attempts to equalise class access. Specifically, Stretton (2005) challenged the neoliberal view that housing was overconsumed, arguing that the productive consumption that goes with the household sphere needs appropriate policy intervention. These different positions on housing reflect different meanings ascribed to ideas associated with freedom, choice, diversity and equity. Basically, the economic rationalist view focuses on freedom, choice, the individual and the markets, combined with direct income support, arguing that these are more effective enablers than the government’s provision of housing. From a different ideological position, left libertarians and socialists argue that individual choice, while socially defined, has not been well served by mainstream housing policy. For example, Kemeny’s (1981) socialist critique argued that the support of a mixed housing system obscured the ways in which homeownership reinforced social divisions and inequities, while the cost and benefits associated with greater levels of public housing are underplayed. Additionally, despite accounts of emerging problems in the public housing sector throughout the 1990s (Nelson, 1994), only responses that aligned with marketisation principles were deemed acceptable. These included new management methods, such as increasingly targeting public housing

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tenants and providing rent assistance to access the private rental market as well as the reliance on non-government organisations and the private market to manage low-cost housing (Gabriel et al., 2005). The preference of housing policy for homeownership is located within an ideological framework underpinned by neoliberal principles, exacerbated by financial markets that have been referred to as the financialisation of housing, in which housing is increasingly seen as a commodity and means of accumulating wealth (Glynn, 2009). However, the impetus for housing investment and homeownership is derived from an over-reliance on marketbased housing policy, with homeownership being represented as the source of residential satisfaction and ontological security (Madden & Marcuse, 2016). This is epitomised in terms such as the Australian Dream or the American Dream, that includes homeownership. These values about housing reinforce the marketisation of housing systems, at the expense of a more socially democratic informed vision, that addresses the increasingly critical housing needs of those living on low incomes or in poverty. Thus, housing policies predominantly influenced by neoliberal thinking and the homeownership ideal are leaving behind socioeconomically disadvantaged population groups. Social privileges and inequalities pertaining to housing and home are produced and maintained in policy making processes. For example, while being 3.3% of the overall population (ABS, 2016), on a range of indices, including health, housing, education, employment and housing, Australia’s First Nations Peoples experience significantly poorer outcomes than non-Aboriginal Australians (AIHW, 2019). Aboriginal Australians and housing policy Housing policy in Australia needs to be contextualised within a 200-year history of colonisation that resulted in and continues to underpin the ongoing socioeconomic disadvantages and marginalisation affecting First Nations Peoples. While there has been some increase in levels of homeownership, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples continue to be overrepresented in social housing and experience significant discrimination and racism in accessing housing more generally (ABS, 2016; Milligan et al., 2011). Government policies continue to reinforce First Nations Peoples’ marginal housing position in Australia, in the context of a long history of forced removal from homelands, the denial of citizenship rights, policies of cultural genocide, and ongoing high rates of incarceration and loss of housing. Housing disadvantage has been created by the segregation of housing on missions, policies of mainstreaming through assimilation and the imposition of European ideas about homeownership that ignored culturally specific characteristics of mobility and connection to country (Milligan et al., 2010; Prout, 2008). First Nations Peoples are more likely to experience (spiritual) homelessness, overcrowding and poor housing conditions (Pawson et al., 2018).

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Sanders (2009) has highlighted three often competing approaches to housing policy making for First Nations Peoples in Australia, which have been emphasised at different times. These three approaches and principles are equality, difference and guardianship. The principle of equality seeks to afford Aboriginal Australians the same opportunities as non-Aboriginal Australians, such as access to homeownership. The second principle of difference recognises the specific cultural contexts and requirements of Aboriginal Australians. The third principle of guardianship tends towards paternalism and coercion. Specific examples of government paternalism include the enforced removal of children from their homes, now known as Stolen Generations (1901–1970) and the government imposing the acquiring of five-year leases of townships in the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER). These paternalistic, topdown approaches in housing policy affect access to culturally appropriate housing and a sense of empowerment, home and belonging. Critical to effective policy making is consultation and collaboration between government and First Nations communities (Habibis et al., 2016). From 1990–2005 the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was the Australian Government body through which First Nations Peoples were formally involved in the processes of government. However, ATSIC was dissolved as there was an ideological government preference for ‘mainstreaming’, which left a vacuum regarding broad-based regional planning to address housing issues affecting First Nations Peoples in Australia. The end of self-determination in policy making and a return to mainstreaming and paternalism was especially evident during the Howard years of Australian government (1996–2007). In 2008, under the auspice of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), all Australian state governments committed to what became known as the Closing the Gap strategy, which aimed to address the ongoing social and economic marginalisation of First Nations Peoples, including access to safe and affordable housing. Under this strategy the concept of ‘healthy homes’ became the means through which inadequate accommodation and living conditions were to be addressed (COAG, 2008). Policy initiatives included improving access to homeownership, private rental and social housing and preventing homelessness. In addition to the healthy homes initiative, the Commonwealth Government provided $5.5 billion over ten years for improving housing that became the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing (NPARIH) (COAG, 2008). Parallel to this, the NPARIH and National Partnership on Remote Housing (NPRH) (2008–2018) were introduced by the Commonwealth Government, to be delivered by states and territories. However, these policies continue to be characterised by standardised housing management and mainstreaming principles (Milligan & Pinnegar, 2010). A key concern was the requirement to conform to standardised tenancy management principles in line with mainstream public housing standards, which would seriously diminish local decision making (Habibis et al., 2016).

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Despite implementation difficulties, NPARIH provided significant improvements in remote housing and living conditions, including a fall in overcrowding, the building of new homes and improvements in property and tenancy management (Towart et al., 2017). However, this was at the expense of facilitating capacity building necessary to the development of local decision making (Productivity Commission, 2017). Ongoing issues included the need for recurrent funding for tenancy and property management, an overall lack of vision for the future of Indigenous Community Housing Organisations and an absence of a culturally appropriate strategy for addressing housing issues affecting First Nations Peoples in Australia (Milligan et al., 2017). This chapter shows that intersecting racialised, classed and socioeconomic privileges pertaining to housing and home continue to be produced and maintained in social policy making, with unequal social consequences and effects.

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted the centrality of access to homeownership as a key policy discourse. However, emerging data suggests that homeownership, particularly in the Australian context, has become an increasingly improbable aspiration for many potential home buyers, particularly those seeking to enter the market for the first time (Pawson et al., 2020; ACOSS, 2019). The policy making processes that encourage homeownership can create and maintain intersecting social inequalities, with implications for social workers working in housing and homelessness, as further discussed in Chapter 6. The next chapter explores diverse subjectivities of home and gives voice to people’s subjective meanings and lived sense of home, commencing with the voices of First Nations Peoples who were stolen from their homes.

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Dovey, K. (1985). Home and homelessness (pp. 33–64). In Altman, I. & Werner, C. (eds) Home environments. New York: Plenum Press. Eslake, S. (2013). Australian housing policy: Fifty years of failure submission to the Senate Economic References Committee Inquiry on Housing Affordability. Accessed 7 June 2021, www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/. Flanders, J. (2014). The making of home. London: Atlantic Books. Flood, J. & Yates, J. (1987). Housing subsidies study. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Forrest, R. & Hirayam, Y. (2014). The financialisation of the social project: Embedded liberalism, neoliberalism and home ownership. Urban Studies, 52 (2), 233–244. Gabriel, M., Jacobs, K., Arthurson, K., Burke, T. & Yates, J. (2005). Conceptualising and measuring the housing affordability problem. Melbourne: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). Glynn, S. (2009). Where the other half lives: Lower income housing in a neoliberal world. London, UK: Pluto Press. Habibis, D., Phillips, R., Spinney, A., Phibbs, P. & Churchill, B. (2016). Reviewing changes to housing management reform on remote Indigenous communities. Melbourne: AHURI. Harvey, D. (2010). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hulse, K. & Yates, J. (2017). A private rental sector paradox: Unpacking the effects of urban restructuring on housing market dynamics. Housing Studies, 32 (3), 253–270. Hulse, K., Burke, T.Ralston, L. & Stine, W. (2010). The benefits and risks of home ownership for low-moderate income households. Melbourne: AHURI. Jacobs, K. (2019). Neoliberal housing policy. An international perspective. New York: Routledge. Kemeny, J. (1981). The myth of home ownership. London: Routledge. King, P. (2009). Using theory or making theory: Can there be theories of housing? Housing, Theory and Society, 26 (1), 41–52. King, P. (2017). Thinking on housing: Words, memory, use. London: Routledge. Madden, D.J. & Marcuse, P. (2016). In defence of housing: The politics of crisis. London: Verso Books. Milligan, V. & Pinnegar, S. (2010). The comeback of Australian housing policy in Australia: First impressions. International Journal of Housing Policy, 10, (3) 325–344. Milligan, V. & Tiernan, A. (2012). No home for housing: The situation of the Commonwealth Government’s Housing Policy Advisory function. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 70 (4), 391–407. Milligan V., Phillips, R., Easthope, H. & Memmott. P. (2010). Service directions and issues in social housing for Indigenous household in urban and regional areas. Melbourne: AHURI. Milligan, V., Phillips, R., Easthope, H., Liu, E. & Memmott, P. (2011). Urban social housing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Respecting culture and adapting services. Melbourne: AHURI. Milligan, V., Pawson, H., Phillips, R., Martin, C. & Elton Consulting (2017). Developing the capacity of Australia’s affordable housing industry. Melbourne: AHURI. National Housing and Homelessness Agreement (NHHA). (2019). Department of social services. Canberra: Australian Government. Nelson, K. (1994). Whose shortage of affordable housing? Housing Policy Debate, 5 (4), 401–442.

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Nicholls, S. (2014). Perpetuating the problem: Neoliberalism, commonwealth public policy and housing affordability in Australia. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 49 (3), 339–347. Paris, C. (1993). Housing Australia. Melbourne: Macmillan. Pawson, H., Milligan, V. & Yates, J. (2020). Housing policy in Australia: A case for system reform. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Pawson, H., Presell, C., Saunders, P., Hill, P. & Liu, E. (2018). Australian homelessness monitor 2018. Melbourne: Launch Housing. Peck, J. (2010). Constructions of neoliberal reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Piachaud, D. (2008). Social justice and public policy: A social policy perspective (pp. 33–52). In Craig, G., Burchard, T. & Gordon, D. (eds) Social justice and public policy. Bristol: Policy Press. Productivity Commission (2017). Introducing competition and consumer choice into human services. Melbourne: Productivity Commission. Prout, S. (2008). The entangled relationship between Indigenous spirituality and government service delivery. Canberra, Australian National University: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR). Rodrigues, M. (2003). First home buyers in Australia. Economic Roundup, 4, 1–17. Sánchez, B.J. (2019). Towering Grenfell: Reflections around socioeconomic disadvantage in antidiscrimination law. Queen Mary Human Rights Law Review, 5 (2). Accessed 7 June 2021, www.qmul.ac.uk/law/humanrights/media/humanrights/docs/ Rev_BenitoSanchez_SED-Grenfell-FINAL.pdf. Sanders, W. (2009). Ideology, evidence and competing principles in Australian Indigenous affairs: From Brough to Rudd via Pearson and the NTER. Canberra: Australian National University Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. Sheppard, J., Gray, M. & Phillips, B. (2017). Attitudes to housing affordability: Pressures, problems and solutions. Canberra: The Australian National University. Simon, J. & Stone T. (2017). The property ladder after the financial crisis: The first step is a stretch but those who make it are doing OK. Sydney: Reserve Bank of Australia. Smith, S. (2008). ‘Owner-occupation’ at home with a hybrid of money and materials. Environment and Planning A, 40, 520–535. Stretton, H. (2005). Australia fair. Sydney: UNSW Press. Towart, R., Griew, R., Murphy, S. & Pascoe, F. (2017). Remote housing review: A review of the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing and the Remote Housing Strategy 2008–2018. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Troy, P. (2012). Accommodating Australians: Commonwealth Government involvement in housing. Sydney: Federation Press. US Census (2017). Quarterly residential vacancies and homeownership in the 4th quarter 2016. Maryland: United States Census Bureau. Wacquant, L. (2016). Revisiting territories of relegation: class, ethnicity and state in the making of advanced marginality. Urban Studies, 53 (6), 1077–1088. Whiteford, P. (2015). Inequality and its socio-economic impacts. Australian Economic Review, 48 (1), 83–92. Williams, R. (1984). Housing policy in Australia. Economic Papers, 3 (3), 38–50. Yates, J. (2008). Australia’s affordability crisis. Australian Economic Review, 41 (2), 200–214. Yates, J. & Bradbury, B. (2010). Home ownership as a (crumbling) fourth pillar of social insurance in Australia. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 25 (2), 193–211.

5

The subjectivities of home Carole Zufferey

Introduction The lived experiences and subjectivities of home often stand in stark contrast to how home is spoken about or understood in policy responses and debates, as discussed in the previous chapter. Pertinent to reflexive social work research and practice is understanding the lived effects of ‘one size fits all’ policies, including racist colonial state policy responses that stole homes and identities. In Chapter 1, we begin the story of home by acknowledging that colonial invasions illegally dispossessed and murdered First Nations Peoples across the world. In Australia, First Nations Peoples’ homes were stolen on the ‘legal fiction’ of terra nullius, that the land ‘belonged to no one’ (MoretonRobinson, 2003, pp. 33–35). Across the colonial world, colonial state policies and legislation were enacted to forcibly remove First Nations Peoples from their homes, annihilating their connections to their own cultures, languages and homelands. This chapter presents the voices of First Nations Peoples in Canada and Australia who were stolen from their homes by the state and experienced institutionalised violence and abuse. Second, the chapter considers subjectivities and lived experience research on home related to the areas of study covered in Part 2 of this book: namely, migration, homelessness, gendered and state violence, the perspectives of children, young people and older people, people with disabilities and of diverse sexualities. It is important to consider how the ‘comforts’ of home have come to signify social privilege within dominant regimes of power (Rossdale, 2015, p. 369). To show diversity, it is necessary for social work researchers to provide accounts of the subjectivities of home that are not fixed but that pay attention to the complexities at the ‘heart of becoming’ which may ‘provoke restless and incomplete subjects’ (Rossdale, 2015, p. 384). The notion of subjectivity encourages self-reflexivity and promotes understandings that knowledge is a social construct that is contingent on social location and positionality. Taking this further, Elspeth Probyn (2003) notes that social locations constitute subjectivities and that there are interrelationships between space and subjectivity, which include spatial and locational subjectivities of home. Thus, a sense of connection to home is spatial, DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-6

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locational, temporally, material, embodied and socially and geographically positioned. Previous research on the subjectivities of home is very broad and has included the experiences of young people and sexuality (Gorman-Murray, 2015; Hopkins, 2010); the ambivalence of home experienced by young German skilled migrants living in England and visiting family and friends in Germany (Mueller, 2015); the meanings of home for older men and women, including baby boomers and grey nomads (Choi, 2019; Burgess, 2018); the divergent home subjectivities of older women in Hong Kong (Choi, 2019) and the threats to home for women living with political violence (Sousa et al., 2014). Different understandings of subjectivity are also used in selfreflective research practices (Coloma, 2008), including when exploring ‘subjectivity work’ in researcher–participant relationships (Orchard & Dewey, 2016). These previous studies illustrate some of the diverse ways that the concepts of subjectivity and home can be used in multidisciplinary research. As reflexive social work researchers, we can also interrogate our own social positions of privilege and connections to home, which includes connecting to a place, a country as well as political or cultural identity, as previously presented in Chapter 2. Individual subjectivities of home are diverse and complex, intertwined with unjust institutional practices, colonial histories and global and local mobility.

A situated intersectional analysis of home A situated intersectional analysis is relevant to contested and shifting subjectivities of home that interact with social, economic and political inequalities in diverse social, temporal and geographical locations (YuvalDavis, 2015; 2011). Situated intersectionality is ‘sensitive to the geographical, social and temporal locations of the particular individual or collective social actors’, which are often contested, shifting and multiple (Yuval-Davis, 2015, p. 95). When considering home and belonging for social work, home is not fixed but temporally intersects with unequal power relations and social and geographical locations. Yuval-Davis (2015, p. 95) has discussed the importance of translocality, transcalarity and transtemporality. The notion of translocality relates to ‘the ways particular categories of social divisions have different meanings – and often different relative power – in the different spaces in which the analyzed social relations take place’ (Yuval-Davis, 2015, p. 95). Transcalarity relates to ‘the ways different social divisions have often different meanings and power when we examine them in small-scale households or neighbourhoods, in particular cities, states, regions and globally’ (Yuval-Davis, 2015, p. 95). Associated with time, transtemporality, relates to how ‘these meanings and power change historically and even in different points in people’s life cycle’ (Yuval-Davis, 2015, p. 95). Thus, a sense of home can differ at different points in time, in different rural and urban places and spaces, both globally and locally.

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Another key UK author in the field of intersectionality and belonging is Floya Anthias (2008) who has highlighted the dialogical complexities of transnational and translocational contexts of home. It is important not to essentialise home and belonging because people have ‘multiple locations, positions and belongings, in a situated and contextual way’ (Anthias, 2008, p. 6). Culture, ethnicity and identity are not ‘fixed, stable, monolithic’ (Anthias, 2008, p. 9) and can shift and change over time. Thus, hybridity, diaspora and cosmopolitanism are important concepts when considering belonging and home. Hybridity is the intermingling of intercultural and cross-cultural lifestyles and practices, and diaspora is about a sense of belonging to ‘home and away’ (Anthias, 2008, p. 9). Cosmopolitanism has a long and complicated history but can be defined as ‘belonging to a range of social relations and political and cultural communities across nation states’ (Anthias, 2008, p. 9), akin to being ‘global’ or ‘transnational’ citizens. Translocational positionality relates to the crisscrossing of different social locations; the shifting locales of people’s lives, movements and flows, and the importance of context, meaning and time, in the construction of social positionalities (Anthias, 2008, p. 16). The subjectivities of home and belonging are socially produced through the interplay of diverse processes and outcomes of unequal power relations. Translocational positionality turns our attention to the experiential, representational and organisational features of social life (Anthias, 1998), which is useful when thinking about the subjectivities of home. A sense of home (and belonging) can be imagined and experienced; it can be globally, locally, temporally and historically situated, and associated with intersecting and situated power relations, in different locational places and social spaces. The ‘interplay of different locations’ as well as institutionalised inequalities associated with colonisation, nationalism, gender, ethnicity, race and class, may have ‘contradictory effects’ (Anthias, 2008, p. 15). A sense of home takes place in the context of performed ‘lived practices’ as well as ‘intersubjective, organisational and representational conditions’ (Anthias 2002a; 2002b). The subjectivities of home are therefore products of power and possibilities for a life lived within broader historical and political contexts (Heyes, 2010).

First Nations Peoples: Stolen Homes First, as we write this book on Stolen Homes (see Chapter 1), it must be acknowledged that First Nations Peoples’ subjectivities of home stand in contrast with the subjectivities of home experienced by new migrants and colonisers. First Peoples’ subjectivities of home are associated with deep connectedness to land and country, to different knowledges of creation (such as ‘Dreaming’), to a sense of place, to kinship and community, and to one’s spirituality (Hogan, 2006). The continued denial of First Peoples’ rights to home in colonised countries across the globe means that it is important to first make visible the experiences and voices of First Nations Peoples. Across

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the world, First Nations Peoples’ connections to home have been annihilated by state policies and practices that removed and displaced children from their connections to land, family, community and home. Focusing on Canada, as outlined in the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC, 2015), Canada had a policy of removing First Nations children from their families and placing them in ‘Indian Residential Schools’, often located far from their families and homes. This policy had stated aims of assimilation and assumed white superiority, which is now seen to be a form of cultural genocide (TRC, 2015). The survivors recounted that the legislation at the time was that their fathers would go to jail if they did not send their children to get educated in residential schools (TRC, 2015, p. 14). Occasionally, the poverty experienced in families meant that the children were placed in residential schools, where they were frequently abused (TRC, 2015, p. 19). One of the survivors of residential schools (in Québec and Ontario), Paul Dixon, described the abusive conditions and the homesickness that children experienced: You hear children crying at bedtime, you know. But all that time, you know, you know we had to weep silently. You were not allowed to cry, and we were in fear that we, as nobody to hear us, you know. If one child was caught crying, eh, oh, everybody was in trouble. You’d get up, and you’d get up at the real fastest way. Now, they hit you between your legs, or pull you out of bed by the hair, even if it was a top bunk, you know. Homesickness was your constant companion besides hunger, loneliness, and fear. (TRC, 2015, p. 110) The survivors had vivid memories of being forced into ‘cattle’ and ‘army trucks’. For example, Leona Bird, who was 6 when she was sent to the Prince Albert, Saskatchewan school: ‘then we seen this army covered wagon truck, army truck outside the place. And as we were walking towards it, kids were herded into there like cattle, into the army truck’ (TRC, 2015, p. 24). As well, Alma Scott was taken to the Fort Alexander, Manitoba school when she was 5 years old: We got taken away by a big truck. I can still remember my mom and dad looking at us, and they were really, really sad looking. My dad’s shoulders were just hunched, and he, to me, it looked like his spirit was broken. (TRC, 2015, p. 24) The experiences of children being forcibly removed from their homes have intergenerational traumatic effects on families, which was compounded by the physical and sexual abuse that occurred in the schools. As Archie Hyacinthe said, ‘that’s when the trauma started for me, being separated from my sister, from my parents, and from our, our home’ (TRC, 2015, p. 36).

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The long journey to school was traumatic and so was the arrival. The survivors reported that they were deloused, regimented, dehumanised, had their long-braided hair cut off, given ‘strange’ clothing because they were not allowed to wear their own clothes and referred to as a serial number. As Marlene Kayseas said, ‘they wouldn’t call you by your name, they’d call you by your number’ (TRC, 2015, p. 66). On arrival, many did not speak English or French. They were physically and emotionally punished and even forced to eat soap if they spoke their own language. Pierrette Benjamin spoke of this happening at the school at La Tuque: They put a big chunk, and they put it in my mouth, and the principal, she put it in my mouth, and she said, ‘Eat it, eat it,’ and she just showed me what to do. She told me to swallow it. And she put her hand in front of my mouth, so I was chewing and chewing, and I had to swallow it, so I swallowed it, and then I had to open my mouth to show that I had swallowed it. And at the end, I understood, and she told me, ‘That’s a dirty language, that’s the devil that speaks in your mouth, so we had to wash it because it’s dirty.’ So, every day I spent at the residential school, I was treated badly. I was almost slaughtered. (TRC, 2015, p. 51) As well, Marcel Guiboche at the Pine Creek school, said: A sister, a nun started talking to me in English and French…yelling at me. I did not speak English and didn’t understand what she was asking. She got very upset, and started hitting me all over my body, hands, legs and back. I began to cry…She got a black strap and hit me some more. (TRC, 2015, p. 48) These abusive practices were an attempt to annihilate connections to cultural identity, to language, tradition, to a sense of home and belonging. As Rose Dorothy Charlie said, ‘they took my language. they took it right out of my mouth. I never spoke it again’ (TRC, 2015, p. 54). These abusive experiences created a sense of shame about Aboriginal cultural identity but also invited resistance. For example, Jeanette Basile Laloche challenged this policy and the suppression of Aboriginal language and culture because, ‘My values were disrespected, my beliefs humiliated, I suffered infanticide’ (TRC, 2015, p. 58). In Australia, before colonisation (or the invasion), over 500 different Aboriginal language groups had ontological connections to country or land tracks as ‘home’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2003, p. 31). Colonialism turned First Peoples’ land and homes into a ‘commodity’ to provide ‘power and profit to the colonisers, creating a home and economic stability for settlers’ (Maddison, 2019 p. 76). The hegemonic and colonial fantasy of home as aligned with consumerism and material buildings is constructed from a white colonial perspective and propagated by those in positions of socioeconomic

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power. First Nations Peoples had a more fluid concept of home and land, ‘associated with care and responsibility not ownership and exploitation’ (Maddison, 2019, p. 76). As discussed in Chapter 1, white colonial state policies included segregation, ‘assimilation’ and ‘protectionist’ legislation, which forcibly removed First Nations children from their kanyini or home. As Bob Randall narrates in the film, Kanyini, (Hogan, 2006), in Pitjantjatjara language from Central Australia, the word kanyini refers to connectedness to tjukurrpa (knowledge of creation or ‘Dreaming’), ngura (place), walytja (kinship) and kurunpa (spirit or soul). The removal of First Peoples from their land, family, community and spirituality, to missions, reserves and cattle stations, under the surveillance of the white colonial state, has stolen lands, cultures and homes. In Australia, First Nations Peoples’ voices became increasingly evident after 1995, when the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (1995–1997) was launched (HREOC, 1997). As discussed in Chapter 1, Aboriginal protectionist and assimilation legislation and policies were enacted in all state jurisdictions, commencing with the Victorian Aboriginal Protection Act 1869. These policies resulted in the systematic removal of over 100,000 Aboriginal children from their homes and families, into public institutions and missions across Australia, which is now referred to as the Stolen Generations (Hunter, 2008). The Bringing Them Home report (HREOC, 1997) documented the experiences of First Nations Peoples who were removed and placed in state institutions. Once they were removed, Aboriginal children under the age of 16 were under the guardianship of the Chief Protector of Aborigines (HREOC, 1997, p. 103). The effects of being removed from their parents was profound: ‘Even though at home you might be a bit poor, you mightn’t have much on the table, but you know you had your parents that loved you. Then you’re thrown into a place. It’s like going to another planet’ (Confidential evidence 323, Tasmania, in HREOC, 1997, p. 103). These state policies had an overt intention of whitening the Aboriginal race: Because the system would make sure that no-one would marry an Aborigine person anyhow. And then my children would automatically be fairer, quarter-caste, and then the next generation would be white, and we would be bred out. I remember when she was discussing this with my foster people, I remember thinking – because I had no concept of what it all meant – I remember thinking, ‘That’s a good idea, because all the Aborigines are poor’. (Confidential evidence 613, New South Wales, in HREOC, 1997, p. 157) The language of this quote draws on the colonial state policy language at the time that categorised and defined Aboriginality through bloodlines as ‘halfcastes’, ‘quarter-caste’, ‘quadroons’ or ‘octoroons’, which included the

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segregation of ‘true Aborigines’ from ‘half-castes’ who were being ‘civilized, educated’ by the state (Pennycook, 2002, p. 22). While all First Nations Peoples were cast as ‘other’, children categorised as having ‘some whiteness’ in their blood were particularly vulnerable to state intervention (Pennycook, 2002), with disabling effects on their sense of home and belonging. As the following quote explains, there was a long-lasting sense of never being able to fully be at home and belong: We may go home, but we cannot relive our childhoods. We may reunite with our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, communities, but we cannot relive the 20, 30, 40 years that we spent without their love and care, and they cannot undo the grief and mourning they felt when we were separated from them. We can go home to ourselves as Aboriginals, but this does not erase the attacks inflicted on our hearts, minds, bodies and souls, by caretakers who thought their mission was to eliminate us as Aboriginals. (Link-Up (NSW) submission 186, in HREOC, 1997, p. 29) There is an undeniable link between the invasion of the land and Aboriginal men and women’s sense of place and belonging in Australia. As O’Shane explains: They strike at the very core of our sense of being and identity. Many of our people assume any other identity than that of Aboriginal: the denial of self. Many say, as I have done for years, I shouldn’t be here in this world, I don’t belong. Yet we are of the most ancient people in the most ancient land on Earth. We question who we are, what we are doing, where we belong. (O’Shane, 1995, p. 151) Furthermore, social workers played a large part in these removals: ‘They had social workers that’d go around from house to house and look in the cupboards and things like that and they’d say the children were neglected’ (Molly Dyer evidence 219, speaking of the practice of the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board in the 1950s, in HREOC, 1997, p. 28). These voices of First Nations Peoples show how colonial policies assumed a superiority of whiteness. White race privilege imbued government legislation and state supported religious institutions, enacting state violence against Aboriginal children, families and communities, including by social workers. State supported violence and abuse are central to the children’s lived experiences of being stolen from their homes and families. The children in Canadian residential schools were physically and sexually abused, not fed properly, were treated like slaves, frightened into religious indoctrination that was not their own, were separated from their family and siblings, gender segregated, shamed for speaking to the opposite sex and were transferred to

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different schools without their parents’ knowledge and consent, preventing them from being able to visit (TRC, 2015). The abuse, violence, fear, loneliness, despair, emotional neglect, cultural suppression and being forced to learn racist curriculum that promoted ideas about ‘savage Indians’ had long-term effects (TRC, 2015, p. 124). In the Australian context, Aboriginal children and young people continue to be overrepresented in homelessness, health, criminal justice and child protection systems, with unprecedented rates of child removal (Funston et al., 2016). Yet, state violence and racist policies and practices have been ignored and denied by privileged white people and white institutions, including by social workers. White people’s ignorance is thus maintained and left unquestioned (Sullivan & Tuana, 2007), which includes our own ignorance as white colonisers writing this book on home. As white social workers, there is much that we do not know about and will never know or experience of racist institutions in a racist society that destroys cultural connections and a sense of home and belonging.

Disciplinary state power Seminal scholars such as Michel Foucault argue that subjectivities and subject positions are constructed through disciplining discourses and techniques of disciplinary power and state control (Foucault, 1991). As Foucault argues, human beings are constantly made and remade as ‘subjects’, involving three modes of objectification of the subject, namely ‘dividing practices’, ‘scientific classification’ and ‘subjectification’ (Foucault, 1991, pp. 7–11). This resonates with how racist colonial policies controlled, divided and ‘scientifically’ classified First Nations Peoples. The third mode referred to as ‘subjectification’ relates to how a person is active in their own self-formation, with the assistance of, for example, a confessor, counsellor, psychoanalyst or social worker, and the disciplinary technologies of social institutions (Foucault, 1991, p. 11). When First Nations Peoples recount the ‘the denial of self’ and a sense of not belonging (O’Shane, 1995, p. 151), this shows how racist state policy responses have shaped subjectivities of home and belonging, by annihilated connections to traditional knowledges, spirituality, land, family and identity.

Diverse subjectivities of home and migration Home can be associated with an individual’s sense of emotional connection to one’s country or homeland and sense of cultural safety and ethnic identity. Home can be an identity, culture and tradition. In contrast, home can be fluidly experienced for migrants and refugees on the move and as a connection to a country of origin (Ahmed et al., 2003). As further discussed in Chapter 10, in migration studies, homes can be diverse and mobile, blurring distinctions between the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ (Ahmed et al., 2003, p. 4). For

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example, those moving and working across transnational borders have described a multiply located sense of self and home (Conradson & Mckay, 2007). Geographical, temporal and emotional patterns of home differ across and amongst different groups. For migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, experiences of dis/connection from past homes and transnational migration fundamentally shifts how they imagine and experience future homes. As discussed in more detail in Chapter 10, previous research on migration, population movements and the subjectivities of home has included the experiences of commuter migrants, professional and skilled migrants in Europe (Klis & Karsten, 2009; Haas & Osland, 2014; Mueller, 2015), as well as the experiences of undocumented migrants (Cuthill, 2019) and refugees and asylum seekers in the UK (Kissoon, 2015). The increasing movement of bodies across national borders is central to the remaking of homes as well as sense of homelessness (Ahmed et al., 2003). Translocational positionalities and subjectivities of home and homelessness intersect with class, race, ethnicity, age, gender, cultural identity and nationality, as well as broader local and global inequalities associated with forced migration and employment opportunities elsewhere than ‘home’. Homelessness: forced dislocation When moving through different countries, migrants and refugees can encounter a sense of loss, displacement, homelessness and trauma, along with a sense of resilience and survival (Cuthill, 2019, p. 41). Migrants as well as refugees and asylum seekers may have hopeful ideas about a new home and host country. The act of moving can be perceived as being a ‘journey’ to another safer country, where physical shelter and safety can potentially be found. However, this journey is a ‘long way from finding a home’ because home is ‘inextricably linked to culture’ (Cuthill, 2019, p. 41). For example, forced migrants and refugees may constantly be perceived as ‘Other’ and feel ‘out of place’ in a new host country, as they are forced to continually reflect on their sense of place and cultural sense of ‘meaning, belonging and identity’ (Cuthill, 2019, p. 41). Furthermore, the situation for undocumented migrants or those refused asylum is dire, as they are socially excluded multiple times (Cuthill, 2019). In the UK, undocumented migrants lack citizenship rights, have limited legal status, experience racism and cultural marginalisation, and they do not get assisted or counted in official homelessness statistics (Cuthill, 2019, p. 2). The stigmatising label and identity of being a ‘refugee’ contributes to prejudice, negative experiences, a sense of homelessness and lack of belonging: ‘…a person cannot be a refugee for the rest of his/her life. The people’s look is different when you are a refugee and when you are a British citizen’ (‘Hassan’ in Stewart & Mulvey, 2014, p. 1031). When reflecting on the subjectivities of home, the geographical mobility of commuter and skilled migrants stands in stark contrast to the traumatic lived experiences of forced migrants such as refugees and asylum seekers.

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Violence at home: interpersonal and political As many scholars have observed, it is the privileged few who can escape an unsafe home and country (Ahmed et al., 2003). A study by Sousa et al. (2014) with women living in Palestine has explored the perspectives and experiences of women who dwell within political violence in ‘everyday civilian environments’ and in their family homes. They used focus group data from 32 Palestinian women to explore violations to their family homes, including threats to their sense of privacy, control and constancy (Sousa et al., 2014, p. 205). They found that while women were engaged in attempting to protect children and described ‘how they mobilized the home for economic, familial and cultural survival’ (Sousa et al., 2014, p. 205), they experienced surveillance, home invasions and actual or threatened home destruction, which ‘provoked fear, anxiety, grief, humiliation, and helplessness’ (Sousa et al., 2014, p. 205). This study underscored ‘the importance of attention to violations of place and home in research on civilian experiences of and responses to political violence’ (Sousa et al., 2014, p. 205). One Palestinian woman recounted her fear associated with state surveillance and the pursuit of family members by Israeli forces and how this affected her sense of safety and home: I am a mother of a martyr and activist/freedom fighter. For 4 years I didn’t sleep in my house … Because my house is right on the street, it’s very exposed. Everybody can see us; whoever is coming or going can see us. (‘Nablus’, in Sousa et al., 2014, p. 208) Home can thus be steeped in experiences of state violence in both private and public spheres. As further discussed in Chapter 7, living in unsafe environments has subjugating effects on women and children’s sense of home and belonging.

Intersecting subjectivities of home through the life course Previous research on diverse and intersecting subjectivities of home has examined age and geography (Malone, 2011; Choi, 2019), gender and sexuality (Gorman-Murray, 2015), from the perspectives of children, young people and adults, including Aboriginal Elders (Avery, 2019). Age related transitions – such as being a child, a young person, making a family and retiring – interact with how home is imagined and experienced. Throughout the life course, home is materially and subjectively intertwined. Home includes how public–private spaces in physical dwellings (such as in houses or state institutions) and family and childhood homes are imagined and lived. As James et al. (1998) point out, ideas of home, family and childhood are intertwined. The child is commonly understood to be ‘at home’ in the family home (see Chapter 8). However, young people and children can have

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diverse experiences of home, of being without a home (such as forced homelessness in situations of abuse and violence), leaving home (as in youth transitions) and the remaking home, after having left the family home (Hopkins, 2010). Children First, children can contribute to how home, childhood and society is reproduced, contrasting children’s identity as distinct from adults (Malone, 2011). A study with children from the Cook Islands in the South Pacific Ocean emphasised giving children a voice as social agents and found that cultural identity is relevant to how young people engage with meanings of home (Malone, 2011). The perspectives of children were fluid and flexible, involving a negotiation of Cook Islands traditions within global influences, such as associated with the use of internet technology (Malone, 2011, p. 475). Home and belonging can be a continual movement between attachment and detachment in the transgression and enforcement of cultural boundaries (Ahmed et al., 2003). When describing their ‘island home’, children vividly described their sense of home in the geographical landscape: ‘It smells like a perfume you have never smelt before. It feels like paradise. It looks like heaven. I have a perfect life. I play fun games at home, with my friends’ (‘Elizabeth’ in Malone, 2011, p. 467). In contrast, the voices of homeless children in Australia focused on home as being connected to family, having a space and things of their own, a sense of safety, permanency and comfort, control over their environment and being connected to their friends and community (Moore et al., 2008). The safety of home is a common theme in research with children, as exampled by ‘Home is somewhere safe…that’s pretty important’ (Boy, aged 11 in Moore et al., 2008, p. 40). Home can be enacted in the domestic sphere of the house. The physical spaces of houses (‘a room of your own’), material objects such as ‘toys’ and a permanent sense of home, were deemed important by the children in Australia: ‘[A home is] when you have your own room and you know you’re there to stay. You’ve got your toys and everything’s yours, except if you’ve got the same room as your brother then some things are your brother’s’ (Boy, aged 6, in Moore et al., 2008, p. 41). Whilst it is acknowledged that child identities are not fixed, given or ascribed by one culture, unlike the Australian children, the Cook Islanders children expressed geographical, historical and cultural connections as home (Malone, 2011). As Travelon, aged 15, said: I love our island and it’s beautiful and we have our own culture. Life is great, so many friendly people and no war. It is so peaceful and quiet and children’s life is so good. People go out fishing on canoes, canoes are our ancestors boats, it is only built by strong trees. The trees are so strong to protect our village from strong winds (in Malone, 2011, p. 471)

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Therefore, housing expectations as well as geographical and cultural backgrounds shape how young people understand home. Furthermore, age and life stages are ‘important aspects of the production of subjectivity’ and the words ‘child’, ‘youth’, ‘adult’ and ‘old’ contribute to the production and distribution of responsibilities and power (Johansson, 2010, p. 80). Giving voice to children about their experiences of home affirms their position as human beings, with their own agency located in the ‘culture of their everyday lives’ (Malone, 2011, p. 466). Gender and sexuality At the other end of the life course, in Hong Kong, Choi (2019, p. 241) explored home for older women and the entanglement of gendered discourses and materiality. She presented three case studies of older women’s homes. She argued that home was constructed as being relative to ‘housewifely performances’ but that ‘temporal and spatial forces’ do reconfigure gender performance and subjectivity (Choi, 2019, p. 241). She found that ‘objects, spatial configuration, structural factors, and intersubjective relationships work as co-constitutive forces in shaping women’s performances and identities’, relative to their sense of home in their physical houses (Choi, 2019, p. 241). Although these women had ‘no intention or desire to resist or subvert’ patriarchal domestic practices in Hong Kong homes, their discursive–materialist practices also showed a dynamic and ‘ongoing enactment of divergent subjectivities’ (Choi, 2019, p. 241). The women enacted both traditional and modern gender roles, such as living comfortably with considerable clutter, continuing to be independent despite the ailments of old age (such as losing one’s eyesight), repairing the house, being accepting of divorce, cohabitation and housing boyfriends (Choi, 2019). Thus, the family home for these women included their ‘multiple temporalities’ that reconfigured shifting structural and spatial relationships and reproduced entangled and multiple subjectivities of home (Choi, 2019, p. 240). Previous research has also found that masculine identities and meanings of home are simultaneously constituted within diverse interpersonal relations and differing engagements with housework and homemaking (GormanMurray, 2008). Gorman-Murray (2015) has examined masculinities and domesticities of five young men aged 18–25 in their home environments: the parental home, shared rented accommodation and a polyamorous same-sex family home. There is a long history associated with the pathologising of same-sex relationships, the medicalisation, stigmatisation and normalisation of ‘sexual deviancy’ as a dividing practice, and the classification of ‘deficits’ and ‘disorders’ through medical and social disciplines (Foucault, 1991, p. 8). However, research has also found that ‘homes are co-constituted through everyday domestic engagements, generating diverse intersectional subjectivities and spaces’ that resist normative makers to express self-identity (Gorman-Murray, 2015, p. 423). An analysis of masculinities and

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domesticity can contest public–private gendered assumptions about ‘homemaking’ being a ‘feminine activity’ in contrast to masculinised constructions of public realms (Gorman-Murray, 2015, p. 435). When examining diverse sexual subjectivities of home, there are complex relationships between heterosexual domesticities and queer homes (Gorman-Murray, 2012), as further discussed in Chapter 13. Disability and culture As further discussed in Chapter 12, the theorising of disability and home lies in understanding the interrelationships between embodiment, subjectivity and society (Goodley et al., 2012). The production of the ‘inferior’ disabled subject intersects with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, class and nationhood and has occurred within specific cultural and historical policy contexts. First Nations Peoples with a disability experience intersecting discriminations, multiple social inequalities, institutional ableism and racism, including in disability, health, education, employment, housing and transport services (Avery, 2019). The inclusion of people with disabilities in traditional practices, cultural ceremonies and community activities has enhanced spiritual healing and health and wellbeing (Avery, 2019). For example, a female Elder with a mobility impairment in a remote area explained the importance of her connection to traditional food gathering practices, ‘We go hunting together. He goes out. I sit in the car’ (Interview 34, in Avery, 2019, p. 238). She felt that hunting practices maintained her spiritual and emotional connections to her traditional lands and culture. She enjoyed calling out to her husband when sitting in the car, to share her knowledge about gathering traditional foods (Avery, 2019, p. 238). Home is a connection to a homeland as an identity and culture. A sense of connection to home and cultural belonging for First Nation Peoples includes healing through ‘returning home’ to Country (or homelands), community and culture, that shapes subjectivities of home and belonging (VACCA, 2015).

Subjectivity and reflexive research Previous research about the researcher’s own subjectivities of home has included intersectional and self-reflective research practices (Coloma, 2008). During a transnational project in the Philippines, Coloma (2008, p. 13) discussed tensions in how he identified himself and how others perceived him, associated with experiencing a compartmentalised subjectivity, when ‘going home’ to the Philippines. When reflecting on his own experiences as a Filipino and American historian, Coloma (2008, p. 11) drew on Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘subjectification’ associated with the dialectical process of self-making and being made. Coloma (2008) engaged with compartmental, intersectional and constitutive processes of subject formations. His analysis related to the relationship between himself and others, the intersections between race and ethnicity, and the researcher’s outsider and insider

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positions in ‘communities that one calls home’ (Coloma, 2008, p. 11). When referring to intersectional subjectivities, he reflected on how multiple markers of difference were intricately linked with material and cultural privileges associated with his ‘American-ness’ that ‘played into the neo-colonial dynamics between the local Filipino/as’ and someone ‘from the States’ (Coloma, 2008, p. 13). His constitutive subjectivity and multidimensional and dynamic positioning depended on subject constructions grounded in ‘socio-cultural, historical, and geographical contexts’ (Coloma, 2008, p. 20). He reflected that the tensions in the migration experience meant that ‘the Philippines is no longer my home, and the USA will never become one’ (Coloma, 2008, p. 23). This personal understanding refashioned his own notion of home, as the liminal borderlands, as the ‘cracks between worlds’ or as a ‘passenger in transit’ between cultures, for whom homelessness is the only state (Coloma, 2008, p. 23). Thus, whilst Coloma (2008, p. 14) wanted to claim the Philippines as a home and a place to belong, he also learnt that ‘evocations of home and community’ are a claim to truth, to origins and places. This ‘authenticating device’ of claiming home can be problematic because it signals who is in and who is out, who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ (Coloma, 2008, p. 14). This type of subjectivity work of researchers can assist social workers to understand the importance of self-reflexivity about our own social positioning in intersectional social work research on the subjectivities of home. The notion of subjectivity was also used in an analysis of ‘subjectivity work’ in participant and researcher relationships (Orchard & Dewey, 2016). Research by anthropologists Orchard and Dewey (2016) reflected on the ‘subjectivity work’ in researcher–participant relationships, in ethnographic research in Canada and the US with women who engaged in sex work. The women lived in the same neighbourhood and service provision location as the researcher, which raised ethical tensions in the research process. One research rule they reflected on was about the ‘duty to protect’ their research participants, which asserts that researchers and social workers, outside the bounds of the agency, are not to say ‘hello’ to clients (or research participants), unless they say ‘hello’ first (Orchard & Dewey, 2016, p. 254). However, this created ethical dilemmas for the researchers when observing participants in their neighbourhoods, such as engaging in ‘conspiratorial silences’ as they pass each other in the street (Orchard & Dewey, 2016, p. 258). This ethnographic study produced insights about the subjectivities deployed by research participants, as they navigated shared spaces and different ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ moments with the researchers (Orchard & Dewey, 2016). These reflections on the subjectivity work of social workers, researchers and their research participants are important to ethical social work research that purports to advocate for social justice and give voice to people’s diverse subjectivities of home.

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Implications for social work The subjectivities and intersections of home are multilayered and exist within unequal power relations that are constituted by unfair state policies. A sense of belonging and home can be supported or disrupted by ‘social structures’ as well as imagined in social constructions and ‘symbolic representations’ of home (Winker & Degele, 2011, p. 51). A multilevel analysis includes highlighting how political and sociohistorical contexts can disrupt a sense of connection to home and belonging. The state violence of colonial policies that have stolen First Nations children from their families and homes have contributed to intergenerational trauma and spiritual homelessness. As well, global inequalities and the violence of war has displaced 79.5 million people worldwide (52% being children) from their homes (The UN Refugee Agency, 2020). These experiences of geographical dislocation and the trauma of state violence contribute to disrupted subjectivities of home, with important considerations for building a renewed sense of home and safety in social work practice. In social work, subjectivity alludes to how subjects, such as researchers or social workers, or ‘clients’ or research participants, are positioned, perceived and locate themselves (see Zufferey, 2017). The social positioning of social workers is contingent on intersecting processes of privilege and oppression, associated with unequal power relations and the politics of social work (Zufferey, 2009). Social work research and practice are power relationships that are situational and temporal. Social work revolves around ‘professional relationships within various settings’ and ‘relationships between clients and their human and physical environment’ (Webb, 2018, p. 1). Social work is an exercise of power and ‘the politics of social work is caught up in our definitions and constitution of subjectivity and what counts as valid subjective experience’ (Webb, 2018, p. 1). Unequal power relations and how power is situated with dominant groups (including social workers) shape how home is individually and collectively imagined and experienced. Home is relational and associated with life transitions, the changing ‘life cycle’, global and local contexts, different spaces and places and different points in time (Yuval-Davis, 2015, p. 95). This chapter has argued that the subjectivities of home are constituted by unjust social policies and colonial state interventions in people’s lives, as well as intersecting aged, gendered, racialised, heteronormative, disabling and classed power relations. By making visible the diversity of voices, lived experiences and subjectivities of home, this can enhance social work knowledge about home and contribute to revisioning responses to home in social work. Consistent with their social work ethics of social justice and human rights, it is pertinent for social workers to reflect on the lived effects of colonial policies that stole children from their homes and annihilated and dispersed First Nations families, including interrogating the role of social workers in these child removals. The subjectivities of home are positioned within institutional practices and

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unequal social relations that are created by intersecting inequalities and unjust state policies. Social workers can contribute to building a renewed sense of home and belonging across different fields of practice, as discussed next in Part 2 of this book.

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted that there is considerable diversity in the subjectivities and lived experiences of home and belonging, commencing with the voices of First Nations Peoples who were stolen from their homes, including by social workers. The influences on the subjectivities of home are diverse and include the lived effects of state violence, intersecting discriminations and social inequalities, as well as the privileges associated with the social positioning of social workers. Social workers are involved in the rebuilding of a sense of home, when it has been disrupted by experiences of violence, abuse and forced dislocation. The next chapter examines home and homelessness and after this, the safety of women in their own homes is further discussed in Chapter 7.

References Ahmed, S., Castaneda, C., Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (2003). Uprootings/regroundings Questions of home and migration. Oxford UK: Berg Publishers. Anthias, F. (1998). Rethinking social divisions: Some notes towards a theoretical framework. Sociological Review, 46 (3), 506–535. Anthias, F. (2002a). Beyond feminism and multiculturalism: locating difference and the politics of location. Women’s Studies International Forum, 25 (3), 275–394. Anthias, F. (2002b). Where do I belong? Narrating collective identity and translocational positionality. Ethnicities, 2 (4), 491–515. Anthias, F. (2008). Thinking through the lens of translocational positionality: An intersectionality frame for understanding identity and belonging. Translocations: Migration and Social Change, 4, 5–20. Avery, S.C. (2019). ‘“We go hunting together”: Cultural and community inclusion as a moderator of social inequality experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability’. Phd thesis. University of Technology Sydney: Faculty of Health. Burgess, K. (2018). Meanings of home for baby boomers and grey nomads. Social Work Honours Thesis. University of South Australia: School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy. Choi, K.W.Y. (2019). Home and the materialization of the divergent subjectivities of older women in Hong Kong. Journal of Gender Studies, 28 (2), 231–243. Coloma, R.S. (2008). Border crossing subjectivities and research: through the prism of feminists of color. Race Ethnicity and Education, 11 (1), 11–27. Conradson, D. & Mckay, D. (2007). Translocal subjectivities: Mobility, connection, emotion. Mobilities, 2 (2), 167–174. Cuthill, F. (2019). Homelessness, social exclusion and health: global perspectives, local solutions. Scotland: Dunedin Academic Press. Foucault, M. (1991). The Foucault reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin.

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Funston, L., Herring, S. & Aboriginal Communities Matter Advisory Group (ACMAG) (2016). When will the stolen generations end? A qualitative critical exploration of contemporary ‘child protection’ practices in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Sexual Abuse in Australia and New Zealand, 7 (1), 51–58. Goodley, D., Hughes, B. & Davis, L. (2012). Introducing disability and social theory (pp. 1–14). In Goodley, D., Hughes, B. & Davis, L. (eds) Disability and social theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gorman-Murray, A. (2008). Masculinity and the home: A critical review and conceptual framework. Australian Geographer, 39, 367–379. Gorman-Murray, A. (2012). Experiencing home: Sexuality (pp. 152–157). In Smith, S. (ed.) International encyclopedia of housing and home. Netherlands: Elsevier. Gorman-Murray A. (2015). Twentysomethings and twentagers: Subjectivities, spaces and young men at home. Gender, Place & Culture, 22 (3), 422–439. Haas, A. & Osland, L. (2014). Commuting, migration, housing and labour markets: Complex interactions. Urban Studies, 51 (3), 463–476. Heyes, C. (2010). Subjectivity and power (pp. 159–172). In Taylor, D. (ed.) Michel Foucault: Key concepts. Stocksfield, UK: Acumen Publishing. Hogan, M. (Director). (2006). Kanyini [Film]. Hopscotch Films. Hopkins, P. (2010). Young people, place and identity. London: Routledge. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). (1997). Bringing them home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. Canberra: HREOC. Hunter, S. (2008). Child maltreatment in remote Aboriginal communities and the Northern Territory Emergency Response: A complex issue. Australian Social Work, 61 (4), 372–388. James, A., Jenks, C. & Prout, A. (1998). Theorising childhood. Cambridge UK: Policy Press. Johansson, B. (2010). Subjectivities of the child consumer: Beings and becomings (pp. 80–93). In Buckingham, D. & Tingstad, V. (eds) Childhood and consumer culture. Studies in childhood and youth. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kissoon, P. (2015). Intersections of displacement: Refugees’ experiences of home and homelessness. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Klis, M. & Karsten, L. (2009). Commuting partners, dual residences and the meaning of home. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 29, 235–245. Maddison, S. (2019). The colonial fantasy. Why white Australia can’t solve black problems. NSW: Allen & Unwin. Malone, K. (2011). My island home: Theorising childhood in the Cook Islands. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology: Research with Children in Asia-Pacific Societies, 12 (5), 462–477. Moore, T., McArthur, M. & Noble-Carr, D. (2008). ‘Stuff you’d never think of’: Children talk about homelessness and how they’d like to be supported. Family Matters, 78, 36–43. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2003). I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society (pp. 23–40). In Ahmed, S., Castaneda, C., Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (eds). Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Mueller, D. (2015). Young Germans in England visiting Germany: Translocal subjectivities and ambivalent views of ‘home’. Population, Space & Place, 21, 625–639.

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Orchard, T., & Dewey, S. (2016). How do you like me now? Exploring subjectivities and home/field boundaries in research with women in sex work. Anthropologica, 58 (2), 250–263. O’Shane, P. (1995). The psychological impact of white colonialism on Aboriginal people. Australasian Psychiatry, 9 (3),149–153. Pennycook, A. (2002). Mother tongues, governmentality and protectionism. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 154, 11–28. Probyn, E. (2003). The spatial imperative of subjectivity (pp. 290–299). In Anderson, K., Domosh, M., Pile, S. & Thrift, N. (eds) Handbook of cultural geography. London: Sage. Rossdale, C. (2015). Enclosing critique: The limits of ontological security. International Political Sociology, 9, 369–386. Sousa, C.A., Kemp, S. & El-Zuhairi, M. (2014). Dwelling within political violence: Palestinian women’s narratives of home, mental health, and resilience. Health & Place, 30, 205–214. Stewart, E. & Mulvey, G. (2014). Seeking safety beyond refuge: The impact of immigration and citizenship policy upon refugees in the UK. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40 (7), 1023–1039. Sullivan, S. & Tuana, N. (eds) (2007). Race and epistemologies of ignorance. New York: State University of New York Press. The UN Refugee Agency (2020). UNHCR figures at a glance. Geneva, Switzerland: UN. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) (2015). The survivors speak: A report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Canada: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. VACCA (2015). Culture is healing: Documenting journeys to identity and belonging: VACCA cultural programs and evaluation report. Melbourne, Victoria: The Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency (VACCA). Webb, S. (2018). The politics of social work. Critical Social Work, 1 (2). Accessed 7 June 2021, https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/index.php/csw/article/view/5583. Winker, G. & Degele, N. (2011). Intersectionality as multi-level analysis: Dealing with social inequality. The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18 (1), 51–66. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage. Yuval-Davis, N. (2015). Situated intersectionality and social inequality. Raisons politiques, 58 (2), 91–100. Zufferey, C. (2009). Making gender visible: Social work responses to homelessness. Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, 24 (4), 382–393. Zufferey, C. (2017). Homelessness and social work: An intersectional approach. Oxon, UK: Routledge.

Part 2

Practice considerations

6

Without a house and home Homelessness Carole Zufferey and Chris Horsell

Introduction Policy definitions of homelessness differ to the subjective sense of being or feeling home-less. A house has cultural, normative, psychological, and moral meanings. Yet, home is more than a house. Home can mean different things to different people. Identifications with home for people defined as ‘homeless’ can be multiple, spatial, material, imagined, symbolic, cultural and temporal. To draw implications for home in social work means moving beyond fixed ideas about housing and homelessness. This chapter commences with a discussion about contested definitions and causes of homelessness, followed by the intersectional complexities of home and homelessness as experienced by First Nations Peoples, women, refugees and asylum seekers, and in the fields of sexuality and disability. It then discusses Housing First responses and social work practice and policy advocacy in the field of homelessness.

Definitions of homelessness As discussed in Chapter 4, while not solely responsible, homelessness can be attributed to the failure of government policies to provide affordable housing to the poorer and more vulnerable sections of society, while also being unwilling to address the issue of the financial incentives that privilege homeownership and property investment. Homelessness has been constructed in diverse ways, drawing on a broad range of definitional issues and individual and structural causation debates (see Horsell & Zufferey, 2018, p. 139). In Europe, FEANTSA (2007) has developed a European Typology of Homelessness and Housing Exclusion (ETHOS), to provide for a common definition. This includes: rooflessness (without a shelter such as sleeping rough); houselessness (temporarily in an institution or shelter); insecure housing (such as insecure tenancies, risk of eviction or domestic violence) and living in inadequate housing (such as in caravans, on illegal campsites, in extreme overcrowding and so on). In Australia, over the past 40 years there have been three major definitions of homelessness, the literal (such as DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-8

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rough sleeping), subjective (such as feeling at home or homeless) and cultural definitions associated with minimum housing standards, such as a small, self-contained rental flat which includes a bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom and some degree of security of tenure (Chamberlain & Johnson, 2001, p. 36; Chamberlain & Mackenzie, 2008). Definitions of homelessness have included primary homelessness, such as living in improvised homes, tents and rough sleeping; secondary homelessness, such as people who move from one form of temporary accommodation to another; and tertiary homelessness, such as people in accommodation less than minimum community standard, including overcrowding and living in caravans (Chamberlain & Mackenzie, 2008, pp. viii, 39). Culturally embedded policy definitions of homelessness assume a normative position that is often seen to be ‘objective’ or representative of what ‘the community’ understands to constitute ‘home’ and ‘homelessness’ (Chamberlain & Mackenzie, 1992; Chamberlain & Johnson, 2001). In contrast, the subjective definition of homelessness has led to attempts to incorporate understandings about the experience of home, mobility and placelessness, which moves beyond a focus on access to a residence. Our own work and practice experiences as social workers within the homeless sector also suggest that isolation, a sense of displacement, issues of identity and other affective dimensions are paramount to the experience of homelessness (see also Zufferey & Kerr, 2004). These dimensions often prove far more difficult to address. A sense of homelessness resonates with a quest for meaning often concerned with geographical rootlessness, placelessness and existential grounding (Weil, 2002). Yet, subjective definitions of homelessness do not sit well within ‘objective’ policy frameworks (Watson, 2000). As well, in the context of a housing market defined by a shortage of housing, the possibility of locating housing based on subjective understandings of homelessness becomes increasingly problematic. Key debates in the field of homelessness relate to individual or structural causal explanations of homelessness. When focusing on policy conceptualisations of homelessness, the causation of homelessness relates to what is seen to be the best way to address ‘the problem’ of homelessness (Bacchi, 2009). Individualist neoliberal policy agendas locate the problem of homelessness within individual deficits and associated notions of deserving and undeserving welfare recipients, in contrast to those that locate causation in the structural and systemic failures of society (Horsell & Zufferey, 2018). For example, in the United Kingdom, eligibility criteria for state housing reflect individualist discourses about deserving and undeserving applicants (Neale, 1997; Cuthill, 2019). Individualist explanations of homelessness that refer to individual moral failings (such as alcoholism, dysfunctional personalities, gamblers and so on) mean that people can be reformed or assisted through appropriate case work. Individualist explanations of homelessness are generally associated with descriptions of behavioural issues such as excessive alcohol use and substance addictions (Kemp et al., 2006); family violence and sexual abuse (Bearsley-Smith et

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al., 2008); psychological and psychiatric problems such as depression, low self-esteem, schizophrenia (Cameron et al., 2004); the effects of loss and grief (Crane et al., 2004; Robinson, 2005); and explanations of ‘homeless clients’ as having high and complex needs (Warnes & Gove, 2006). While it is rare for researchers to identify only one cause of homelessness (Crane et al., 2004), the assumed link between the cause identified and the change in an individual’s experience that is categorised as ‘homeless’ is less than transparent (Fitzpatrick, 2005). Since the early 2000s, the language of risk has also entered causal explanations (Pleace & Quilgars, 2003), which invariably locates risk factors in an individual’s experience. However, what is missing from these debates is that homelessness interrelates with a sense of home and belonging. The category of homelessness is constructed through both privileging and disadvantaging social and policy processes, at local and global levels (Zufferey, 2017). For example, although the term ‘homelessness’ is contested internationally and not commonly used in migration studies, in the UK, the most destitute of ‘rough sleepers’ are commonly current or former asylum seekers who cannot access government support (Cuthill, 2019). Exclusionary institutional systems and policies of nation states, social structures of societies, identity category constructions and symbolic representations of ‘social problems’ intersect and have reciprocal effects (Winker & Degele, 2011), producing experiences of home and homelessness.

Home and homelessness Drawing on early research in anthropology and urban design, Dovey (1985) distinguished between a house and a home. A ‘home’ as distinct from a house is more than just a physical structure. The idea of home is more abstract and experiential, related to connectedness, spatiality, temporality, familiarity and connected to oneself and identity, in all their sociocultural differences (Dovey, 1985). Home is often assumed to have positive attributes, as a place of nurturing, where conflict is suspended, and a private sanctuary distinguished from the public or ‘social’ world (Klodawsky, 2012, p. 384). However, the consumed and designed house as the place of home can be emphasised over the experience of the dweller within the place (Dovey, 1985). For example, urban design involves rationalist thinking, the commodification of property, bureaucratic dehumanisation, the erosion of communal public space and the valuing of the relationship with the ‘expert’ designer (Dovey, 1985, pp. 51–56). This draws attention to the ‘selling of home’ or the commodification of a classed image of home to a ‘nostalgic public’ (Dovey, 1985, p. 34). These ideas about the commodification of home and homeownership stand in stark contrast with the experiences of ‘homeless people’ but can shape how home is imagined and represented.

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In both the Global North and Global South, homelessness is increasing in many nation states (Pawson et al., 2020; Jacobs, 2019). Homelessness can also be broadly defined as the ‘processes and conditions that can erode the experience of home’ (Dovey, 1985, p. 34). Robinson (2005) has researched emotional embodiment, home and homelessness to further understand how grief is central to young people’s experiences of homelessness. She has noted that ‘brutal past homes’ continue to ‘haunt young people and impact on the ways in which they relate to place, including the place of their own body’ (Robinson, 2005, p. 47). She argues that grief and trauma are key causes of homelessness amongst young people, which ‘continues to underpin trajectories of homelessness after initial exits from home’ (Robinson, 2005, p. 47). These ideas about the family home as the site of trauma are further discussed in Chapter 8. Home and homelessness are multidimensional, with material, social, emotional and psychological contours that are subjectively experienced (Parsell, 2012, p. 159). Numerous authors have highlighted diverging multidisciplinary interpretations of the meanings of home and that the relationship between home and homelessness depends on national, societal and institutional contexts (Klodawsky, 2012, p. 384; Mccarthy, 2018). When considering Western idealisations of home, Somerville (1992) in the UK was a seminal author in this field, arguing that home and homelessness are ideological constructs that are created subjectively through experience and imagination. That is, that homelessness is not just a lack of shelter but has physiological (a lack of comfort), emotional (lack of love), territorial (lack of privacy), ontological (lack of rootedness) and spiritual (lack of purpose) dimensions (Somerville, 1992). Focusing on the perspectives of rough sleepers in Brisbane, Australia, Parsell (2012, p. 159) explored meanings of home and found that ‘biographies of feeling disconnected from society, underpinned their ideas of home’. While home is more than housing, having a home was ‘constructed as a signifier of normality’ that included ‘a commitment to participation in Australian society’ (Parsell, 2012, p. 159). Thus, while home and housing cannot be conflated, they can be perceived to be ‘synonymous’ by rough sleepers (Parsell, 2012, p. 159). However, when considering gender, women are less likely to be rough sleepers and more likely to be living in ‘temporary and unsatisfactory’ housing solutions, which ‘are off the radar of the authorities’ who only focus on rough sleeping (Bennett, 2011, p. 962). As well, definitions of homelessness that do not extend beyond rough sleeping tend to marginalise the voices of women (Watson & Austerberry, 1986; Tomas & Dittmar, 1995; Watson, 2000). Furthermore, Western understandings of home and homelessness fail to capture First Nations Peoples’ sense of home and belonging (Moreton-Robinson, 2003).

First Nation Peoples, home and homelessness It must be acknowledged that in the Australian context, the notion of Australia being home to non-Aboriginal migrants and colonisers is contested. As

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discussed in previous chapters, white institutions, legal regimes and colonial state policies have positioned First Peoples as trespassers on their own land, as outsiders to the nation (Moreton-Robinson, 2003, p. 37). First Nations Peoples’ sense of home and belonging are configured differently to those of migrants or colonisers (Moreton-Robinson, 2003, p. 37). When considering the perspectives of First Nation Peoples in Australia, the term ‘homelessness’ does not always fit local and cultural meanings of home (see Zufferey & Chung, 2015). Narrow policy definitions that focus on housing as being ‘home’ and ‘rough sleeping’ as homelessness may overlook the meanings of home for some people. There has been a confusion between temporary mobility and homelessness (Habibis, 2011, p. 403). The reasons for Aboriginal mobility vary across regions but are influenced by kinship obligations, historical cultural practices and requiring access to basic services, including health services such as hospital care, that is not available in remote locations (Habibis, 2011). Habibis (2011, pp. 409–412) identified seven different categories of Aboriginal mobility, which include temporary visits; migrations (long-term mobility such as for employment, marriage and access to services); boarding (moving away from ‘home’ for predictable periods for a purpose, such as education and training); ‘between place’ dwelling (people who have a ‘home’ and residence in more than one location); transience (people constantly moving); involuntary mobility (which involves little choice such as escaping violence) and chronically ‘homeless’ (such as people without a permanent address or ‘home’ akin to spiritual homelessness). Keys Young (1998) identified five types of homelessness affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, which included: spiritual homelessness (such as people who feel spiritually disconnected because they were from Stolen Generation/s and forcibly removed from their traditional lands); relocation and transient homelessness (such as mobility between dry communities and fringe or town camps); women and children escaping unsafe homes (such as in family violence); having ‘nowhere to go’ (which is very rare because ‘everyone comes from somewhere’) and overcrowding, which is very common (Young, 1998). These different experiences of ‘homelessness’ and/ or mobility challenge policy definitions of homelessness and home as being solely connected to a physical material house. In New Zealand, Ma-ori notions of home also have multiple meaning but are associated with social connections to wha-nau (family), cultural identity and tu-rangawaewae, defined as ‘a place to stand’ or ‘land to which one has a genealogical tie’ (Leggatt-Cook & Chamberlain, 2015, p. 13). As Jo, a Ma-ori adviser in Leggatt-Cook and Chamberlain’s (2015, p. 14) study explained: If somebody asked any Ma-ori where home is, they will directly relate back to their tribal boundaries. I’m a Ma-ori who has never lived in my tu-rangawaewae…but when I stand up to do my pepeha [marking membership to a group], it’s directly to that iwi (tribe)…I would always culturally go there and spiritually that’s where I am.

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The recitation of her pepeha allows Jo to connect with members of her tribe and her ancestral land and provides Jo with a sense of cultural and spiritual belonging and home that is integral to her lived identity as Ma-ori (Leggatt-Cook & Chamberlain, 2015, p. 14). In Canada, Christensen (2013, p. 804) spent five years with Indigenous peoples in Yellowknife and Inuvik, two regional Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, to examine home and visible homelessness. She too draws on the idea of a collective sense of spiritual homelessness as multilayered, associated with colonialism and displacement and cultural detachment (Christensen, 2013, p. 810). To explain their own personal experiences and the collective roots of homelessness, her research participants discussed the ontological insecurity associated with being institutionalised in residential school and the interventions of the child welfare system that disrupted family and community ties and their sense of home (Christensen, 2013, p. 822), as discussed in the previous chapter. These colonialist practices and state systems have contributed to an intergenerational sense of detachment from cultural identity and land, displacing First Nations Peoples from home (Christensen, 2013, p. 822). These homeless geographies ‘transcend the northern Canadian context to encompass Indigenous homelessness in rural and urban areas across Canada and other settler countries such as the USA, Australia and New Zealand’ (Christensen, 2013, p. 822). Thus, collective experiences of unjust colonial policies, institutional practices and intergenerational trauma shape family stressors and ‘individual material experiences of homelessness such as a lack of shelter’ (Christensen, 2013, p. 810). These experiences of state violence highlight ‘individual and collective needs for self-determination, cultural emplacement and socio-economic inclusion’ (Christensen, 2013, p. 822). Across the world, institutionalised racism in government policies and service systems means that social workers often fail to consider the complexities of home and homelessness for First Nations Peoples. For example, Alaazi et al. (2015, p. 30) interviewed 14 Aboriginal residents and six key project staff in the Canadian Housing First initiative: At Home/Chez Soi (AHCS) project. Consistent with previous studies, she found that First Nations Peoples’ sense of place in the city was largely disconnected from their housing experiences (Alaazi et al., 2015). The shortage of affordable housing as well as the ‘systematic erasure of Indigeneity from the urban sociocultural and political landscape, have adversely impacted Indigenous people’s sense of place and home’ (Alaazi et al., 2015, p. 30). Intersecting power relations associated with race, class and gender constitute social meanings about home, place and practices of home in ‘everyday life’ (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Power and gender inequalities constitute women’s experiences of abuse and violence in the physical house that is imagined to be home.

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Women, home and homelessness Homelessness is gendered. Across the world, women’s and children’s homelessness is inextricably linked to male violence, as further discussed in the next chapter. The family home is often constructed as being where gender is enacted and gendered identities are formed and performed (Cuthill, 2019, p. 98). For some women, the house as home can offer security, a sense of belonging, continuity and safety, while for others, it can be a place of violence and abuse (Watson & Austerberry, 1986; Watson, 2000). The loss of a house can mean loss of physical shelter. However, the involuntary loss of both a physical house and a sense of home can be immeasurably more significant, including the loss of safe relationships, social and community connections and threats to mental health (Minnery & Greenhalgh, 2007). The state is central to women’s access to basic citizenship rights, including to safe housing as well as a sense of belonging and home (Franzway et al., 2019). In the UK, Bennett (2011, p. 960) completed an ethnographic study of ‘young, working class women living in privately rented or social housing in the former coalfields of East Durham’ (in Northeast England). The women were on a lengthy waiting list for social housing and although they had a place to stay, they felt homeless and rarely felt ‘at home’ (Bennett, 2011). For these women, home was an ‘emotional space of imagining’ because they currently lacked privacy, individualisation, a sense of safety in the neighbourhood and the finances to furnish and preserve a sense of self and identity through home (Bennett, 2011, p. 960). The young women felt haunted by changing housing policy responses to sole parents and under surveillance by ‘authorities with the power to allocate or withdraw housing’, including social workers (Bennett, 2011, p. 981). The women felt unable to access their basic citizen rights to safe housing and to sufficient finances, which highlighted the intersecting effects of gendered and classed power relations in women’s lives, shaping their access to adequate housing and an imagined sense of home. Gendered accounts of home are often associated with the familiar domestic spheres of the family house but women who experience domestic violence can also feel ‘homeless at home’. Policy definitions of women’s homelessness include women living in a state-sponsored homeless or domestic violence service. However, Mccarthy (2018, p. 960) problematises these housed-homeless binaries in her research on women’s meanings of home and homelessness. Some women discussed the family home or house as being frightening and the shelter as home. In her interviews with women accessing homelessness services in the North of England, she found the Freudian notion of the ‘unheimlich’ useful, to ‘…capture the uncanny process of inversion whereby the familiar domestic sphere of the house turns into a frightening place; and a typical space of homelessness—the hostel—is considered home’ (Mccarthy, 2018, p. 960). This highlights how the social dialectics of home and homelessness, including self–other, public–private, community–identity, are not binary

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opposites but are mutually defining and situationally specific (Dovey, 1985, p. 44). Some people, including First Nations Peoples who were stolen from their home, women, migrants and refugees, may only ever experience a partial sense of home and belonging, in a society with deep structural and systemic practices of gendered, cultural, ethnic and religious discrimination and power inequalities (Crenshaw, 1991). Furthermore, institutionalised classism, sexism, racism and xenoracism in state policies, social work practice, research and education can render these social inequalities invisible to some social workers (Singh & Masocha, 2020).

Forced migration, home and homelessness Homelessness can be experienced by forced migrants such as refugees and asylum seekers as well as local citizens. Homelessness exists within the social inequalities of local and global contexts (Cuthill, 2019). When considering home and homelessness for refugees and asylum seekers, the notions of homelessness and home are complicated. Refugees and asylum seekers are often seen to be ‘doubly’ or ‘multiply’ ‘homeless’, especially if they must access homelessness services, with no place to stay and are in a foreign land, without a country to call ‘home’ (Kissoon, 2015, p. 2). Kissoon, (2015, p. 300) found that this idea of homelessness eclipses different meanings and sites of home that do offer hope and possibilities for transcending loss. That is, that the Western imaginary of ‘refugee’ identities may not actually be relevant to the refugee’s experience. In her study, she interviewed refugees and state informants in the UK and Canada and found that those who were defined as a ‘refugee’ or ‘homeless’ were constructed through social and legal definitions that were often related to notions of individual deficiency and deserving or undeserving dichotomies, in the context of a country’s politics (Kissoon, 2015, p. 27). However, these policy constructions did not fit the lived experiences of people defined as a refugee or homeless. The process of homemaking for refugees involved a reconstruction of home, which related to accessing adequate housing, the reassembling of employment and careers and resettling in a new culture and country (Kissoon, 2015, p. 35). As refugees are often members of a minority group, this resettlement process often occurs without a history of deep place-based learning and knowing (Kissoon, 2015, p. 350). A large Australian study on refugee resettlement also found that ‘the remaking of home’ interacted with structural and systemic issues, including the cost of housing, limited choice in the rental market, lack of public housing, poor housing quality, negative attitudes of real estate agents and complex tenancy procedures (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014, p. 148). Also, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 10, an exploratory study of skilled African migrants over 50 years old in South Australia examined conceptualisations of ‘home’, ageing and their retirement futures (Watindi, 2020, p. 10). This study found that for skilled African migrants, home is not restricted to one geographical location but is linked to spaces that transcend national borders,

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with a sense of belonging to more than one place (Watindi, 2020). However, the experience of skilled migrants may differ to forced migrants and refugees who cannot return to their home country, and are living in refugee camps, which is more akin to a sense of homelessness. Another small study explored the lived experiences of encampment of four Togolese refugees in Krisan Refugee Camp (Ghana) and found that they did not feel safe, worried about their children’s future and felt that they did not belong, as they were struggling to negotiate survival in adversity while living in exile (Ameganvi, 2019). The experiences of refugees and lack of safety in refugee camps highlights the realities of ‘homelessness’ for forced migrants and refugees. This contrasts deeply with Western ideas about the material commodification of home through homeownership (Dovey, 1985, p. 34). For refugees and forced migrants, home is a country that you cannot go back to, even when experiencing a sense of cultural ‘homelessness’ in a new host country. These emotional aspects of lacking a sense of home and belonging are compounded by the material experience of being without a house (Zufferey et al., 2020; Kidd & Evans, 2011).

Sexuality, home and homelessness In Western contexts, as Cuthill (2019, p. 98) argues, research in homelessness has tended to focus on rough sleepers and older single white males, which obscures the experiences of home and homelessness for refugees and asylum seekers, young people, women and people who identify as queer or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual and other diverse sexualities (LGBTQIA+). Sexuality, home and homelessness is an emerging area of research in social work (see also Chapter 13). In the UK and North America, 20 to 40% of young people living in a homeless situation identify as LGBT, who, compared to heterosexual young people, are more likely to experience high levels of trauma and sexual abuse (Cuthill, 2019, p. 101). Previous research has found that sexuality is central to experiences of home because the ‘house-as-home’ does assume heterosexual domestic relationships (Gorman-Murray, 2012, p. 152). Homophobia in the family home affects young people’s risk of experiencing homelessness (Dunne et al., 2002; Pilkey, 2013), although family homes are not always homophobic (Gorman-Murray, 2008). In Kent, UK, Tunaker (2015, p. 252) found that LGBT young people (aged 16–25) living in a homeless hostel perceived being estranged from family as being ‘properly homeless’. The multiplicity of sexual subjectivities means that home, homelessness and sexuality is multilayered (Gorman-Murray, 2012, p. 152). This book further interrogates and complicates assumptions about heteronormative family homes in Chapter 13.

Disability, home and homelessness An intersectional analysis can also interrogate how ableist and disabling practices intersect with other axes of difference in ‘the structure of

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inequalities in urban societies’ (Prince, 2016, p. 186), which includes ableist assumptions in disability policy (Horsell, 2020). As further discussed in Chapter 12, able-bodied privilege is often invisible when considering the making and meaning of home. Housing studies rarely consider ‘the body and impairment and its interactions with domestic space’ (Imrie, 2004, p. 762). Whilst mental illness has long been associated with homelessness, non-psychiatric disabilities are under-recognised in homelessness (Albrecht et al., 2001). Ableist assumptions (including in social work) tend to fear people with a mental illness, misunderstand people with a learning disability and construct people with a developmental disability as being incompetent (Prince, 2016, pp. 175–177). There has been a long history of denying access to human rights for people who do not fit ‘prevailing notions of ability and normalcy’ (Prince, 2016, p. 177). Australian research has found that young people’s high support needs (including homelessness and disability) can be magnified through ableist judgments and social marginalisation, such as in small regional communities with resource inadequacies (Ellem et al., 2019). Young people living in rural locations can disengage from services or experience an inadequate response that results in systemic escalation to a homelessness crisis (Ellem et al., 2019, p. 97). Therefore, geographical locations are an important axis of difference in intersectional research on home and homelessness. Social work responses, such as in the field of disability and homelessness, are mostly assumed to be urban (Zufferey, 2016). This is because social work has a long history of engaging with urban poverty through the charity efforts of the Charity Organization Society (COS) and place-based Settlement Movement (Williams, 2016, p. 48). The imaginary of homelessness is urban, rendering invisible rural homelessness. However, the surveillance and policing of urban homelessness creates new forms of displacement through urban design (such as benches people cannot sleep on) and the criminalisation of homelessness (Zufferey, 2016). An understudied intersection in homelessness is ‘the presence of intellectual, developmental and/or learning disabilities’, even though rates of cognitive disabilities are higher in homeless populations (Baker et al., 2018, p. 99). The invisibility of disability in homelessness is accentuated by the ‘siloed’ responses of homelessness and disability services (Baker et al., 2018, p. 99). When considering housing for people with disabilities, an Australian study found that people with moderate (but not acute) disabilities often fall through gaps in crisis services, require integrated responses from different services, and a holistic Housing First approach that supports employment and socialisation (Beer et al., 2011). However, access to affordable and appropriate housing remains a challenge, with long waiting lists as an ‘impediment to the provision of housing for persons with a disability at risk of homelessness’ (Beer et al., 2011, p. 30). As well, it has been found that there is a need to ‘develop better skills sets within the homelessness workforce’ to further address disability related issues (Beer et al., 2011, p. 30).

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Housing First, home and homelessness There have been recent debates about the successes of Housing First approaches from conservative thinktanks in the US (Eide, 2020). However, Canadian research at the Toronto site has found that the Housing First EthnoRacial Intensive Case Management (HF ER-ICM) trial that served 100 homeless individuals with mental illness from diverse ethno-racial groups offered a promising approach, by drawing on anti-racism and anti-oppression principles (Stergiopoulos et al., 2012). The building of a sense of home through providing permanent housing in a non-judgmental way (such as in Housing First) is consistent with social work ethics and principles of social justice. Housing First approaches have the potential to contribute to building a sense of home and belonging for diverse community groups (Cladera et al., 2019). A sense of home can be enhanced through physical buildings as well as an emotional sense of belonging or ontological security (Giddens, 1991). In Spain, Cladera et al. (2019) noted that access to supportive housing does contribute to the recovery process for people with a mental illness who are homeless. Supportive and appropriate housing can provide ‘a sense of meaning and purpose’, contribute to empowerment and hope for the future, as well as build social connections, self-determination, a sense of ‘social justice and participation’ (Cladera et al., 2019, p. 54). Housing First approaches can contribute to the possibility of having a sense of home, privacy, control and a meaningful existence. The personalisation of the Housing First apartments promoted a sense of control and privacy, with service users decorating them to their own tastes, with their own furniture and domestic objects, as well as having the choice about when to invite service providers to their home (Cladera et al., 2019). However, intrusive practices and legalistic state policies as well as unequal client–worker power relations can potentially affect service users’ sense of home, in residential settings and Housing First services. Some service users felt under surveillance and more controlled when housed, with home visits by professionals at times making them feel ‘anxious and stressed’, especially when the rental contract is not in their names (Cladera et al., 2019, p. 60). Similarly, a study in Sweden found that the surveillance and legal restrictions associated with caring for unaccompanied minors in residential care units conflicted with staff’s desire to offer an ‘ordinary home’ in Sweden, which they associated with a sense of belonging (Soderqvist et al., 2016, p. 591). Social workers can thus consider the effects on power in client–worker relationships, which may mean that people distrust frontline providers, who ‘embody a control figure’ (Cladera et al., 2019, p. 65). Nonetheless, there are also possibilities for considering state funded accommodation services as ‘home’ (Mccarthy, 2018; Cladera et al., 2019). Tenant suggestions for building a sense of home in a Housing First house has included: to ‘allow people to appropriate their space and feel it as their home’; to establish ‘an individual rental contract’ so service users can be tenants; to enable tenants to

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‘choose the furniture of their home’ and for ‘frontline providers to strengthen the ethical relationship’ with service users (Cladera et al., 2019, pp. 65–66).

Implications for social work When considering home and homelessness, learnings for social work from the research presented in this chapter include that it is important for social workers to contribute to policies and practices that build a sense of home, community and belonging, and to advocate for social and systemic changes. Housing First approaches can provide for more time and space to build twoway ethical client–worker relationships but there are limitations because the building of trust takes time and considerable worker self-reflexivity. Intersectional social work approaches can assist us to reflect on what we privilege and what we render invisible, in research, policy, practice and academia, which includes considering the intersecting influences on and experiences of housing, home and homelessness (Zufferey, 2017). At a policy level, social workers can engage in systemic advocacy about individualist policy framing and responses to homelessness that render invisible institutionalised structural oppressions associated with intersecting axes of difference, such as indigeneity, race, gender, age, ability and sexuality, to name a few. However, the challenges and the politics of social action mean that social work activists need to frame homelessness as an issue of housing to effect policy change (Leggatt-Cook & Chamberlain, 2015). Research in New Zealand has found that advocating for homelessness can require pragmatic and strategic compromises, moving away from biographically informed subjective accounts of home to the ‘conflation of home with dwelling’ (Leggatt-Cook & Chamberlain, 2015, p. 20). These are important considerations in social work advocacy that intend to influence social change. Policy advocacy to end homelessness and increase access to appropriate and safe housing can contribute to building a sense of home and community belonging. When considering First Nations Peoples and notions of home and homelessness, policy definitions and state responses to homelessness can provide access to housing but cannot respond to a sense of ‘spiritual homelessness’. In colonial nations such as Australia and Canada, colonial state policy responses that removed children from their families have contributed to intergenerational trauma that underpins homelessness. Social workers play an important role in preventing intergenerational homelessness by reconsidering the removal of children in child protection work and imagining how government systems can ‘flip the system from crisis to prevention’ (Oscar, 2019). As further discussed in the next chapter, social workers are also centrally involved in working with women and children rendered homeless because of domestic and family violence. When women experience intimate partner violence this affects their housing situation, connections to a sense of safety

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and home and their social participation (Zufferey et al., 2016). Social workers can provide respectful and empowering services that address women’s feelings of shame and being shamed when accessing housing assistance, by responding respectfully to women’s disclosures of abuse, addressing safety issues and focusing on holding perpetrators accountable for their crimes (Zufferey et al., 2016, p. 474). Legal reforms in all Australian states provide for exclusion orders that remove the perpetrator from the family home, so that women and children can remain in the family home. However, the success of this option is contested because it depends on the police implementing it, the severity of violence and safety concerns and even with added home security, women may never again feel safe ‘at home’ (Zufferey et al., 2016, p. 474). Furthermore, transnational social work perspectives can acknowledge the need to adopt social policies and practices that recognise the changing landscapes of global migration and ageing populations (Watindi, 2020). As further discussed in Chapter 10, migrants and refugees have diverse transnational backgrounds, with unique histories, multiple experiences, attachments, identities, senses of belonging and definitions of home. Other areas of intersecting disadvantage that may impact on a sense of home and homelessness include sexuality and disability, as further discussed in Chapters 12 and 13. Homelessness is higher for queer identified young people, although previous research has found that the relationships between sexuality and multiple homes is complex (Gorman-Murray, 2012). For people with physical disabilities, the making of home can be related to accessible dwellings and home environments, which includes physical design, ease of movement and access to different spaces and facilities in the house as a home (Imrie, 2004). As two white heterosexual social workers who are able-bodied, we are constantly reflecting on our own privileges that require us to challenge culturally and systemically embedded racism, sexism, heteronormativity as well as ‘disablism and ableism’ (Pease, 2010, p. 164).

Conclusion This chapter on homelessness and home has distinguished between a house, a home and homelessness, whilst arguing that these can be interrelated and mutually constitutive. It covered different definitions of home and homelessness. It considered First Nations Peoples’ experiences of mobility and homelessness. It highlighted homelessness and home research on gender and women’s homelessness, migration and refugee resettlement, sexuality, disability and geographical locations. It pointed to heteronormative and ableist policy assumptions when considering sexuality, disability, home and homelessness, which will be further examined in Chapters 12 and 13. Finally, it discussed research on the contributions of Housing First approaches to a sense of home, drawing implications for advocacy, service provision and policy responses to housing and homelessness. The next chapter examines violence against women and home.

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Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (eds). Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Neale, J. (1997). Theorising homelessness (pp. 35–49). In Burrows, R., Pleace, N. & Quilgars, D. (eds) Homelessness and social policy. London and New York: Routledge. Oscar, J. (2019). Removal of Indigenous children is human rights concern. Accessed 19 July 2021, https://humanrights.gov.au/about/news/removal-indigenous-children-huma n-rights-concern. Parsell, C. (2012). Home is where the house is: The meaning of home for people sleeping rough. Housing Studies, 27 (2), 159–173. Pawson, H., Milligan, V. & Yates, J. (2020). Housing policy in Australia: A case for system reform. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Pease, B. (2010). Undoing privilege, unearned advantage in a divided world. London UK: Zed Books. Pilkey, B. (2013). Embodiment of mobile homemaking imaginaries. Geographical Research, 51 (2), 159–165. Pleace, N. & Quilgars, D. (2003). Led rather than leading? Research on homelessness in Britain. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 13, 187–196. Prince, M. (2016). Disabling cities and repositioning social work (pp. 173–192). In Williams, C. (ed.) Social work and the city. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Robinson, C. (2005). Grieving home. Social & Cultural Geography, 6 (1). 47–60. Singh, G. & Masocha, S. (eds) (2020). Anti-racist social work. London: Springer. Soderqvist, Å., Sjoblom, Y. & Bulow, P. (2016). Home sweet home? Professionals’ understanding of ‘home’ within residential care for unaccompanied youths in Sweden. Child & Family Social Work, 21 (4), 591–599. Somerville, P. (1992). Homelessness and the meaning of home: Rooflessness and rootlessness? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 16 (4), 529–539. Stergiopoulos, V., O’Campo, P., Gozdzik, A.Jeyaratnam, J., Corneau, S., Sarang, A. & Hwang, S.W. (2012). Moving from rhetoric to reality: Adapting Housing First for homeless individuals with mental illness from ethno-racial groups. BMC Health Serv Res, 12, 345. Accessed 7 June 2021, doi:10.1186/1472-6963-12-345. Tomas, A. & Dittmar, H. (1995). The experience of homeless women: An exploration of housing histories and the meaning of home. Housing Studies, 10 (4), 493–515. Tunaker, C. (2015). No place like home? Home Cultures, 12 (2), 241–259. Warnes, H. & Gove, M. (2006). Housing people with complex needs: Managing transitional housing tenancies. Parity, 6, 19–21. Watindi, H. (2020). What does it mean for skilled African migrants living in South Australia, to age in a country other than that in which they were born? A transnational ageing perspective. Social Work Honours Thesis. Adelaide: University of South Australia. Watson, S. (2000). Homelessness revisited: New reflections on old paradigms. Urban Policy and Research, 18 (2), 159–170. Watson, S. & Austerberry, H. (1986). Housing and homelessness: A feminist perspective. London: Routledge. Weil, S. (2002). The need for roots. London: Routledge Classics. Williams, C. (2016). Social work and the city. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Winker, G. & Degele, N. (2011). Intersectionality as multi-level analysis: Dealing with social inequality. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18 (1), 51–66. Young, K. (1998). Homelessness in the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander context and its possible implications for the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP): Final report. Sydney: Department of Family and Community Services.

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Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Intersectionality and feminist politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13 (3), 193–209. Zufferey, C. (2016). Homelessness in Western cities (pp. 215–233). In Williams, C. (ed.) Social work and the city. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Zufferey, C. (2017). Homelessness and social work: An intersectional approach. Oxon: Routledge. Zufferey, C. & Chung, D. (2015). Red dust homelessness: housing, home and homelessness in remote Australia. Journal of Rural Studies, 41, 13–22. Zufferey, C. & Kerr, L. (2004). Identity and everyday experiences of homelessness: Some implications for social work. Australian Social Work, 57 (4), 343–353. Zufferey, C., Chung, D., Franzway, S., Wendt, S. & Moulding, N. (2016). Intimate partner violence and housing. Affilia, 31 (4) 463–478. Zufferey, C., Yu, N. & Hand, T. (2020). Researching home in social work. Qualitative Social Work, 19 (5–6), 1095–1110.

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The safety of home Violence against women Carole Zufferey

Introduction This chapter takes an intersectional feminist approach to domestic violence and home. Domestic violence (DV) disrupts women’s sense of safety and home. Women who experience domestic violence can be further disadvantaged in their attempts to rebuild a safe home after escaping violence, especially within the context of broader social inequalities and limited, ethnocentric service support systems. However, home is experienced differently by different women. A sense of home is culturally, materially, socially, politically and economically constituted and embodied. As well, representations of home in domestic violence research are culturally and geographically embedded. For example, a study in South Africa with women who reside and work on street pavements has challenged how home is imagined in domestic violence through Western assumptions and the spatial imaginings of home in domestic violence (Meth, 2003). As well as violence by intimate partners, environmental and political violence also impact women’s sense of safety and home. The multiple experiences of gendered violence inflicted on women and children across the world are inextricably linked to their sense of safety, home and belonging.

The gendering of home Gendered assumptions are central to meanings of home. In Western literature, home tends to be conflated with the private domain: a house, the family, a haven or refuge. Home can be related to feelings of ‘being-at-home’ and the creating or making of a safe home (Mallett, 2004, p. 62). An ideal home is perceived to be ‘a haven in a heartless world’ that provides for safety, privacy, the support of a nuclear family, protection, familiarity and inclusion (McDowell, 1997, p. 13). The notion of ‘a safe home’ alludes to a place as well as a person’s inner self, a place where one goes to ‘recharge’ oneself, immersed in material objects that reflect our personality and identity (Marcus, 2006). There is an assumed relationship between emotional wellbeing and being safe and ‘at home’ (Zufferey et al., 2016). Home is also DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-9

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a commodity, that is ‘materially, socially, politically and economically constituted and differentiated’ (Meth, 2003, p. 318). The place of home is associated with an embodied sense of belonging, attachment, care and rootedness (Cresswell, 2015). For some women, home is experienced as an empowering place, a haven from a racist society, a site of resistance and identity formation (hooks, 1990). Yet, as feminist geographer Gillian Rose (1993) argues, universalist understandings of housing and home are masculinist notions that fail to recognise the diversity of women’s experiences of home. Dominant ideas about nurturance and care in the place of home are challenged when women and children experience abuse and violence in the privacy of their homes. Many women who experience gendered violence are forced to leave their homes for their own and children’s safety, which affects their housing conditions and connections to a sense of safety, belonging and home. Domestic violence disrupts women’s sense of safety and home (Zufferey et al., 2016; Franzway et al., 2019). A house can be a ‘prison’ for women and children who experience violence and abuse in their ‘homes’ (Mallett, 2004, p. 71). For some women, home is a central site of oppression (Cresswell, 2015; Rose, 1993). As well, certain groups of women who are escaping domestic violence can be further disadvantaged in their attempts to build and rebuild a safe home. Women living in poverty, for example, may be financially unable to escape their circumstances, especially within the context of broader intersecting social inequalities and limited and ethnocentric services and support systems.

Violence again women: effects on home Violence against women (VAW) is a major health issue for women worldwide (World Health Organization, 2013). The United Nations General Assembly (2014) noted that VAW creates conditions that deny women their citizenship rights to an adequate standard of living, as they experience fear within the home and constrained social participation in public life. Previous research has found that intimate partner violence (IPV) is an extreme example of gender inequality that compromises women’s citizenship, which includes their access to safe and affordable housing, social participation and connections to a sense of ‘home’ (Zufferey et al., 2016; Franzway et al., 2019). IPV affects women’s mental health, which compounds and is compounded by housing stress and instability (Moulding et al., 2021). There are interconnections between a sense of home, access to safe housing, domestic violence and mental health (Franzway et al., 2019). When escaping violence in their homes, women are displaced from their local communities, make frequent geographical moves and report never feeling safe and ‘at home’ (Zufferey et al., 2016; Franzway et al., 2019). In an Australian study of 658 women who experienced IPV, 42% of the women reported having to make frequent geographical moves and more than half

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reported post separation violence, such as being stalked (Franzway et al., 2019). Women were forced to leave their homes for their own and children’s safety, lived in constant fear and had to frequently relocate, which severely curtailed their freedom to participate in civil life (Zufferey et al., 2016). Fear, stalking and escalating violence shaped women’s decision making about their housing choices: I would have to leave my house with the kids in the middle of the night because he was threatening to come burn it down or slit my throat… also kill all 4 kids…afraid to go home because of his death threats…only went back when he was jailed…we were separated and living elsewhere but he continually threatened us…had to leave the state and relocate with the kids and sell my house. (Nadia, in Zufferey et al., 2016, p. 9) Typically, after experiencing IPV, women reported never feeling ‘safe’ and not having a sense of home: ‘I will never have a home of my own or a place that I feel is my home safe, secure, and private’ (Lydia, in Zufferey et al., 2016, p. 8). The long-term emotional, psychological and physical effects of IPV impact women’s ability to recuperate from violence and abuse, which affects their sense of connection to a safe home. When considering the urban–rural geographical divide, domestic violence in rural areas cannot be separated from gendered rural experiences of entrapment and surveillance in small rural communities (Little, 2017). However, rural places can be diversely experienced. For example, Rena’s move to a ‘safe place’ in the country after escaping domestic violence assisted her to survive the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days, enabling her to regain a sense of connection to place, safety and home, albeit only partially (Zufferey et al., 2016, p. 9). Rena’s construction of rurality and a rural geographical location as a ‘safe place’ is an individual preference and can be contrasted with what is known about rural locations and domestic violence. There are higher rates of domestic violence in rural and remote areas and rural women are less likely to disclose and have access to formal support services (Campo & Tayton, 2015; Owen & Carrington, 2014). As well, Aboriginal Australian women are more likely to live in rural and remote areas and are at least 35 times more likely to experience domestic and family violence than non-Aboriginal women (AIHW, 2015; Spinney, 2016). Women who live in small regional, rural and remote communities experience a lack of privacy, isolation, stigma, shame and community gossip, transport barriers and systemic issues such as the lack of perpetrator accountability (Campo & Tayton, 2015). Domestic violence is gendered, racialised and a geographically situated experience. However, recent research on digital coercive control or ‘the use of digital technologies by domestic violence perpetrators’ in rural areas, shows that coercive control is far reaching and ‘spaceless’ (Harris & Woodlock, 2019, p. 530).

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Furthermore, many women escaping domestic violence are mothers. The complexities of mothering in the contexts of domestic violence have been researched by many feminist scholars (see Zufferey & Buchanan, 2020). In the context of domestic violence, women as mothers are expected to leave their relationship, to negotiate access to safe housing and a ‘safe home’ for their children. However, women express concerns about reporting domestic violence to state authorities because they risk being defined as a ‘bad mother’, while the violent actions of the partner remain invisible (Zufferey & Buchanan, 2020; Cramp & Zufferey, 2021). The responses of child protection services to domestic violence have been under considerable scrutiny for mother blaming practices (Humphreys et al., 2020; Mennicke et al., 2018; Stanley & Humphreys, 2014; Stanley et al., 2012; Humphreys & Absler, 2011; Humphreys, 2008; Stanley et al., 2002). When women are living in a family home with a violent partner and their children, they do attempt to negotiate a safe home to protect their children, through practices of maternal protectiveness. In the US, Haight et al. (2007) identified maternally protective strategies as including: physically separating their children from the violence, asking a third party for assistance, warning children away from violence, trying to calm and protect the partner, and expressing love, reassurance and hope towards the children. In a recent South Australian study on service provider perspectives about working with women whose children have been removed, service providers identified other maternally protective strategies, such as continually breastfeeding the baby and allowing the children to go out late at night, to protect them from witnessing the violence when the violent partner is likely to come home (Cramp & Zufferey, 2021). However, this maternal protection occurs in the family home in the context of hostility, fear, verbal, physical and sexual abuse, and coercive control (Wendt et al., 2015). Since the 1970s, the feminist response to domestic violence has been to assist women to leave their homes to escape domestic violence (Murray, 2008, p. 65). However, this response disrupts women and children’s sense of home and belonging in their house and community. More recently, in the Australian context, legislated ‘safe at home’ reforms have advocated for removing the violent partner and for woman and children to remain safely at home (Murray, 2008, p. 65). Exclusion orders can enable women to seek protection from domestic violence and remain in the family home, while the perpetrator is removed (Phillips & Vandenbroek, 2014). It can be possible for some woman and their children to remain in their own homes and retain some sense of belonging to place and community but with added home security and a partial sense of home and safety. Despite post separation violence, some women have remained in their homes and communities with the additional costs of installing security, such as safety alarms, locks on doors and windows, extra lighting, cameras, and video intercom (Zufferey et al., 2016, p. 10). However, this is not a safe option for women with violent partners who do not respect legal orders.

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Murray (2008, p. 65) argued that a gap exists between the experiences of women and the policies and legislation that aim to assist and protect them. The ability of women to remain safe at home depends on their financial capacity and the severity of the violence and safety concerns. Yet, financial capacity is classed, gendered and racialised. Compared to men, women have limited access to owner occupied dwellings during times of crisis, such as single parenthood and after divorce or separation, because of the ‘earnings gap between men and women throughout the life cycle’ (Madigan et al., 1990, p. 626). Furthermore, in the US, recent studies have found that ‘women across racial/ethnic groups and Black men are more likely than White and Hispanic men to have nonsteady employment trajectories’, with heightened poverty (Weisshaar, & Cabello-Hutt, 2020, p. 33).

Challenging Western imaginings of domestic violence and home When referring to domestic violence the concept of domestic is derived from the Latin word ‘domesticus’ which means ‘belonging to the house’, with ‘domus’ meaning house (Meth 2003, p. 318). Western concepts that are drawn on to respond to women in domestic violence often focus on ‘breaking free’ from violence in the private sphere of the home or house. A feminist geography study in South Africa has challenged how home is imagined in domestic violence through Western assumptions; the connections made between domestic violence and private material home spaces; and the spatial imaginings of home in domestic violence (Meth, 2003). Meth (2003) argued that there is an uncritical adoption of Western domestic violence literature to represent all women affected by violence and a false separation between public and private spaces. This renders invisible the violence experienced by ‘women street traders who reside and work from street pavements’ (Meth, 2003, p. 320). Furthermore, violence frequently occurs in the ‘private space of the white household’, which is the ‘public space of the black domestic worker’ (Meth, 2003, p. 320). It is noted that research on domestic violence commonly examines the ‘event’ rather than the ‘space’ in which the event took place (Meth, 2003, p. 320). Who and what is overlooked in these assumptions? The people excluded from these imaginings include women who sleep on the streets, who live in densely built shack settlements, and women who reside in single-sex hostels (Meth, 2003, p. 321). Meth (2003, p. 317) advocates for examining domestic violence where it takes place and for challenging racialised and classed assumptions of home in domestic violence, namely the ‘home as a formal material space, the home as private, and the domicile as home’. In South Africa, Meth (2003) interviewed nine middle aged, black South African women in two focus groups across two Durban locations. When considering their sense of home, she found that some women had dual and multiple homes, including family commitments to homes located in rural areas, and ‘other homes’ in nearby urban townships (Meth, 2003, p. 323).

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However, at the time of the interviews the women were in insecure accommodation or homeless (living in shacks and on pavements), which was where they experienced domestic violence. The informality of their homes (such as the use of cardboard, scrap plastic and metal sheeting as walls) was a source of immense insecurity (Meth, 2003, p. 324). As one woman said, home is often seen to be elsewhere, When we talk of home, we are talking about the home on the farm, not the mjondolo [shack] we live in, it’s only a workplace not a home. We can’t say we’ve got two homes. We’ve got a mjondolo and a home on the farm. (Meth, 2003, p. 324) One focus group participant became angry when asked questions about home because she felt like she was ‘talking about nothing’ as she had no home (Meth, 2003, p. 326). Therefore, even after speaking about physical and sexual assault and domestic violence, the questions about home seemed the most painful (Meth, 2003, p. 326). This finding about the pain associated with a loss of home and sense of belonging is most insightful.

Cultural diversity, women, violence and home A comprehensive response to violence and abuse would require social workers to understand how gendered and racialised practices are systemically reproduced within ethnocentric service systems (Cramp & Zufferey, 2021). For example, an Australian study found that institutionalised racism means that new arrival and refugee communities are often homogenised as being more violent, making it harder for women to speak up (Cramp & Zufferey, 2021). This is explained by Brenda, who was from an Indian Malaysian cultural background and worked in a women’s service: …as soon as something happens in an ethnic community, it gets blown up. ‘Oh, you know the Sudanese boys are doing this or the Pakistani’s are this or the Indians are this or the Chinese are this.’ So, I think that makes it really hard for the people in the community to come out and say, ‘yes there is violence in our community,’ because they will be in the spotlight if they did that. (Cramp & Zufferey, 2021, p. 15) Yet, the risk of homelessness is particularly high for culturally diverse women who experience violence and do not have any family or other informal supports. As Greta, who was escaping domestic violence as a new migrant said: ‘I became more or less homeless as I didn’t have family in Australia, a baby and no job and no money’ (Zufferey et al., 2016, p. 9).

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The impact of colonisation, colonial policies and institutional racism is allpervading. For example, Aboriginal Australian women experience high rates of DV and child removal (AIHW, 2019a). In Australia, First Nations children are seven times more likely than non-Aboriginal children to have received child protection services (AIHW, 2019a). First Nations women are up to five times more likely to experience DV, and 32 times more likely to be hospitalised for family violence, compared to non-Aboriginal women (AIHW, 2019b). In Western Australia, Blagg (2000) found that First Nations women wanted refuges or safe houses for respite from the violence, but they did not always want to leave the relationship. For some First Nations women and women from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities, it has been found that ‘leaving their partner may mean leaving their community, and possible ostracism or alienation from others in that community’ (Murray, 2008, p. 66). Culturally appropriate responses to domestic violence were explored in a South Australian study that included the perspectives and community knowledges of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander service providers. Community responses to family violence tend to focus more on ‘healing approaches’, with the aim to preserve family connections (Murray, 2008, p. 66). Amy, a Torres Strait Islander worker, spoke about directly confronting perpetrators which she called ‘growling’, working with community networks and Elders, and focusing on community resources and relationships, not on Western qualifications (Cramp & Zufferey, 2021, p. 14). These strategies can open spaces for conversations with perpetrators, to include men in the healing process (Cramp & Zufferey, 2021). Furthermore, service providers have expressed frustration at a wider service system not being equipped to be flexible in their responses to culturally diverse women experiencing DV, who are revictimised by an ethnocentric service system (Cramp & Zufferey, 2021, p. 15). Despite experiencing limited systemic supports and domestic violence, women are frequently expected to protect their children from violence, including from her violent partner (Murray, 2008, p. 66; Cramp & Zufferey, 2021). As Lapierre (2020) has found, women (and their children) require emotional, practical and material service supports that do not mother blame and acknowledge their successes as mothers, whilst holding perpetrators accountable for their violence. More political will to support women and their children affected by violence requires continued feminist activism for gendered violence to end, which includes challenging how service systems blame, shame and shift responsibility for that violence (Cramp & Zufferey, 2021).

Political and environmental violence and relocated home/s Beyond the impact of domestic violence in the home, women’s sense of home is also affected by political and environmental violence, such as being violated and dislocated in war. In times of political conflict, there are high levels of violence towards women and girls as tactics of warfare, including

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trafficking, murder, torture, sexual violence and forced marriage. Women who have migrated and have experienced forced dislocations from another country because of violence and war are rebuilding ‘homes’ across the world. Refugee women who fled after experiencing trauma and violence may feel a sense of not belonging, in their own family home, in new host countries and in their communities and neighbourhoods (Cuthill, 2019). When considering service responses to migrant families it is acknowledged that they may experience transnational and multiple homes. A search of literature from Western countries has found that ‘ways of belonging’, such as cultural, religious and linguistic identities, do tend to be acknowledged in social and health care (Merry et al., 2020). However, ‘ways of being’, that include emotional, social and economic transnational ties with children and family and access to health services abroad, are not often visible (Merry et al., 2020). To support migrants and refugees and asylum seekers in the making of home in a new host country, culturally safe health and social care would involve understanding diverse ways of being and belonging. In the context of environmental distress, the idea of solastalgia (from the Latin word so-la-cium for comfort and the Greek word algia for pain) was coined by philosopher Albrecht (2019) as a place-based melancholia or homesickness induced by environmental, emotional or existential distress. This melancholy is associated with individuals feeling a sense of powerlessness when they are separated from a sense of a ‘loved home’ after environmental change, including when experiencing floods, droughts and the impact of open cut coal mining (Albrecht et al., 2007, in NSW Australia). The loss of home can also relate to experiences of war, political violence, murders, threats, surveillance, home invasions and environmental destruction (Sousa et al., 2014, in Palestine). In the context of warfare and political and public violence in civilian environments, a sense of alienation can be experienced in the community, in intimate relationships and in the home environment. In a study of the perspectives of 32 Palestinian women, the emotional and mental health effects of emplaced home violations (including the destruction of homes) during political violence are highlighted (Sousa et al., 2014). In political conflicts, violations of place and home are common. This engenders a lack of place and safety that ‘provoked fear, anxiety, grief, humiliation, and helplessness, particularly as women struggled to protect their children’ (Sousa et al., 2014, p. 205). However, there are also stories of resilience, resistance and ‘economic, familial and cultural survival’ (Sousa et al., 2014, p. 205). Women can use their home for survival, which can include undertaking home-based activities for nutritional and economic caretaking as well as caring for displaced extended family members in their homes (Sousa et al., 2014, p. 205). When building connections to home and place, this can involve supporting women’s individual and collective activism about claims to a homeland, such as in the entrenched particularities of the Israeli–Palestinian political conflict (Sousa et al., 2014, p. 205).

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Community-based approaches are useful when social workers are working towards building a sense of safety and home. As Lavalette et al. (2020) observed in their recent work in the Palestinian West Bank, there are numerous outstanding examples of ‘popular social work’ projects in refugee camps, where there are no qualified social workers. Camp volunteers can be involved in projects that work with young people traumatised by state-based violence (such as by the army and security forces), through music, drama, art and craft, photography, filmmaking, education and sport (Lavalette et al., 2020). These projects are involved in providing artificial limbs and combating attitudes towards physical disabilities for those injured in the occupation, through political and social activism (Lavalette et al., 2020, p. 63). Different aspects of recovery processes and practices were identified in their research with workers in Palestinian refugee camps, including re/discovery and recovery; self-determination and social justice; dreaming of a better future (or home); political commitment, engagement and action, akin to Freire’s connection between ‘thinking and doing’ (Lavalette et al., 2020, pp. 68–74). Lavalette et al. (2020, p. 74) argued that grassroots, popular social work is ‘non-hierarchical, non-judgemental, relationship-based, co-produced, political, historically rooted and based on notions of solidarity’, which can assist to ‘de-colonise’ social work and rebuild connections to home. This requires social workers to engage with people affected by classed, racialised and gendered state violence, in co-designing projects that acknowledge they are ‘experts of their own lives’ (Lavalette et al., 2020, p. 74). Thus, co-designed research can provide important insights for social work researchers, practitioners and policy makers, when intending to assist in rebuilding a sense of home, such as for young people psychologically and physically affected by state violence and for poor women across the world affected by gendered violence. Violence against women and state violence affects women and young people’s sense of safety, home and belonging, with important implications for ending gendered and state-based violence across the world.

Implications for social work As social workers, we are working within ethnocentric service systems and cultural differences that are not within our own realms of experience. This requires us to facilitate collaborative dialogues and practice self-reflexivity, consistent with an intersectional and feminist social work approach (Murphy et al., 2009). Intersectional social work approaches in research, policy and practice play an important role in moving away from simplistic notions and imaginings of home, violence and culture, which include challenging understandings of violence as positioned in and caused by culture (Chen, 2017). Intersectional research involves challenging unequal systems of power and moving towards equity; reflecting on our own positions of power and privilege; understanding that there is no fixed hierarchy of power and centring the diverse voices of people affected by violence (Chen, 2017, p. 6).

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Violence against women and children has considerable costs worldwide, affecting people’s sense of having a safe home. A central concern for social work and intersectional feminism is women and children’s safety, which includes how women who have had their children removed are represented and responded to (Broadhurst & Mason, 2013). For women to experience a sense of belonging to a safe home and community, their lives need to be free from violence, they need to be able to access affordable housing, to be shown respect and recognition, have financial security, as well as be able to engage in activities that support their social and civic participation (Zufferey et al., 2016). Social workers need to respond positively to women and children’s disclosures of violence, address safety issues and explore connections to home and place, whilst focusing on holding perpetrators accountable for their crimes. Yet, women and children escaping from violence continue to have limited access to social justice and basic human rights because male perpetrators disrupt their access to a safe home (and housing) and constrain their agency, curtailing their ability to enact their rights as citizens (Franzway et al., 2019; Lister, 2003). Furthermore, social workers often imagine that domestic violence occurs in the privacy of a detached home with thick walls (Meth, 2003, p. 321). However, Western ideas about home and domestic violence are less relevant in countries with high rates of informal dwelling and occupation, where houses may be shanty shacks and bedrooms are spaces behind curtains (Meth, 2003, p. 319). Homes are differentiated according to economics and poverty. Thus, Westernised ideological and material concepts ‘cannot fully contribute to an understanding of home in an entirely different socio-economic and political context’ (Meth, 2003, p. 321). Rebuilding home involves rebuilding a sense of community, safety, social justice and equity. Social workers can expand their understandings of home and place, when responding to domestic violence and homelessness. It is thus important for social workers to be careful about how we imagine the house as home and as the only site where violence occurs. The private, middle class home is not the only space and place where gendered violence occurs. Meth’s (2003) research provides further insights into the diverse spatial imaginings of home in domestic violence for women living in shacks and on city street pavements, which may include a home on a farm in the country. When considering homeless women’s realities in South Africa, DV cannot be responded to using the usual safety planning frameworks adopted in Western studies. Western practice frameworks assume women are housed and ask questions such as: ‘Did you lock the door? Did you hide somewhere? Did you lock the children away? Did you phone the police? Did you report the case? Did you receive state support? Did you gain access to a shelter? Did they help re-house you?’ (Meth, 2003, p. 327). The mismatch between many women’s lived housing realities and middle class ethnocentric social work assumptions needs further consideration. As early as the late 1990s, Bograd (1999) argued for strengthening domestic violence theories

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and family therapy thinking, to make explicit intersections of race, class, sexual orientation and gender, and for addressing unequal gender relations in family therapy interventions. However, more co-designed social work research is needed, particularly with women affected by violence, of diverse housing experiences, abilities, ethnicities, sociocultural and classed backgrounds.

Conclusion This chapter argued for broadening the social work imaginary about home and the places and spaces where violence against women occurs. It emphasised co-designing research and community-based projects with people most affected by violence and that social work activism involves responding to all forms of violence, including the trauma of political, environmental and state violence. The emotionalisation and idealisation of the family home exists alongside the knowledge that domestic violence and child abuse commonly occurs within the family and the privacy of home. However, it is important for social workers to also re-imagine where violence occurs because the private, middle class home is not the only place where gendered violence occurs. The next chapter discusses the complexities of home for children and young people, focusing on family homes as being ‘where we start from’ (Winnicott, 1990) and children’s feelings about home in ‘out of home care’ (OOHC).

References Albrecht, G. (2019). Earth emotions: New words for a new world. New York: Cornell University Press. Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B. & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change, Australasian Psychiatry, 15, 95–98. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). (2015). The health and welfare of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Canberra: Australian Government. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). (2019a). Child Protection Australia 2017/18 (Cat. no. CWS 65). Canberra: Australian Government. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). (2019b). Family, domestic and sexual violence in Australia: Continuing the national story 2019—In brief (Cat. no. FDV 4). Canberra: Australian Government. Blagg, H. (2000). Crisis intervention in Aboriginal family violence: Summary report. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Bograd, M. (1999). Strengthening domestic violence theories: Intersections of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 25(3), 275–289. Broadhurst, K. & Mason, C. (2013). Maternal outcasts: Raising the profile of women who are vulnerable to successive, compulsory removals of their children – a plea for preventative action. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 35 (3), 291–304. Campo, M. & Tayton, S. (2015). Domestic and family violence in regional, rural and remote communities: An overview of key issues. Canberra: Australian Institute of Family Studies.

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Chen, J. (2017). Intersectionality matters: A guide to engaging immigrant and refugee communities in Australia. Melbourne: Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health. Cramp, K. J. & Zufferey, C. (2021). The removal of children in domestic violence: Widening service provider perspectives. Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, 36 (3),406–425. Cresswell, T. (2015). Place: An introduction. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Son Ltd. Cuthill, F. (2019). Homelessness, social exclusion and health: Global perspectives, local solutions. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. Franzway, S., Wendt, S., Moulding, N., Zufferey, C. & Chung, D. (2019). The sexual politics of gendered violence and women’s citizenship. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Haight, W., Shim, W., Linn, L. & Swinford, L. (2007). Mother’s strategies for protecting children from batterers: The perspectives of battered women involved in child protection services. Child Welfare, 86, 41–62. Harris, B.A. & Woodlock, D. (2019). Digital coercive control: Insights from two landmark domestic violence studies. The British Journal of Criminology, 59 (3), 530–550. hooks, bel. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Humphreys, C. (2008). Problems in the system of mandatory reporting of children living with domestic violence. Journal of Family Studies, 14 (2–3),228–239. Humphreys, C. & Absler, D. (2011). History repeating: Child protection workers responses to domestic violence. Child and Family Social Work, 16, 464–473. Humphreys, C., Kertesz, M., Healey, L. & Mandel, D. (2020). Shifting practice in domestic violence: Child protection workers partnering with mothers (pp. 194–205). In Zufferey, C. & Buchanan, F. (eds) Intersections of mothering: Feminist accounts. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Lapierre, S. (2020). ‘Just another side of the coin’: Support for women as mothers in the context of domestic violence (pp. 180–193). In Zufferey, C. & Buchanan, F. (eds) Intersections of mothering: Feminist accounts. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Lavalette, M., Ramsey, T. & Amara, M. (2020). Popular social work in the West Bank – Insights for an internationalist anti-racist social work (pp. 57–79). In Singh, G. & Masocha, S. (eds) Anti-racist social work. International perspectives. London, UK: Red Globe Press, Springer Nature Ltd. Lister, R. (2003). Citizenship: Feminist perspectives. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Little, J. (2017). Understanding domestic violence in rural spaces: A research agenda. Progress in Human Geography, 41 (4), 472–488. Madigan, R., Munro, M. & Smith, S.J. (1990). Gender and the meaning of the home. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 14, 625–647. Mallett, S. (2004). Understanding home: A critical review of the literature. The Sociological Review, 52, 62–89. Marcus, C. (2006). House as a mirror of the self: Exploring the deeper meaning of home. Lake Worth, FL: Nicolas-Hays Inc. McDowell, L. (ed.) (1997). Undoing place? A geographical reader. London: Arnold. Mennicke, A., Langenderfer-Magruder, L. & MacConnie, L. (2018). ‘It’s tricky…’: Intimate partner violence. Service providers’ perspectives of assessments and referrals by child welfare workers. Journal of Family Violence, 34 (1), 47–54. Merry, L., Villadsen, S.F., Sicard, V. & Lewis-Hibbert, N. (2020). Transnationalism and care of migrant families during pregnancy, postpartum and early-childhood: An integrative review. BMC Health Serv Res, 20, 778. doi:10.1186/s12913-020-05632-5.

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Meth, P. (2003). Rethinking the ‘domus’ in domestic violence: Homelessness, space and domestic violence in South Africa. Geoforum, 34, 317–327. Moulding, N., Franzway, S., Wendt, S., Zufferey, C. & Chung, D. (2021). Rethinking women’s mental health after intimate partner violence. Violence Against Women, 27 (8),1064–1090. Murphy, Y., Hunt, V., Zajicek, A.M., Norris, A.N. & Hamilton, L. (2009). Incorporating intersectionality in social work practice, research, policy and education. USA: NASW Press. Murray, S. (2008). “Why doesn’t she just leave?”: Belonging, disruption and domestic violence, Women’s Studies International Forum, 31 (3) 65–72. Owen, S. & Carrington, K. (2014). Domestic violence (DV) service provision and the architecture of rural life: An Australian case study. Journal of Rural Studies, 39, 229–238. Phillips, J. & Vandenbroek, P. (2014). Domestic, family and sexual violence in Australia: An overview of the issues. Canberra: Parliament of Australia. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism & geography: The limits of geographical knowledge. USA: University of Minnesota Press. Sousa, C.A., Kemp, S. & El-Zuhairi, M. (2014). Dwelling within political violence: Palestinian women’s narratives of home, mental health, and resilience. Health & Place, 30, 205–214. Spinney, A. (2016). FactCheck Q&A: Are Indigenous women 34–80 times more likely than average to experience violence? Accessed 7 June 2021, https://theconversation.com/fa ctcheck-qanda-are-indigenous-women-34-80-times-more-likely-than-average-to-exp erience-violence-61809. Stanley, N. & Humphreys, C. (2014). Multi-agency risk management and management for children and families experiencing domestic violence. Children and Youth Services Review, 47, 78–85. Stanley, J., Goddard, C. & Sanders, R. (2002). In the firing line: Violence and power in child protection work. Child & Family Social Work, 7 (4), 323–324. Stanley, N., Miller, P. & Richardson-Foster, H. (2012). Engaging with children’s and parents’ perspectives on domestic violence. Child and Family Social Work, 17, 192–201. United Nations General Assembly. (2014). Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, Rashida Manjoo (pp. 1–21). Geneva, Switzerland: UN. Weisshaar, K. & Cabello-Hutt, T. (2020). Labor force participation over the life course: The long-term effects of employment trajectories on wages and the gendered payoff to employment. Demography, 57 (1), 33–60. Wendt, S., Buchanan, F. & Moulding, N. (2015). Mothering and domestic violence: Situating maternal protectiveness in gender. Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, 30(4), 533–545. Winnicott, D.W. (1990). Home is where we start from: Essays by a psychoanalyst. London: Norton. World Health Organization. (2013). Global and regional estimates of violence against women: prevalence and health effects of intimate partner violence and non-partner sexual violence. Geneva: World Health Organization (WHO). Zufferey, C. & Buchanan, F. (eds) (2020). Intersections of mothering: Feminist accounts. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Zufferey, C., Chung, D., Franzway, S., Wendt, S. & Moulding, N. (2016). Intimate partner violence and housing: Eroding women’s citizenship. Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, 31 (4), 463–478. .

8

Imagining family homes Carole Zufferey

Introduction The heterosexual, nuclear family home is often promoted as the ‘emblematic model of comfort, care and belonging’ (Fortier, 2003, p. 115; Fortier, 2001). The contradictions in these ideal imaginings of the family are that domestic violence and child abuse predominantly occur within the family and the privacy of home, as discussed in the previous chapter. This chapter discusses how family and childhood experiences shape people’s sense of home, drawing implications for social work practice. It highlights social work’s complex engagement with the notion of home when working with families and children, including when children have been removed and are living in out of home care (OOHC). The family and home are often represented as fixed entities in social work research literature about childhood homes. Some social work authors have challenged the assumed residential fixity of childhood homes, as children may have multiple family homes and their connections to home can be fluid, complex and contested (Forsberg & Pösö, 2011). This chapter explores the language of home in social work and child protection literature, associated with home visits and institutional care, the idealisation of the family home, psychoanalytical understandings of home and discusses research that hears children’s voices, including about being removed from their family homes. The removal of children can have intergenerational effects related to dislocation and displacement from a sense of home, as exampled by the experiences of First Nations children and families. Implications for social work include advocating for centring children’s voices and feelings about being ‘at home’ (or ‘homeless’) within their extended family and childhood homes.

Social work, home and child welfare Social work literature in the field of working with children and families has tended to refer to home when discussing home visits, with home being referred to as a fixed living place (Zufferey et al., 2020). Some social work literature has focused on the ‘home visit’ as a mobile and embodied DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-10

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experience (Ferguson, 2018; Winter & Cree, 2016), which includes research in Israel that provided an institutional ethnography of the bodily aspects of home visits (Muzicant & Peled, 2018). In the UK, in the field of child protection, research has documented the embodied experiences of social workers and emotional nuances associated with home visits (Ferguson, 2018; Disney et al., 2019). The home visit to the family home has been portrayed as a ‘resource for creative change’ (Ferguson, 2018, p. 79). An assessment of the ‘family home environment’ is a key consideration in social work research and practice approaches. However, the notion of home in the language of ‘home visit’ is often imagined as being a singular and fixed entity. Some social work literature in child welfare has called for social workers to critically reassess how we use the term home, challenging the assumed residential fixity of childhood homes (Forsberg & Pösö, 2011). Social workers have tended to assume a moral position on the safety and residential fixity of childhood homes, which may not be the lived experience of children (Forsberg & Pösö, 2011). For example, children in separated families or in foster care may have multiple family homes and their connections to home can be fluid, complex and contested (Forsberg & Pösö, 2011). Children have diverse meanings and experiences of family and home, which can relate to a sense of safety and security in ‘nurturing’ families, communities and relationships. An Australian study on meanings of home for children, young people and mothers after separation found that home was a relational concept (Campo et al., 2020a; 2020b). Children and young people rarely defined home as a ‘physical residence’ because home was created through ‘everyday interactions with significant others’, which had ‘existential significance for children and young people’ (Campo et al., 2020a, p. 299). However, as discussed in the previous chapter, gendered violence and abuse within the family home does impact women and children’s sense of ontological security.

The idealisation of the family home A sense of safety in the family home is seen to be a key dimension of ontological security (Giddens, 1990). The emotionalisation of the domestic is inextricably linked to the idealisation of the family and family home, including in social work. Anthropologist Cieraad (1999, p. 11) describes home as ‘the emotionalisation of domestic space’. In geography, imaginative connections to ‘ancestral’ homes and family have been related to how identity, culture and geography is imaged (Nash, 2003). Drawing on moral politics theory, Feinberg and Wehling (2018) argued that the idealisation of family, as associated with a ‘strict father’ or ‘nurturant parents’, shapes conservative and progressive politics and worldviews. People rely on ‘notions of ideal family life when reasoning about how society should function’, informing their social and political attitudes (Feinberg & Wehling, 2018, p. 1). The state regulation and policing of families has tended to focus on the preservation and education of children in the family

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(Donzelot, 1979). In social work, the family home is policed and regulated in cases of abuse and violence, with the intention to enhance the wellbeing of children in families, which includes identifying risk or protective factors in the family associated with children’s wellbeing (Forsberg & Pösö, 2011). Social workers have complex social care and social control roles, when engaging with families and children in their physical homes. In social work, the (fixed) family home as ‘where we start from’ (Winnicott, 1990) has often been ‘taken for granted’ knowledge, given that social work is heavily influenced by psychoanalytical ideas.

The (psychoanalytical) family home Early psychoanalyst Winnicott (1990) coined the term ‘home is where we start from’, which he connected with early socialisation and attachment in the family home. Israeli psychotherapist Durban (2017, p. 175) argues that ‘the construction of a sense of home in early infancy is a complex achievement’ and interplays with a sense of time, space and self. In his clinical analysis, when working with ‘a refugee child on the autistic spectrum’ and his military father, after the death of his mother and grandmother, he found that an existential sense of ‘homelessness and nowhere-ness’ can be ‘the outcome of severe trauma’ (Durban, 2017, p. 181). His psychoanalysis argument refers to the ‘interplay of anxieties and unconscious phantasies’ in an interaction between ‘(a) a safe dwelling in the body-as-mother (constitution); (b) the internalisation of the mother as-me (internal object space) and (c) establishing Oedipal triangular space which is responsible for the capacity to move between narcissism-as-a-home and the world-as-a-home’ (Durban, 2017, p. 175). He makes a distinction between ‘mental states of being-athome, homelessness and nowhere-ness’, by drawing on the psychoanalytical idea that home and homelessness are ‘more developed states’ than nowhereness because they are accompanied by ‘some capacity for feelings of loss, mourning and longing’ (Durban, 2017, p. 175). However, ‘nowhere-ness’ is ‘characterised by confusion between self and object…nameless grief…dread and devastation’ (Durban, 2017, p. 175). Durban (2017, p. 175) discusses ‘the role of psychoanalysis and of the psychoanalyst in promoting the creation of an internal home’. From a psychoanalytical perspective, ‘to have a home’ we need ‘boundaries’ that provide for a ‘containing-enveloping structure’; an ‘interior space’ or a ‘multidimensional internal world’ with ‘meaningful, authentic object relationships and identifications’, that exist alongside ‘memories, phantasies and feelings’, as well as a recognition that there is an ‘outside’ or ‘external reality’ (Durban, 2017, p. 183). Thus, boundaries between an internal world and external reality are ‘preconditions for a sense of belonging’, and ‘our sense of home is inseparable from our sense of having an identity’ (Durban, 2017, p. 183). As Durban (2017, p. 183) argued, to ‘develop our identity and

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strengthen it, we must leave home’, which includes ‘sometimes even partially’ disavowing or destroying it. This psychoanalytical approach to ‘internal’ notions of home and ‘the self’ sits in contrast with socially constructed and post structural understandings of (multiple) homes, as related to language, discourse and spatiality. Home can be disrupted by state surveillance and ‘subjectification’ associated with the disciplinary technologies of social institutions enacted by social workers (Foucault, 1991, p. 11), as evident in the experiences of First Nations families across the colonial worlds. Home can also be related to spatial and locational subjectivities (Probyn, 2003) and experienced as an ‘internal journey’ (Rowntree & Zufferey, 2017). In contrast to the internal journey of home, in the field of child protection, the language of ‘home’ also refers to institutional care settings, such as orphanages, residential care units, children’s homes, foster homes or group homes.

Institutions as home? In child protection, there are considerable debates about safety, home and belonging in the ‘out of home care’ systems across the world. The proposed ‘solutions’ to caring for children who are unsafe in their family homes are contested. In Ghana, the move from institutional care to family and community-based care (‘homes’) has increased, in response to allegations of sexual and physical abuse, corruption and human trafficking occurring in residential care institutions (Frimpong‐Manso, 2014). In New York, scholars in the field of children with a disability and foster care lament the failures of short-term placements in the foster care system and advocate for ‘long-term placements until adulthood’ (Allen & Vacca, 2011, p. 1067). Controversially, this includes advocating for a return to institutional care by suggesting how orphanages have provided a ‘stable environment over time, good educational opportunities, and the chance for the children to develop emotionally in a secure, nurturing environment’ (Allen & Vacca, 2011, p. 1067). These special education scholars have argued that ‘we need to give foster kids a sense of what it feels like to have a happy home life—a sense of belonging and the feeling that someone really cares about them’ but they also argue that ‘the time has come to embrace orphanages as a pathway to provide a better foster care system for our youth’ (Allen & Vacca, 2011, p. 1070). This position that the stability of institutions such as orphanages can provide a ‘home’ is particularly controversial and has not been the experience of young people living in such residential institutions. Even when the intentions of staff are to be supportive, they cannot avoid the structural and organisational conditions of residential care units as total institutions isolated from wider society (Goffman, 1961). A study in Sweden examined the concept of home or homelike environments in two residential care institutions for unaccompanied minors from the perspectives of staff members (Soderqvist et al., 2016). They found that

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the Swedish-centric notion of ‘the ideal home’ was not always possible in a residential care setting. Residential units for unaccompanied minors are provided in the contexts of rigid and controlling legislative requirements and regulations. Minors are under surveillance by staff members with limited resources and there are clear power divisions between residents and staff (Soderqvist et al., 2016, pp. 597–598). The idea related to the residential unit being ‘the substitute home’ for unaccompanied minors was also questioned. For example, staff saw themselves as ‘family’ but only when they were at work, not when they left the unit (Soderqvist et al., 2016, p. 595). Lastly, staff perceived this idea of the residential unit being ‘home’ as an ‘obstacle’ in their work, especially when there was conflict between their professional and personal boundaries (Soderqvist et al., 2016, pp. 595–596). These institutional and legislative conditions worked against achieving a sense of home for the young people living in these units.

Child’s voices about home and ‘out of home care’ Children who cannot be cared for by their families need safe and permanent homes, in state systems that are supportive and well resourced. However, from the perspectives of care leavers, growing up in shared spaces of large institutions or even smaller group homes were not always experienced as ‘home’ or ‘homelike’ settings (Murray et al., 2007; Murray & Malone, 2008). Research with care leavers found that the houses they moved into after leaving care felt more like a ‘home of their own’ (Murray et al., 2007, p. 77). Their post care homes had ‘immense emotional significance as sites of normalisation and stability’, whilst at the same time, they were a ‘bewildering experience after growing up in large and regimented settings’ (Murray et al., 2007, p. 77). Nonetheless, residential institutions that were childhood homes did remain important to care leavers, ‘even when they were remembered as a place of trauma and distress’ (Murray et al., 2007, p. 168). When considering the voices of children, there is some research that centres the diversity of children’s feelings about being ‘at home’ (or ‘homeless’), particularly in residential, foster and kinship care. What we know from this research is that children mostly prefer not to be in care; want their views to be heard; want to participate in decisions about their care; want to have contact with their birth families and keep connected with siblings and other people important to them (Higgins & Buoy, 2010, p. 18). Often, being removed from an abusive parent means that young people experience grief and loss about being separated from the people they love, including their siblings. Young people have been found to say: ‘I want to go back home’ (to their township and family), where they experienced a sense of belonging and love, despite the perceived deficit skills and abilities of their parent/s (Higgins & Buoy, 2010, p. 18). These young people prioritised a feeling of belonging and ‘living with people they care for and who care for them’ over ‘safety, stability, and an absence of risk’ (Higgins & Buoy, 2010, p. 18).

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These findings resonate with research from South Africa that explored 13 children’s perspectives and experiences of foster care and child and youth centres (Perumal & Kasiram, 2009). This research found that only one of the children they spoke to knew why they were removed and that the ‘physical and emotional wellbeing of children was compromised in both placements’, in foster care and institutional care (Perumal & Kasiram, 2009, p. 201). Children recounted positive experiences about being provided for materially in their current placements and ‘enjoying social outings and celebrations’, which some associated with a sense of belonging, relatedness, attachment, respect and love (Perumal & Kasiram, 2009, p. 200). However, they also ‘expressed a desperate longing for their families of origin’ (Perumal & Kasiram, 2009, p. 200). This is complicated for social workers working in child protection, who are engaged in responding to keeping children safe from abuse in their family home as well as rebuilding a sense of home, including in ‘out of home care’ settings. In Scotland, qualitative research on the experiences of 12 children and young people living with relatives or friends in kinship care provided contrasting findings about a sense of connection and home (Burgess et al., 2010, p. 298). Most of the young people in their study were cared for by their grandparents, who had cared for them at least part time since being born. They all felt safe and loved and did not experience feeling different (or stigmatised) living with extended family relatives, rather than with a parent (Burgess et al., 2010, p. 301). They felt emotionally attached, with a sense of home and belonging in their current care arrangements, as one young person, Emma, expressed: I never felt like I belonged there (with her mum and dad), do you know what I mean? I just feel like I wasn’t like them. I was more like my nana…I felt I was more wanted here than I was with my mum and dad. (Burgess et al., 2010, p. 301) A small number of young people referred to seeing their parent using the term ‘contact’ because these were arranged by the local authority; some expressed disappointment about ‘being let down’ by their parents, and four young people expressed feeling uncomfortable when seeing their parents in the street, in the small community in which they lived (Burgess et al., 2010, p. 302). All young people stated that they would prefer living with relatives than in foster care (Burgess et al., 2010, p. 304). These findings provide important implications for supporting extended family and kinship carers, in building young people’s sense of home and belonging. Therefore, the idealisation of the family and language of home can be complex and intertwined with children’s experiences of abuse and care.

Child removal: Aboriginal Australian context Colonial state violence and racist government legislations and policies removed First Nations children from their homes, families and communities

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and disrupted their sense of identity, belonging and home. There are many testimonies from children who were stolen, about the effects of removal, the abuse and violence they experienced in state and church institutions and the loss of a sense of trust, cultural identity, belonging and home, as outlined in Chapters 1 and 5. In Australia, despite community self-determination policies being introduced in the 1970s, the legacy of the colonial invasion continues to influence politics as well as social work (Briskman, 2003). In 2007, the ‘emergency’ national government response – known as the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (NTER) or ‘The Intervention’, following the Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle (‘Little Children are Sacred’) Report by the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse (Northern Territory Government, 2007) – is one example of how quickly paternalism becomes enacted in government policies. This national government intervention enacted ‘special measures’, such as the compulsory quarantining of welfare payments, which breached the Racial Discrimination Act (1975), lacked community consultation and showed limited understanding of community self-determination (Hunter, 2008). Government legislation and policies that purport to protect First Nations children are biased in favour of white colonialists, who have the invisible power and privilege to create policy and legislation that is not always culturally supportive of First Nations communities (Walter et al., 2011). The NTER was reminiscent of the historical ‘assimilation’ policy, where children were removed by white institutions, such as the ‘Aboriginal Protection Boards’, with ultimate control over Aboriginal people’s lives. It bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Australia’s colonial past that gave rise to the ‘Stolen Generations’ (Funston et al., 2016). The removal of First Nations children from their family and homes continues. The rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children currently being removed from their families into the ‘out of home care’ system by statutory child protection services is unprecedented in Australia (Funston et al., 2016). Traditional Aboriginal knowledge systems, complex kinship relations and cultural identity are strengths that are not often captured or acknowledged in academic research (Lohoar et al., 2014). First Nations childrearing knowledges and practices include that caring for children is a shared responsibility; childhood is about having the freedom to explore and experience the world; community elders are highly respected, and communal spiritual practices can contribute to healing through building a sense of cultural identity, belonging, support and protection (Lohoar et al., 2014, p. 1). However, ongoing child removal practices are continuing to disrupt First Nations children’s sense of home and belonging, with unearned power and privilege being systematically attributed to members of the dominant cultural group, including to social workers (Zufferey, 2013). The trauma of state removal on First Nations children and their families means that cultural knowledges and a sense of community belonging has been severely disrupted, with intergenerational impacts.

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Implications for social work This chapter has engaged with a psychoanalytical lens on home and family, commencing with a discussion of home as an ‘internal’ state associated with a sense of attachment to parents and caregivers (Winnicott, 1990). When considering social work in child protection, the material realities of the physical and safe home remain important. Previous research has highlighted that extended family, such as grandparents, can provide a sense of home and belonging for young people who have been removed from their parents and their original family home (Burgess et al., 2010). However, ‘out of home care’ systems, such as foster care and institutional care, are not ideal nor adequately resourced. The perspectives of children about living in ‘out of home care’, such as institutional care, foster care and kinship care, provide important insights for social work. There were several recommendations that came out of research on children’s voices, in South Africa, Australia and Scotland. First, that children can be partners in and can co-vision social work intervention, to assist with decision making about removal, placement and reunification (Perumal & Kasiram, 2009, p. 204). Second, that caregivers need to have minimum standards, be adequately paid, trained in trauma debriefing and engaged in ways to develop a child’s sense of home and belonging (Perumal & Kasiram, 2009, p. 204). As well, given that children prefer to stay with parents or kin such as grandparents, it is important for social workers to support a child’s own wishes in rebuilding a sense of home and belonging. Social work services can provide early intervention and support for extended families, from a strengths-focused perspective, to enable children to remain in safe homes with their family (Burgess et al., 2010; Higgins & Buoy, 2010). Social workers can also develop extensive networks and support groups, with foster caregivers, children, extended family members and parents, to ensure supportive and child focused permanency planning (Perumal & Kasiram, 2009, p. 204), which is akin to providing stable home/s. Support groups for children in care, as well as for caregivers, can contribute to the sharing of experiences, challenges and best practices, towards creating a safe ‘home for children whose lives have been disrupted’ (Perumal & Kasiram, 2009, p. 204). More ‘participatory action research to capacitate families of origin in assuming responsibility for their children’ (Perumal & Kasiram, 2009, p. 204) can enhance understandings about how to assist in providing a safe ‘home’ for children. However, home/s are not fixed in time, they can be fluid, temporal and contradictory. For example, when their parents separate, children may have multiple family homes and their connections to a sense of home and belonging can shift and change, within different family contexts (Forsberg & Pösö, 2011; Campo et al., 2020). Home can be multiply experienced as a cultural origin, an internal state, a family, an imagined or real physical place, which is imbued with a sense of love and belonging. This chapter has tended

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to focus on individual, person-based approaches, which can be contrasted with place-based approaches to building home and community with children and families. Place-based approaches would shift the focus from working with families and individuals to focusing on creating child friendly social and physical environments within a particular geographical location (Moore & Fry, 2011). It is acknowledged that people and places are interrelated because ‘all people live in places and both affect and are affected by these places’ (Moore & Fry, 2011, p. 30). Therefore, safe homes for children depend on both child friendly people and places.

Conclusion This chapter has examined previous social work literature and conceptualisations of home focusing on children and their families. It has included how home is theorised as an internal psychoanalytical concept and highlighted children’s experiences of ‘home’ in institutions and in different forms of ‘out of home care’. Previous research has found that a sense of home and belonging was most pronounced for children who were in kinship care with their grandparents (Burgess et al., 2010). However, it must be acknowledged that the colonial fantasy of a safe nuclear family home is constructed from a white colonial perspective (Maddison, 2019). Western notions of home and family render invisible a long history of state intervention that has removed (and continues to remove) First Nations children in unprecedented numbers from their homes, intergenerationally disrupting their sense of belonging and home (Funston et al., 2016). More social work research is needed that gathers the perspectives and the voices of children from diverse backgrounds about what contributes to building a sense of safety and home. The next chapter discusses research with young people that found systemic interventions intended to support their employment and education transitions also affected their emotional self-worth and sense of community belonging and home.

References Allen, B.S. & Vacca, J.S. (2011). Bring back orphanages—An alternative to foster care? Children and Youth Services Review, 33 (7), 1067–1071. Briskman, L. (2003). Indigenous Australians: Towards postcolonial social work (pp. 92–106). In Allan, J., Pease, B. & Briskman, L. (eds) Critical social work. Crows Nest, NSW, Australia: Allen and Unwin. Burgess, C., Rossvoll, F., Wallace, B. & Daniel, B. (2010). ‘It’s just like another home, just another family, so it’s nae different’ Children’s voices in kinship care: a research study about the experience of children in kinship care in Scotland. Child & Family Social Work, 15 (3), 297–306. Campo, M., Fehlberg, B., Natalier, K. & Smyth, B. (2020a). The meaning of home for children and young people after separation. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 42 (3), 299–318.

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Campo, M., Fehlberg, B., Natalier, K. & Smyth, B. (2020b). Mothers’ understandings of ‘home’ after relationship separation and divorce. The Journal of Social Welfare & Family Law, 42 (4), 461–477. Cieraad, I. (1999 [2006]). Introduction: Anthropology at home (pp. 1–12). In Cieraad, I. (ed.) At Home: An anthropology of domestic space. New York: Syracuse University Press. Cieraad, I. (2010). Homes from home: Memories and projections. Home Cultures, 7 (1), 85–102. Disney, T., Warwick, L., Ferguson, H., Leigh, J., Connor, T.S., Beddoe, L.Jones, P. & Osborne, T. (2019). “Isn’t it funny the children that are further away we don’t think about as much?”: Using GPS to explore the mobilities and geographies of social work and child protection practice. Children and Youth Services Review, 100, 39–49. Donzelot, J. (1979). The policing of families. New York: Random House. Durban, J. (2017). Home, homelessness and nowhere-ness in early infancy. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 43 (2), 175–191. Feinberg, M. & Wehling, E. (2018). A moral house divided: How idealized family models impact political cognition. PloS one, 13 (4), e0193347. Ferguson, H. (2018). Making home visits: Creativity and the embodied practices of home visiting in social work and child protection. Qualitative Social Work, 17 (1), 65–80. Forsberg, H. & Pösö, T. (2011). Childhood homes as moral spaces – New conceptual arena. Social Work & Society: International Online Journal, 9 (2), 1–4. Fortier, A. (2001). ‘Coming home’: Queer migrations and multiple evocations of home. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4 (4), 405–424. Fortier, A. (2003). Making home: Queer migrations and motions of attachment (pp. 115–135). In Ahmed, S. et al. (eds) Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford: Berg. Foucault, M. (1991). The Foucault reader, Paul Rabinow (ed.). London: Penguin. Frimpong‐Manso, K. (2014). From walls to homes: Childcare reform and deinstitutionalisation in Ghana. International Journal of Social Welfare, 23 (4), 402–409. Funston, L., Herring, S. & ACMAG. (2016). When will the stolen generations end? A qualitative critical exploration of contemporary ‘child protection’ practices in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Sexual Abuse in Australia and New Zealand, 7 (1), 51–58. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. New York: Anchor Books. Higgins, J. & Buoy, L. (2010). Children’s voices: ‘Home is where their heart is’. Children Australia, 35 (2), 18–20. Hunter, S. (2008). Child maltreatment in remote Aboriginal communities and the Northern Territory Emergency Response: A complex issue. Australian Social Work, 61 (4), 372–388. Lohoar, S., Butera, N. & Kennedy, E. (2014). Strengths of Australian Aboriginal cultural practices in family life and child rearing. Australian Government: Australian Institute of Family Studies. Maddison, S. (2019). The colonial fantasy. Why white Australia can’t solve black problems. NSW: Allen & Unwin. Moore, T.G. & Fry, R. (2011). Place-based approaches to child and family services: A literature review. Parkville, Victoria: Murdoch Childrens Research Institute and The Royal Children’s Hospital Centre for Community Child Health.

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Murray, S. & Malone, J. (2008). Making life after care: The provision of support across the life course. Developing Practice, 22, 63–71. Murray, S., Murphy, J., Branigan, E. & Malone, J. (2007). After the orphanage: Life beyond the children’s home. Sydney: UNSW Press. Muzicant, A. & Peled, E. (2018). Home visits in social work: From disembodiment to embodied presence. British Journal of Social Work, 48, 826–842. Nash, C. (2003). They’re family! Cultural geographies of relatedness in popular genealogy (pp. 179–203). In Ahmed, S. et al. (eds) Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford: Berg. Northern Territory Government. (2007). Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle (Little Children are Sacred’). Northern Territory: Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. Perumal, N. & Kasiram, M. (2009). Living in foster care and in children’s homes: Voices of children and their caregivers. Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk, 45 (2), 198–206. Probyn, E. (2003). The spatial imperative of subjectivity (pp. 290–299). In Anderson, K., Domosh, M., Pile, S. & Thrift, N. (eds) Handbook of cultural geography. London: Sage. Rowntree, M. & Zufferey, C. (2017). Lesbians embodied and imagined homes: ‘It’s an internal journey’. Sexualities, 20 (8), 943–958. Soderqvist, Å., Sjoblom, Y. & Bulow, P. (2016). Home sweet home? Professionals’ understanding of ‘home’ within residential care for unaccompanied youths in Sweden. Child & Family Social Work, 21 (4), 591–599. Walter, M., Taylor, S. & Habibis, D. (2011). How white is social work in Australia? Australian Social Work, 64 (1), 6–19. Winnicott, D.W. (1990). Home is where we start from: Essays by a psychoanalyst. London: Norton. Winter, K. & Cree, V. (2016). Social work home visits to children and families in the UK: A Foucauldian perspective. British Journal of Social Work, 46 (5), 1175–1190. Zufferey, C. (2013). ‘Not knowing that I do not know and not wanting to know’: Reflections of a white Australian social worker. International Social Work, 56 (5), 659–673. Zufferey, C., Yu, N. & Hand, T. (2020). Researching home in social work, Qualitative Social Work, 19 (5–6), 1095–1110.

9

Belonging, home and young people Carole Zufferey and Deirdre Tedmanson

Introduction This chapter builds on the previous chapter about children in family homes by focusing on systemic interventions aimed at assisting young people to transition into further education and employment. It discusses how young people’s experiences of educational, social welfare and employment services can shape their sense of self-worth and community belonging, drawing implications for case management and social work practice. Social workers and human service workers play an important role in negotiating supportive transitions for young people into education and employment, which influences young people’s collective sense of home and community belonging. The concept of belonging, akin to home, creates possibilities for exploring relational and holistic approaches to understanding young people’s experiences beyond employment and education life transitions (Wyn, 2018).

Young people, home and belonging The notion of ‘home’ can be understood to be a ‘physical place or a state of mind’ (Davies & Rowe, 2020, p. 117). A sense of belonging is crucial to the emotional wellbeing and academic success of young people. Belonging affects their motivation, engagement and school attendance (Comber & Woods, 2018; Cartmell & Bond, 2015). As well, familial support and positive relationships with teachers and peer groups can enhance young people’s sense of community engagement (Rowe & Savelsberg, 2010). However, the notion of the ‘family’ as a home and a ‘safe haven’ is potentially problematic, especially for young people who have experienced homelessness because of violence and abuse in their family of origin. Belonging for young people is multifaceted and can be positively or negatively associated with peer groups, online social performances and a sense of mobility (White et al., 2017; Yuval-Davis, 2006). In the discipline of criminology, representations of home in child protection and immigration policies have been found to shape the responses to and complexities for young people in transitory circumstances who have been separated from their DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-11

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home and families (Malloch & Rigby, 2020). There are substantial challenges in the building of home and belonging for transitory or mobile young people, including those who have ‘gone missing’ from the family home or alternative care, as well as for unaccompanied young people who are asylum seekers, living in new host countries as ‘home’ (Malloch & Rigby, 2020). More materially, research has found that access to stable housing and housing tenure influences the engagement of young people in education, employment and community life (Rowe & Savelsberg, 2010). The concept of belonging and place expands youth research beyond life transitions (Wyn, 2018). Previous research about belonging and young people relates to building a sense of belonging in schools (Comber & Woods, 2018), including for international new arrivals (Cartmell & Bond, 2015). Youth sociologists have drawn on the notion of belonging to make visible social inequalities and systemic power inequalities affecting young people. For example, Farrugia’s (2011) research on young people who are homeless discusses identity strategies that young people use to build a sense of belonging. As well, Watson and Cuervo (2017) and Watson (2018) emphasise the importance of considering the impact of non-material aspects on homeless young women’s subjectivities, social exclusion and stigma and intimate sexual relationships. Furthermore, research with youth and online platforms (such as Facebook) found that online media enabled young people to position themselves within a system of belonging in youth culture (White et al., 2017). Online platforms also provided communications technologies that enabled connectivity with family members (White et al., 2017, p. 27). A sense of belonging can be associated with different people, places and social institutions in young people’s lives (White et al., 2017). However, belonging for young people can also be affected by social and economic dynamics that reproduce social inequalities. One area of inequality is youth unemployment. In Australia, youth employment policies have been criticised for exacerbating the dynamics of exclusion experienced by young people, through enforcement politics and punitive welfare to work policies (Savelsberg, 2010; Savelsberg & Martin-Giles, 2008). The power of state coercion can mask social and economic inequalities that young people in welfare systems experience. Social constructs of welfare identities often exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, social harms (Malloch & Rigby, 2020). What is known from previous research is that a young person’s past experiences, family background and access to informal and formal supports assist their educational and employment transitions and sense of belonging. Unequal access to resources disproportionally affects young people from lower income backgrounds, serving as barriers in negotiating ‘uncertain transitions to employment’ (Borlagdan, 2015, p. 839). These unequal social dynamics invariably affect young people’s sense of belonging, home and stability, which can be exacerbated (or improved) by the systems and services supporting young people. The transition to work or education is an

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uncertain process; a journey of becoming, rather than a destination (or outcome) (Borlagdan, 2015; Worth, 2009).

Case managers and young people This chapter presents insights from an ethnographic study with a small group of young people and their teachers in a pilot film making course in a metropolitan capital city in Australia. All the young people attending the program were not currently in employment, education or training and had experienced barriers to employment and completing secondary schooling. The young people’s sense of belonging was inextricably intertwined with their relationships with case managers in state funded welfare institutions involved in ‘managing’ their employment and education transitions. When working in housing, education and employment sectors, social workers would ideally implement person-centred case management approaches that build young people’s sense of achievement, belonging and home. However, the young people in this study provided examples of the disempowering impacts when compliance and employment was prioritised over their attendance at the film making course. The young people in this study were referred to a film making course by ‘transition to work’ case managers, who were responsible for helping young people to develop practical work skills, connect with education and training, participate in work experience and job opportunities (Australian Government, 2016; 2020). A generic job description of a ‘case manager’, or in this context, ‘youth employment consultant’, is to actively engage with the young job seekers, prepare them for the conditions of work or education, develop the skills, attitudes and behaviours expected of them and refer them for mandatory job searches. It is well documented that in the current quasimarket service delivery context, ‘employment consultants have high caseloads and low qualifications and devote considerable time to administrative activities’ required by service funding agreements (ACOSS, 2012, p. 16). The young people in this study were cognisant of the funding pressures on their case managers. They expressed the lived effects of their compliance with the expectation of their case managers and tensions associated with accessing education or employment. Case management research in social work and the human services is multifaceted. In the Australian context, there have been several quantitative outcome evaluations of case management, including for homeless job seekers and young people experiencing both homelessness and unemployment (Grace & Gill, 2014; 2016). The YP4 study was a large clinical controlled trial (CCT) that compared standard and intensive case management services and found that for young people who received 20 or more case management contacts, accommodation and employment outcomes improved significantly (Grace & Gill, 2014; 2016). Thus, it was found that intensive support through case management can improve the trajectory for

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young people. As well, Tregeagle (2010) examined client and social worker perspectives on standardised case management systems that responded to abused or neglected children. Some social workers felt that standardised case management undermined the professional social worker–service user relationship (Tregeagle, 2010). Service users (including children, young people and parents) reported that case management intervention and processes were easy to understand but that they experienced barriers to participation and limitations in assessments (Tregeagle, 2010). Another study completed a process evaluation of relational case management for people in financial hardship (Davidson et al., 2018). This research reinforced the importance of the quality of relationships between case managers and their clients and advocated for a flexible approach that tailored personalised support to the individual contexts of client’s lives (Davidson et al., 2018). Despite lip service to person-centred case management, ideal models are often inadequately funded and constrained by fragmented service delivery systems (Moore, 2016; Harvey et al., 2002). As Moxley (2003, p. 3) asks ‘Whose outcomes matter most in case management?’ There is a long debate in case management and social work literature about balancing the importance of individual and systemic or structural outcomes. This includes debates about case management being fundamentally person-centred (akin to consumer, citizen, client-focused) or service system focused (Moxley & Daeschlein, 1997). In social work education, five Australian social work academics from three educational institutions reflected on the tensions between social work’s commitment to personalisation approaches and the quasi-market contexts of case management (Short et al., 2019). Ethical dilemmas arose when personalisation approaches (that emphasise tailored services, co-production, client choice and control) conflict with market-based outcomes, that operate within a quasi-market model, where services compete for case management funding (Short et al., 2019, p. 218). It has been found that relational, holistic, personcentred (or client focused) case management approaches can assist socially excluded young people to build a sense of community belonging, akin to home. However, some British social work academics have also argued that in the current neoliberal policy context, person- and relationship-centred social work is untenable and that the ‘epistemological position of person-centred theory is largely incompatible with social work practice’ (Murphy et al., 2013, p. 703). These debates reflect the perennial individual-structural or systemic change debates in social work, which currently exist within individualist neoliberal policy contexts, as highlighted in Chapter 4. The concept of mutual obligation underpins the responses of employment services, which stipulates that young people can only receive income support if they are ‘actively seeking work’, if they ‘improve their competitiveness in the labour market’ and ‘contribute to the community’, including through volunteering activities (O’Halloran et al., 2020, p. 492). However, a recent Australian study that spoke to 52 unemployed or partially employed people who were ‘job active’ found that employment services had been harmful in

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their approach, unhelpful in assisting them to find employment and that they primarily focused on compliance, which was depersonalised and psychologically destructive (O’Halloran et al., 2020, p. 501). As well, despite welfare dependency discourses that underpin mutual obligation policies, Australian welfare benefits for young people (aged 16–29) are less than in most Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, and young people are not more likely than other groups to be on welfare benefits for long periods (OECD, 2016). The policy concern about disadvantaged young people’s welfare dependency and the prioritising of compliance and employment over education by service providers can have destructive effects on their sense of community engagement, belonging and home. This was evident in Jack’s experience of attempting to ‘please’ his ‘case manager’, as discussed in the ‘Findings and discussion’ section later in this chapter.

The study This study documented the motivations and challenges experienced by the young people who attended a pilot film making course. This chapter draws on the researcher’s ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews with two young people and two teachers. In line with the social constructionist tradition (Burr, 2015), this study assumed that reality is co-constructed by researchers–young people–teachers, in the context of social institutions and social interactions, within the educational setting. Thus, each researcher’s ethnographic insights and observations were not objective accounts of reality but co-created through social interactions, based on his/her own research interests. As a social worker and human service worker, we were interested in young people’s lived experiences and their accounts of the challenges in their lives and relationships with the service systems supporting them. Research observations included broader organisational and structural or systemic issues affecting young people (Dietz, 2011; 2009). Social work literature has long discussed the importance of participant observation, as the asking, observing, listening and feeling aspects of practice (Floersch et al., 2014). Participant observations assisted the researchers to understand the complexities of the young people’s relationships with peers inclass and out-of-class, their perspectives about the people in services supporting them (such as their ‘case managers’) and their social participation as citizens within their social networks (Hopkins, 2010). The numbers of students in this course fluctuated each week, with the highest being five students and the lowest being one student. The four young men and one young woman who attended the inner city course were given pseudonyms: Jack, Jim, Matt, Josh and Jane. This chapter touches on the experiences of five young people who attended a film making course but only two young people were interviewed and remained engaged until the end.

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We found that reflexive ethnography (Floersch et al., 2014; McNamara, 2009) was a useful social work research approach that combined a micro (personal) and macro (systemic) focus to explore the participation challenges facing young people. Ethnography has been used in social work research to engage with hard-to-reach participant groups, such as people experiencing homelessness and their service engagement with Housing First approaches in the US (Stanhope, 2012). This previous research found that the quality of engagement depended on the ‘interaction between the case managers and residents’ and how ‘case managers paid attention, listened, and communicated’ during shared activities (Stanhope, 2012, p. 412). In Melbourne (Victoria), ethnographic research found that educational opportunities for young people in media production can act ‘as a key tool in empowering active citizens, able and willing to contribute to the democratic process’, which includes having young people’s voices heard (Hopkins, 2010, p. 183). There have also been studies in social work that point to how ethnography can highlight contradictions in social policy, arguing that ethnographic research aligns with social work observations of the person in his/her environment (Floersch et al., 2014, pp. 3–4). However, there are opportunities and ethical challenges in ethnographic research with vulnerable or traumatised participants who are unfamiliar with research protocols (Haight et al., 2014). For example, the young people stated feeling uncomfortable with ‘researchers following them around’ but then said that they ‘got used to it’. This research provided an in-depth thematic analysis of locational, relational and systemic barriers facing one small group of young people, in one ten-week course that had numerous challenges. It did not compare the experiences of young people in a different pilot site that was more successful (see MacGill et al., 2018). As well, the perspectives of service providers (‘case managers’) employed in the welfare service systems who referred the young people to the pilot project have not been included. More research is warranted that highlights the perspectives of service providers and their experiences of implementing case management in the current (neoliberal) political context. To understand the barriers faced by young people, we reflected on the complex influences in young people’s lives, including the role of case management within broader political systems and policy contexts, deficit welfare discourses about young people as a group and personal aspects associated with past disadvantaging experiences. In this chapter we argue that the responses of social welfare and educational institutions affect young people’s emotional wellbeing and relational connections, akin to a sense of home and belonging.

Findings and discussion The young people in this course were case managed by a transition to work program, were early school leavers (aged 18 to 21), were actively looking for work and experienced personal barriers in their histories such as

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homelessness and mental health issues. The young people were reliant on financial government support and had been referred into the film making course by their job services provider, who they called their ‘case manager’. Positive relationships with their case manager were an incentive to participate in the film making course. However, the young people had to concurrently search for employment, which served as a barrier to their full participation and engagement in this educational opportunity. The research found that young people complied with impossible tasks to ‘make their case manager happy’ and that the ‘system was not doing its job properly’ to support young people. Whilst the young people were striving to be successful ‘ideal entrepreneurial, neoliberal subjects’ (de St Croix, 2017, p. 430), the emotional effects of systemic expectations affected their sense of empowerment and belonging. Previous studies have found that young people are not passive recipients of services but can be active policy resisters (Pultz & Mørch, 2015). Brief comments from the young people alluded to such resistance, such as Jane no longer attending class because she was ‘not interested’. However, their ability to resist the vagaries of powerful punitive welfare discourses about young unemployed people and their articulation in service delivery systems was limited. The young people in our study were genuinely interested in furthering their education and employment. Nonetheless, they expressed that being unable to find work, in a tight labour market, with high youth unemployment, affected their sense of selfworth, belonging and feelings of being ‘at home’ in themselves and the community. Youth belonging and transitions ‘are continually made and re-made through relationships with others’ (Borlagdan, 2015, p. 851), including through relationships with their employment case managers. Young people’s experiences and perceptions: ‘making my case manager happy’ The young people’s relationships with their employment ‘case managers’ appeared to be very strong because they were frequently mentioned in conversations. For example, Jim and Jack had the same case manager, they had conversations about the merits of different case managers, staff turnover and employment barriers for young people. When Jim was asked ‘How did you come to be involved in the film making course?’ he said that ‘most students will say that they were referred by their Job Providers – they have to apply for five jobs per week’. All young people described positive interactions and relationships with their case manager, which served as an incentive to participate in the film making course. Nonetheless, when Jack recounted his challenges to participating in the course, he explained that on one of the days he was expected by his case manager to attend a job interview instead of attending class. This affected his sense of belonging, engagement and participation in the course and the group dynamics:

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When I was trying to do courses and then my job provider would try and make me go and do something else that would clash with course… try and make me do a job interview, it is good to get a job but ‘if you are going to put me in a course to get a job, why are you pulling me away at the same time?’ (Jack, 2017) Jack was positioned in a ‘double bind’ because he wanted to find work and to ‘please his case manager’ but also wanted to attend the film making class – yet he could not do both ‘at the same time’. Consequently, there was only one student in class that day (Jim) and the film making process slowed down considerably and affected group cohesion. Jim expressed great dismay at what happened to Jack. He said: ‘Jack was trying to finish but he was penalised – he was thrown under a bus’. Jim had earlier commented how another participant (Matt) had expressed an issue with not receiving funding for the course, which resulted in him having to leave the course with a large debt, which arguably exacerbated the financial inequalities he already experienced. These systemic funding barriers disempowered young people and affected their sense of belonging. According to Jim, this led to a further group participant leaving because ‘he and Matt were friends’ and Josh left out of solidarity with ‘his mate’. Therefore, their feelings of belonging and social relationships with their in-class peer group were disrupted. This disruption occurred because of systemic failures, including one participant receiving contradictory advice from their case managers. However, Jack also understood that his case manager was under pressure to achieve outcomes, although this placed more pressure on individual job seekers: My job provider, they are currently understaffed…they are upping it because they are under pressure, so we have to apply for more and more jobs [ten jobs in a little over one week]…I feel like we have to apply to more places, they don’t seem care where we want to work, just so we are ‘out of their hair’…[R: how does that make you feel?]…to be fair, it is destructive in itself…you walk into jobs and hand in resumes and they say: ‘sorry you are not what we are looking for’. I don’t even want to go there… I am forced to…they say: ‘don’t come back’…you feel bad…pathetic. (Jack, 2017) Jack’s vivid expression of the emotional impact of constant job seeking and rejection that made him feel ‘bad…pathetic’ illustrates how mutual obligation policies and outcome-based funding of services reinforced unemployed young people’s sense of not belonging to society. This quote shows how ‘destructive’ practices of enforced compliance are service system focused, not person-centred (Moxley & Daeschlein, 1997). The pressure to conform

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to unrealistic systemic expectations impacted on the lived experiences of young people in their quest to pursue further education and find employment. Mutual obligation policies can depersonalise young people’s search for work: ‘They have a quota to be filled and that is all I am doing for them’ (Jack, 2017). However, this was not expressed by all young people. As Jim explained, he was ‘getting stressed’ and his case manager assisted him to obtain ‘exemptions’ to look for work on medical grounds. Jim said that his case manager reduced his obligations to look for work, from five jobs per week to two jobs per week. He was also on a youth allowance and had a health issue. He stated that he ‘really wanted to get a job’ (Field Notes, 31.3.17), which was reinforced by his wish to belong and contribute to society. Teachers’ perspectives on young people’s challenges: ‘systems doing their jobs properly’ The observations of both teachers also reflected the challenges that young people expressed. When one teacher was asked: ‘what challenges do you think they face, the young people coming here…you were talking about filming challenges but any others?’ These challenges were expressed as the distances young people had to travel on public transport and system challenges, including eligibility criteria for the course and ‘bureaucratic form filling’: Yeh just getting here…I did not really realise that they get up at 6 o’clock…it takes them an hour or more to get here….there have been system challenges…where [one student] was unable to fully enrol and [Jack] is not here this morning because…his job provider insisted that he go for a job interview…yesterday…[they had to]…sign a different form because the course structure had changed…just the bureaucratic kind of sign this form, fill this out, kind of thing… (Teacher One, 2017) The ‘guilt, stress, pressure’ on young people was further discussed by another teacher: …kept putting pressure on them [to find employment] when they’re in the course, it starts to impact on how the student feels. They are being torn between ‘Am I responsible to this person, am I responsible to this person…how am I gonna fit this in, where is it gonna go, I mean, I wanna be here, but I also need to be there and I’m gonna lose my [government] allowance if I don’t attend that but I need to be here because I’m doing this course which is also a component’…so on it goes…guilt, stress, pressure. (Teacher Two, 2017)

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It was therefore important for us to acknowledge that the system ‘did not do their job properly…to acknowledge the failures of these authority bodies, with the students’ (Teacher One, 2017). As Jim said: ‘it was really unfair’.

Implications for social work This study found that young people’s educational challenges are embedded in unequal institutional and systemic barriers that impacted their sense of self-worth, empowerment, belonging and social participation. These findings have important implications for social workers who may be practicing within welfare services systems that focus on compliance and the neoliberal punishing of the poor (Wacquant, 2009). Social workers can reflect on the systemic and structural barriers that young people experience by researching the effects of welfare compliance on young people accessing services. The systemic tensions imposed on young people are inextricably associated with how they are socially positioned as ‘individual failures’ in society and in policy discourse, affecting their sense of community belonging and home. The findings of this study also resonate with previous research by Borlagdan (2015) and Butler and Muir (2016) that young people’s education and employment opportunities are affected by their individual backgrounds, past experiences, financial and family biographies. The young people in this study did express concern about their own and their families’ financial circumstances preventing them from accessing education, which intersected with personal challenges and barriers that affected their ability to socially participate. Therefore, in addition to systemic failures, there were familial, financial and personal challenges (such as homelessness and mental illness) affecting the young people, which were variably responded to by service providers. These systemic failures can be experienced as a form of state violence and abuse, compounding the abuse and violence that some young people had already experienced in their own families. When reflecting on the social work ethic of social justice to influence social and systemic change, it is important to hear the voices of service users, which in this research were the voices of young people. The findings of this multidisciplinary ethnographic study are significant for social work research because the researchers were able to make visible the compliant and (briefly) resistant voices of young people. The young people spoke about the impact of systemic challenges they faced when pursuing case management goals, as well as their positive personal relationships with their case managers. However, the systemic challenges faced by the young people contributed to a broader sense of social disenfranchisement, affecting their sense of belonging and feelings of being ‘at home’ in society, which was intertwined with their perceived successes or failures in accessing employment and/or completing their education. Critical to young people’s sense of home and belonging are strategies that address the creation of permanent jobs for young people to provide a foundation for accessing the housing and labour markets.

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This analysis of young people’s engagement in an educational opportunity was viewed through the lens of social work and human service work, highlighting the complex relationships young people had with their case managers as well as unjust and unfair service systems. At times, the disciplinary focus, professional identities and discourses of research actors, who were social workers, human service workers and teachers, did differ (Dietz, 2011; 2009). As reflexive human service workers, it was important for us to learn from the perspectives of the teachers who supported the young people and understood the effects of ‘system failures’ on their educational pursuits. More research is needed specifically on how young people’s relationships with their families, case managers, peers and teachers affected their sense of belonging and feelings of being ‘at home’ in society. Despite rapidly changing policy and systemic contexts, person-centred case management approaches are aligned with social work values and principles associated with respect for the worth and dignity of individuals and when upholding human rights and social justice (IFSW, 2018). Consistent with social work values, ethics and principles, case managers intend to establish empathetic, respectful relationships and supportive systems and environments, which can work towards socially excluded young people rebuilding a sense of home and belonging. However, despite the person-inenvironment slogan of social work, there are times when person-focused and system-focused case management approaches can clash. Organisational contexts are variable and shape case management practices and client outcomes (Moxley, 2003), which do not always align with supporting young people to build a sense of belonging and home. This chapter has argued that the state being involved in enforcing ‘community participation’ in contradictory ways can potentially work against young people feeling a sense of safety, support and community belonging (or home). Case management and social work relies on building positive client–worker relationships and having access to practical supports and resources. However, as found in this research, case management and social work are enacted within a neoliberal welfare state and policy context that promotes welfare dependency discourses and mutual obligation strategies, prioritising policy compliance and employment over education. To enhance the service delivery system for young people, funding person-centred social work and case management approaches that further dialogues with and incorporate the voices of young people can contribute to enhancing their sense of empowerment and belonging.

Conclusion This chapter discussed research that engaged with young people transitioning into further education and/or employment. It gathered insights from both young people and their teachers and found that young people such as Jack were placed in a ‘double bind’ by the contradictory expectations of case

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management services. On the one hand, young people wanted to ‘please’ their employment case managers because of the relationship they had with them and intended to attend all employment and educational opportunities. On the other hand, they were required to apply for more and more (inappropriate) jobs, as dictated by the system-centric employment service funding model, in problematic youth employment markets (Furlong, 2006). This was ‘destructive’ and affected young people’s sense of self-worth and belonging. This systemic abuse compounded the abuse and violence that some young people experienced in their own families, which further disenfranchised and disconnected young people from supportive relationships and their own internal journeys of home and belonging. This chapter made visible the challenges and voices of young people transitioning into education and/or employment, drawing implications for supporting young people’s social inclusion and sense of belonging and home. The next chapter on multiple, dislocated homes discusses voluntary and forced migration and associated experiences of home and belonging.

References Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS). (2012). Towards more efficient and responsive employment services: submission to Advisory Panel on Employment Services Administration and Accountability (APESAA). Strawberry Hills, NSW, Australia: ACOSS. Australian Government. (2016). Engaging school leavers. Canberra: Department for Education, Skills and Employment. Australian Government. (2020). Transition to Work Fact Sheet. Canberra: Department for Education, Skills and Employment. Borlagdan, J. (2015). Inequality and 21 year olds’ negotiation of uncertain transitions to employment: a Bourdieusian approach. Journal of Youth Studies, 18 (7), 839–854. Burr, V. (2015). Social constructionism. (3rd Edition) London UK: Routledge. Butler, R. & Muir, K. (2016). Young people’s education biographies: Family relationships, social capital and belonging. Journal of Youth Studies, 20 (3), 316–331. Cartmell, H. & Bond, C. (2015). What does belonging mean for young people who are International New Arrivals? Educational and Child Psychology, 32, 89–101. Comber, B. & Woods, A. (2018). Pedagogies of belonging in literacy classrooms and beyond: what’s holding us back? (pp. 263–281). In Halse, C. (ed.) Interrogating belonging for young people in schools. Switzerland: Palgrave. Davidson, D., Marston, G., Mays, J. & Johnson-Abdelmalik, J. (2018). Role of relational case management in transitioning from poverty. Australian Social Work, 71 (1), 58–70. Davies, P. & Rowe, M. (2020). Themed section: Introduction: ‘Home’ environments: Crime, victimisation and safety. Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 59 (2), 117–119. de St Croix, T. (2017). Youth work, performativity and the new youth impact agenda: Getting paid for numbers? Journal of Education Policy, 33 (3), 414–438. Dietz, G. (2009). Multiculturalism, interculturality and diversity in education: An anthropological approach. Muenster & Nueva York: Waxmann. Dietz, G. (2011). Towards a doubly reflexive ethnography: A proposal from the anthropology of interculturality. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 6 (1), 3–26. Link: www.aibr.org.

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Farrugia, D. (2011). The symbolic burden of homelessness: Towards a theory of youth homelessness as embodied subjectivity. Journal of Sociology, 47 (1), 71–87. Floersch, J., Longhofer, J. & Suskewicz, J. (2014). The use of ethnography in social work research. Qualitative Social Work, 13 (1), 3–7. Furlong, A. (2006). Not a very NEET solution: Representing problematic labour market transitions among early school leavers. Work, Employment and Society, 20 (3), 553–569. Grace, M. & Gill, P.R. (2014). Improving outcomes for unemployed and homeless young people: Findings of the YP4 clinical controlled trial of joined up case management. Australian Social Work, 67 (3), 419–437. Grace, M. & Gill, P.R. (2016). Client-centred case management: How much makes a difference to outcomes for homeless jobseekers? Australian Social Work, 69 (1), 11–26. Haight, W., Kayama, M. & Korang-Okrah, R. (2014). Ethnography in social work practice and policy. Qualitative Social Work, 13 (1), 127–143. Harvey, J., Gursansky, D. & Kennedy, R. (2002). Case management in Australia: Application of Moxley’s scenarios. Care Management Journals, 3 (2), 50–54. Hopkins, L. (2010). YouthWorx. Increasing youth participation through media production. Journal of Sociology, 47 (2), 181–197. International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW). (2018). Global social work statement of ethical principles. Accessed 2 June 2021, Global Social Work Statement of Ethical Principles – International Federation of Social Workers (ifsw.org). MacGill, B., Carter, J. & Price, D. (2018). Youthworx South Australia: Re-engaging youth in learning and employment through the creative art of film-making (pp. 129–144). In Best, M., Corcoran, T. & Slee, R. (eds) Who’s in? Who’s out? What to do about inclusive education. Netherlands: Brill. Malloch, M. & Rigby, P. (2020). The complexities of ‘home’: Young people ‘on the move’ and state responses. Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 59 (2), 158–173. McNamara, P. (2009). Feminist ethnography. Storytelling that makes a difference. Qualitative Social Work, 8 (2), 161–177. Moore, E. (Ed.) (2016). Case management: Inclusive community practice. (2nd edition) South Melbourne, Victoria: Oxford University Press. Moxley, D.P. (2003) Outcomes and alternative cultures of case management. Australian Journal of Case Management, 5 (1), 3–11. Moxley, D.P. & Daeschlein, M. (1997). Properties of consumer-driven forms of case management (pp. 111–133). In Moxley, D.P. (ed.) Case management by design: Reflections on principles and practices. Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers. Murphy, D., Duggan, M. & Joseph, S. (2013). Relationship-based social work and its compatibility with the person-centred approach: Principled versus instrumental perspectives. The British Journal of Social Work, 43 (4), 703–719. O’Halloran, D., Farnworth, L. & Thomacos, N. (2020). Australian employment services: Help or hindrance in the achievement of mutual obligation? The Australian Journal of Social Issues, 55 (4), 492–508. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (2016). Society at a Glance 2016. Spotlight on Youth. How does Australia compare?Paris: OECD. Pultz, S. & Mørch, S. (2015). Unemployed by choice: Young creative people and the balancing of responsibilities through strategic self-management. Journal of Youth Studies, 18 (10), 1382–1401. doi: doi:10.1080/13676261.2014.992318 Rowe, P. & Savelsberg, H. (2010). How are young people’s experiences of ‘home’ affecting their engagement with schooling and community? Youth Studies Australia, 29 (3) 36–42.

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Savelsberg, H. (2010). Setting responsible pathways: The politics of responsibilisation. Journal of Education Policy, 25 (5), 657–675. Savelsberg, H. & Martin-Giles, B.M. (2008). Young people on the margins: Australian studies of social exclusion. Journal of Youth Studies, 11 (1), 17–31. Short, M., Trembath, K.S., Duncombe, R., Whitaker, L. & Wiman, G. (2019). Contemporizing teaching case management: Mapping the tensions. Social Work Education, 38 (2), 212–226. Stanhope, V. (2012). The ties that bind: Using ethnographic methods to understand service engagement. Qualitative Social Work, 11 (4), 412–430. Tregeagle, S. (2010). Red tape or gold standard? Australian service users’ experiences of child welfare case-managed practice. Australian Social Work, 63 (3), 299–314, Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the poor: The neoliberal government of social security. Durham: Duke University Press. Watson, J. (2018). Youth homelessness and survival sex: Intimate relationships and gendered subjectivities. London: Routledge. Watson, J. & Cuervo, H. (2017). Youth homelessness: A social justice approach. Journal of Sociology, 53 (2), 461–475. White, R.D., Wyn, J., & Robards, B.J. (2017). Youth and society (4th Edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Worth, N. (2009). Understanding youth transition as ‘becoming’: Identity, time and futurity. Geoforum, 40, 1050–1060. Wyn, J. (2018). A critical perspective on young people and belonging (pp. 35–48). In Lange, A., Reiter, H., Schutter, S. & Steiner, C. (eds) Handbook childhood and youth sociology. Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer. Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Belonging and the politics of belonging. Patterns of Prejudice, 40 (3), 197–214.

10 Multiple, dislocated homes Carole Zufferey and Kalpana Goel

Introduction This chapter explores the movement of home across transnational borders (Ahmed et al., 2003), which includes a focus on intersections between cultural identity and geography, and the hybridity of home. It discusses the experiences of middle classed skilled and commuter migrants as well as of people who have been forced to dislocate from their homes such as refugees and asylum seekers. Dr Kalpana Goel reflects on her migration journey from India to Australia as a skilled migrant and her experience of the hybridity of home and belonging. When thinking about transnational homes, this moves beyond the fixity of the locale of home (Ahmed et al., 2003). The transnational movement of people across the globe can be for various reasons, including in situations of migration by choice as well as forced dislocation. ‘Uprootings’ and ‘regroundings’ in transnational mobility and migration can affectively, materially and symbolically interact with and transform our understandings of home and belonging (Ahmed et al., 2003). Migration can contribute to the making and unmaking of transnational and multiple homes and hybridised cultures, blurring distinctions between the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ (Ahmed et al., 2003, p. 4). Migration experiences are embodied and lived, within unequal power relations, at the intersections of cultural identity, religion, age, nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality and class, to name a few (Plüss, & Chan, 2012). This chapter starts with reflecting on more privileged lived experiences of skilled migration, followed by highlighting differences for refugees and asylum seekers. It draws implications for social work that move beyond assumptions about the residential fixity of home, to home/s as being imaginings from the past, in the revisioning of the future. The chapter points to social work involvement in transnational homes, the reconstitution of home post migration in resettlement work.

Home and migration Migration movements have often been simplistically defined as a one-way departure from unfavourable conditions (the ‘push’) to arrive at more favourable conditions (the ‘pull’) (Hoerder et al., 2011, p. xxv). A more DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-12

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nuanced and multilayered account of migration requires an engagement with human agency (micro-level); with cultural, societal and economic contexts (meso-level) and the constraints and opportunities of state policies and legislations (macro-levels) that contribute to the making and remaking of home/ s (Hoerder et al., 2011, p. xxvii). The micro-meso-macro layers of home and migration exist within intersecting gendered, classed, aged, economic and racialised power relations. The movement of home across transnational and locational borders has a long history but cannot be examined outside of ‘spacialised relations of power’ (Ahmed et al., 2003, p. 6). Diverse experiences of mobility and migration transform people’s understandings of home and belonging, as being a journey and imagined future (Ahmed et al., 2003, p. 4). From transnational and transcultural perspectives, ‘diaspora has become an emblem of multilocality, “post-nationality” and non-linearity of both movement and time’ (Fortier, 2001, p. 406). The term diaspora was initially used when referring to the dispersal and exile of Jewish people but since the 1960s, the term diaspora has increasingly been used to refer to all migrants (Kenny, 2013, p. 1). It must be acknowledged that notions of home as a journey have a long history. When examining the homing practices of tramping Danish artisan journeymen, with roots back to the Middle Ages, Andersen and Pedersen (2018, p. 82) argued that home and homing can be understood as being the lived tensions and performances of ‘belonging trouble’ and homing practices. The journeyman’s home and homing practices included: their material artefacts, such as a knapsack and objects within it; traveling with Danish journeyman companions for emotional support; accessing Danish and Scandinavian Associations in foreign lands, and a spatialised sense of belonging and nationalism, performed through social events and encounters with ‘familiar national (drinking) customs, social practices and the familiar tongue of the homeland’ (Andersen & Pedersen, 2018, p. 87). The journeyman’s romantic reinvention of an idealised home or homeland as a ‘utopia’ was a constantly re-imagined space, akin to ‘no place like home’, which ‘is and will never be’ (Andersen & Pedersen, 2018, p. 87; Saunders, 2003, p. 73). Mobility became central to the professional life of artisan journeymen and they re-enacted and re-negotiated the notion of home by (re)forming perceptions of belonging, through both material and emotional expressions (Andersen & Pedersen, 2018, p. 88). The hybridity of home is an important concept in migration literature. What happens then when migratory subjects return home? As Elspeth Probyn (1996, p. 114) writes, ‘you can never go home. Or rather, once returned, you realize the cliché, that home is never what it was’. If ‘home’ is not what it was, what would it look like? What if it was to be turned into a question of ‘it ain’t what it’s cut out to be’ (Probyn, 1996, p. 97)? What happens to ‘home’ once it loses its mythical status (Fortier, 2001, p. 412)? In the context of increasing globalisation and mobility, Plüss and Chan (2012) consider how homes are diversely imagined and lived. Focusing on the

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hybridity of transnational migrants in Asia, Plüss and Chan (2012, p. 266) noted the ‘multi-directionality’ of home and identity. Diverse intersections can help to explain ‘why migrants who share race, gender, skills, ethnicity, age, nationality, aims of migration, and social class can develop quite different cultural identities, even if they reside in places with similar characteristics’ (Plüss & Chan, 2012, p. 266). For example, some return migrants may report multiple cultural identities; that their roots (or feelings of home) are ‘in the family’ but not in a place, city or country (Plüss & Chan, 2012, p. 267). These multiple and fluid understandings of home challenge ideas about making a ‘new home’ in a host country. Some forced migrants, such as Africans transported against their will or Asian or Irish contract workers in the US, were more likely to experience a sense of exile, ‘discrimination, marginalization and exclusion in their new host countries’ and thus, their sense of home often remained in their country of origin (Kenny, 2013, p. 40). The notion of what ‘home’ means for forced and skilled migrants, both ‘being at home’ and ‘leaving home’, is complicated by interrelationships between migration, estrangement and cultural identity (Ahmed, 1999).

Intersections: culture, identity, geography In migration literature, the idea of being connected to a place as home has been found to depend on an ‘imagined kinship’ and framing of culture, identity and geography (Nash, 2003, p.179). Nash (2003) examined the search for Irish ‘roots’ in the colonial contexts of North America, Australia and New Zealand. She explored constructions of relatedness, in ideas about national and personal identity, cultural and biological inheritance, ethnicities and belonging (Nash, 2003). She recounted email correspondence with an American, whose father was Irish, and mother was Polish, but identifies ‘totally’ with Ireland as: ‘my true hometown…my heart, my hope, my heritage’ (Nash, 2003, p. 184). This was puzzling but she reflected that identifying as ‘totally Irish’ may be related to cultural capital associated with being an affluent, white American (Nash, 2003). She discussed the process of travelling back to Ireland to trace Irish connections as being a ‘process of imaginative repossession’, akin to a spiritual pilgrimage, in honour of ancestors who were colonially dispossessed and forced into exile and displacement (Nash, 2003, pp. 188–189). This idea of ‘going back home’ is situated in the movement towards an imagined ‘home’ that can (re)produce the ideal of home, while continuously deferring being ‘at home’ in the present. In the British context, Ahmed (1999) examined different texts, including short autobiographical stories by Asian women in Britain and constructions of migrancy in nomadic or migrant communities, such as the Global Nomads International and the Asian Women’s Writing Collective. She argued that migrant communities can be lived through ‘collective acts of remembering in the absence of a shared knowledge or a familiar terrain’ (Ahmed, 1999, p. 329). This offers a critique of the idea that being a migrant

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or nomad is ‘inherently transgressive’ or an ‘ontological condition’, where the common experience is ‘the loss of a home’ (Ahmed, 1999, p. 329). She posits that it is through ‘estrangement’ that migrant communities come ‘to be lived’, making ‘a place’ for the ‘out of place-ness’ of migrant bodies (Ahmed, 1999, p. 345). As well, Davis (2017, p. 13) explored life stories of female Jewish refugees in the 1950s and found that women’s fear of antisemitism made it difficult for them to feel ‘at home’ and that they belonged in Britain as a country. To feel more ‘in place’, women employed strategies such as concealing their identity as well as taking pride in their Jewish identity and ‘surrounding themselves with other people like themselves’ (Davis, 2017, p. 13). When exploring migrant experiences in Australia, Noble (2005) affirms that migration can temporarily disrupt one’s sense of home and can create considerable anxiety. In the context of racism towards Arabs and Muslims in Australia, he argued that experiences of racism undermined the ability of migrants to feel ‘at home’, and hence their capacity to exist and act as citizens (Noble, 2005). In South Australia, an exploratory study of skilled African migrants examined ways in which seven African migrants (who were all over 50 years old; mostly Kenyan, one from Zimbabwe; five males and two females) conceptualised ‘home’ and perceived ageing in a country other than their country of birth, and how these perceptions informed their retirement plans (Watindi, 2020, p. 10). The study found that for this small group of skilled African migrants, aging was not restricted to one geographical location but rather linked to spaces that transcend national borders. This study highlighted three major themes: 1) Ageing in place: ‘I belong here, even when I die, I will be buried here’ (in Australia, for five out of seven participants); 2) Ageing transnationally: ‘9 months here and 3 months back in Kenya retirement plan’; and 3) Return migration: ‘Even with all the bells and whistles I still choose my humble village’ (Watindi, 2020, p. 44). The one participant who wanted to age transnationally expressed a hybrid identity, with his ‘roots’ in a Kenyan village being a locational ‘marker for transnational belonging’, and Australia as his ‘second home’ (Watindi, 2020, p. 48). Thus, cultural identity and country of birth are intertwined with past and present lives and current circumstances also considered as ‘home’: I consider myself an African-Australian, that means I am an Australian, now that I am a citizen, but I am still…an African from Africa…This means that I have not shed off my African culture by becoming an Australian…I also embrace the fact that I have acquired something new and I like it, but I wouldn’t like to lose what I had. (Tumaini (pseudonym), in Watindi, 2020, p. 49) This quote shows the complex intertwining of cultural identities within a transnational sense of home and belonging for skilled migrants. The hybrid identity of being African-Australian and belonging to more than one place

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resonated with six out of the seven study participants (Watindi, 2020, p. 49). However, the experiences and choices of skilled migrants differ to the choices for forced migrants and refugees who cannot return to their home country, which is discussed later in this chapter.

Skilled migration Migration is influenced by economic, social, political and environmental circumstances, which includes moving to be with friends and family and escaping political prosecution and environmental disasters. Each migration story is unique. Building on Carole’s earlier reflection on migration to Australia as a young child in the introductory chapter, Kalpana shares her journey from India to Australia as a skilled migrant. Kalpana’s migration journey and reflections on home I am a skilled migrant who came to Australia 13 years ago with my immediate family, constituting my husband and three children. We decided to migrate to Australia to provide a better life for our children. My husband always wanted to migrate to Australia. He did apply in the late 1980s to obtain accreditation for his engineering degree, but the regulations kept changing. Due to changing accreditation requirements and having a young family, we did not pursue it in the 1980s. However, when I was in my early 40s, we decided to apply for permanent residency and were successful. We came to Australia in 2007 and my first job was in a regional town in South Australia. Leaving my home in India and all my family members was not at all easy. It was emotionally painful, with feelings of guilt for leaving behind parents and brothers and sisters. It was hard to decide which material things I could let go of and which ones to keep. I was also not sure whether I would return at some stage and if I should keep my accumulated household items. There were things that I could not let go of, as they had memories attached. There were objects that I had bought on certain occasions and gifts given by family and friends close to me. It was very difficult to vacate the house. I left most of my belongings in India, in anticipation that I would come back and slowly take them with me over the years. This was possible, as my parents owned their house, and they were still living in the house. We left our bedroom and children’s room in the same condition as if we were living there. I still go back home frequently and stay in our house in these familiar living conditions. It does not feel strange when I return temporarily. When we arrived in Australia in 2007, we landed in a small regional town, as I had a job there. We started looking for a rental property. It was hard to know which suburb was good and which type of house would be good for my family. The houses were structurally different. Gradually, we got used to living in houses that were different. It was not easy to call this area and the house a ‘home’. The children felt unsettled and desired to return home to

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India. They did not only leave their home, but it was also their school and friends who could not be replaced here. A feeling of being removed from the familiar to unfamiliar surroundings was quite intense in the early days. My eldest daughter returned to India as she could not fit into the University midyear intake system in Australia. She did not want to waste her six months and therefore went back to complete her graduate studies. She was quite happy to be back with her friends. The other two children had no option but to stay with their parents. The youngest one went to the local school and had his own challenges where at times he received racist comments. We decided to change his school to provide him with a better environment. Living in a regional town made it difficult to catch international flights and to go home. It had its own benefits though, as it was easy to commute and spend time with friends in the local community. We developed a good circle of friends from the Indian community with whom we could feel at home. I could never imagine how life would have been without having a social circle of people from our own community. We changed rental housing and then bought our own house. Home ownership contributed to feeling a sense of permanency to the place. We now had less trouble compared to looking after a rental house on terms and conditions. This feeling of permanency however did not last long as adult children started moving out due to various factors. They were seeking opportunities to have their own social circle which did not seem to be possible in a small town. Thus, they moved to larger cities, and we felt stuck in a remote and rural place. After a few years, we also had an opportunity to settle in a city and we decided to make another home in the city to remain close to our children. I now commute between the two homes and geographical locations for work. We continue to make regular trips to India, due to having a parental house, family and relatives there. Our connection to India continues not just by visiting but maintaining our connections through daily telephone conversations, watching the news and following cultural events. Having homes ‘there’ and ‘here’ gives us a sense of security, of having rootedness in India, which is branching out in Australia. We feel settled and at home in Australia too and know that this is our long-term abode now. However, having a home in India does give a sense of security and belongingness.

The geographical movement of skilled migration is occurring across the world in the context of increasing globalisation and mobility. Kalpana’s story of home shows how homes are diversely lived across countries and geographical locations, highlighting the hybridity of home for transnational economic migrants. Home in Kalpana’s narrative is understood to be constantly changing, whilst also being constant, and is enacted affectively (being with family and friends), materially (attachments to meaningful domestic objects) and symbolically (India as culturally home, as providing a sense of security and belonging). Central to experiences of migration and home are

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considerations about social relationships and social connections to family and relatives. In the European Union context, where migratory distances are much shorter, researchers have gathered the perspectives of middling migrants and their translocal subjectivities in the context of transnational urbanism (Mueller, 2015). Qualitative research with young German-English migrants about visiting friends and relatives (VFR), based on one year of participant observation amongst young Germans in London, and 39 formal, in-depth interviews with participants aged 23–42, found considerable diversity about a sense of connection to one country as home (Mueller, 2015, p. 626). As ‘middling’ skilled, educated, transnational migrants, with limited economic and visa barriers, ‘VFR can take a central role in the migrants’ lives, incorporated into their everyday lives’ (Mueller, 2015, p. 626). This study found three main types of migrants. The first type was bi-local, first-time migrants, with intense, short but frequent visits to Germany. The second type was multi-local migrants, who have migrated internationally or within Germany prior to coming to England, with more irregular VFR patterns and who are ‘settled in mobility’ but with some ambivalence. The third type was settled migrants, settled in the United Kingdom (UK) for five–ten years, with friends and partners in the UK but relatives in Germany, who currently felt ‘rooted and at home’ in London but stated that they may consider moving back to Germany, when/if they have children (Mueller, 2015, pp. 630–635). This shows considerable diversity about a sense of connection to being settled, mobile or at ‘home’ (Mueller, 2015, p. 626), which arguably would be further complicated by Brexit, the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union in 2021. Previous research has also explored New Zealanders in London, as ‘middling migrants’, who do not represent the extremes of socioeconomic status and power, privilege and poverty, and are not motivated to move by narrowly economic or political reasons (Wiles, 2008, p. 120). Wiles (2008, p. 121) explored the migratory experiences and expectations of 26 New Zealanders, who were aged 27 to 33; nine males and 17 females, out of which 15 New Zealanders had been living in London for two or more years, and 11 had returned from London to live in New Zealand in the year before the interview. Some were already considering returning to London or migrating elsewhere, illustrating fluid movements and connections to home (Wiles, 2008, p. 121). Wiles (2008, p. 116) conceptualised home as being spatial, temporal, social and symbolic because home, migration and a New Zealand identity was perceived to be ‘interdependent’. Wiles (2008, p. 116) found ‘three interrelated themes: the symbolic or political nature of home; the importance of family and familiarity for a sense of home; and the role of physical material objects and places’ that make a home. She noted that references to home were ‘slippery’ and often defined by what was actively sought and experienced, and to what was not home, including opportunities for travel to a wide variety of places; the diversity of people and experiences and the general ‘buzz’ of London as a

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world city (Wiles, 2008, p. 135). In London, migrant New Zealanders engaged with and resisted a ‘collective imaginary of New Zealand as home that is both self-perpetuated and externally imposed’ (Wiles, 2008, p. 135). The claiming of New Zealand as home was ‘fluid’ and connected to ‘personal and group identities’, family, friendships, education and employment experiences (Wiles, 2008, p. 135). As skilled and privileged migrants, they were able to ‘engage strategically with London-based ideas about New Zealand (NZ) and New Zealanders, often to their own advantage’ (Wiles, 2008, p. 135), including in the building of professional careers and extending their stay in the context of the global market for skilled labour. Some New Zealand migrants in London framed an idealised version of their New Zealand homeland, just as Danish journeyman migrants did more than 100 years earlier (Andersen & Pedersen, 2018, p. 87). However, these idealised versions of the homeland are then challenged for returnees readapting to the ‘realities’ of the imaginary homeland (Wiles, 2008). These are the ‘unanticipated costs in transnationalism’ for those who return home because the ‘actual return home abruptly challenges’ idealistic and simplistic visions of ‘New Zealand as home’ (Wiles, 2008). One’s sense of self and as a collective group changed with migration, in the ‘processes of meaning making’ about home (Wiles, 2008, p. 135). However, it must be noted that these experiences potentially differ to those of other migrants to London with less institutional privilege, such as refugees and asylum seekers. Commuter migrants An emerging area of research on home and migration is related to ‘interactions between commuting, migration, housing and labour markets’ (Haas & Osland, 2014, p. 463). Commuting can be defined as ‘regular travelling between home and work’ (Haas & Osland, 2014, p. 463). In post-industrial countries, work-related mobility has expanded with new travel opportunities, along with ‘changing family structures, the rise of dual-income families, the breakdown of employment security, regional differences between housing markets and regional specializations in labour markets’ (Klis & Karsten, 2009, p. 235). In commuter partnerships, one partner lives near the workplace and away from the family residence. This situation provides important research insights into the sense of home that relates to the dualresidence situation of a commuter migrant (Klis & Karsten, 2009, p. 235). Indepth interviews with 30 commuter couples in the Netherlands, on home, place and commuter partnerships, found that many felt they were ‘living two separated lives: a work life and a private life’ (Klis & Karsten, 2009, p. 463). Home was a ‘daily-life experience…grounded in a specific place’ (Klis & Karsten, 2009, p. 235). Near the workplace, home was a residence, a material physical setting, with employment related activity patterns, and some social interactions with family, friends and co-workers (Klis & Karsten, 2009). The material dimension of a physical place was used to create a sense of home,

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while activity patterns were ‘primarily focused on the job’ (Klis & Karsten, 2009, p. 235). The social dimension was the most difficult because of the ‘strong relationship between being with one’s family and experiencing a sense of home’ (Klis & Karsten, 2009, p. 235). Most research participants did not experience ‘commuter dwelling as a home away from home’ (Klis & Karsten, 2009, p. 235), alluding to the partiality of commuter homes. In the Australian context, mining workers often commute long distances to remote locations to access employment, leaving their families and partners behind. In Western Australia, studies with ‘fly in and fly out’ (FIFO) mining workers and their partners has raised concerns about the impact on workers’ health and mental health (Gardner et al., 2018). The study found relational difficulties in the managing of multiple roles associated with ‘adjusting between the responsibilities of perceptually distinct on-shift and off-shift lives’ as well as the ‘psychological distance that develops’ in relationships, ‘while workers are on site’ (Gardner et al., 2018, p. 1). Whilst participants emphasised the importance of maintaining communication and support from family members and regularly engaging with support networks, they felt that organisational support for their mental health was ‘tokenistic, stigmatised or lacking’ (Gardner et al., 2018, p. 1). In contemporary times, the notion of ‘forced’ and ‘free’ (economic) migration can be difficult to separate because during times of economic hardship individuals within families are required to seek labour and income elsewhere (Hoerder et al., 2011, p. xxv). Isolating and remote work conditions can have negative emotional effects because workers may feel socially isolated, displaced and disconnected from a sense of home, family and belonging. Social work involvement could enhance the emotional and mental health supports provided to FIFO workers, by advocating for the further development of social work services to respond to socially isolated commuter migrants.

Forced dislocation from home: refugees and asylum seekers Across the world, there are nearly 80 million people forced to flee their homes, 1% of the world’s population have fled because of persecution, with nearly 26 million refugees (half of whom are under 18 years old), and millions of stateless people, who are denied a nationality, basic human rights and freedom of movement (UNHCR, 2020). As Kaplan (2003, p. 2020) argues ‘transnational subjects are produced through location as well as mobility…as national economies dictate who moves to obtain work and who stays put’. When researching refugee settlement in London and Toronto, Kissoon (2015) asked 60 refugees how they conceived, located and reconstructed ‘home’ in asylum seeking and resettlement processes. She found that ‘vitriolic rhetoric against asylum seekers obscures’ their ‘life-or-death pursuits’ to find a new home and ignored their lived realities (Kissoon, 2015, p. 6). Furthermore, the inclusionary migration policies and strategies of Canada compared to the exclusionary and ‘deterrent’ migration strategies in

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the UK profoundly affected perceptions of belonging, acceptance, equality and their desire and ability to make a home in a new country (Kissoon, 2015). The making of home/s for refugees and asylum seekers is inextricably intertwined with national migration policies and responses and political dynamics, which invariably shape social work responses in resettlement services. When focusing on refugee resettlement in Australia, previous research in Western Australia has highlighted that access to safe and affordable housing is vitally important for refugees’ sense of belonging and that ‘establishing a home is part of the process of redeveloping a sense of ontological security’ (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014b, p. 148). In Australia, humanitarian entrants are likely to move multiple times in the early years of settlement and are far less likely to be purchasing their homes compared to other migrants, which relates to ‘the cost of housing, limited choice in the rental market, lack of public housing, poor quality, negative attitudes of real estate agents, lack of access to services’ as well as complex and insecure tenancy processes (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014b, p. 148). In this context, access to housing is intertwined with one’s sense of belonging and home, when resettling and remaking home in a new country. It must be acknowledged that some refugees have been living in exile for many decades and have never felt a sense of safety and home. South Australian research with a small group of Togolese refugees in a refugee camp in Ghana found that refugees and asylum seekers are struggling to belong and negotiate survival in this adversity (Ameganvi, 2019). This small exploratory study of the lived experiences of encampment of four Togolese refugees in Krisan Refugee Camp (Ghana) included two males and two females, who had lived in the camp for at least 16 years and were aged between 44 to 54. It found that as refugees in a host country they did not feel safe, worried about their children’s future and felt that they did not belong: ‘life for me in the camp is like I am in prison’ (Ameganvi, 2019, p. 31). Negative responses towards them and social representations of refugees in their host country affected their sense of belonging and wellbeing: When Ghanaians view our refugee identity (ID) cards, and recognise us as refugees, they think we refugees are bad people, liars, thieves…and we fled our country because of this. Even me, we went to a certain place to work as labourers, but when we arrived at an army barrier, they asked who we were…and we showed them our ID cards. They said, ‘what, you Togolese, are you criminals and is that why you have refused to return to your country?’ These things are really disturbing us, when we hear things like that, we do not feel well. (Ameganvi, 2019, p. 34) However, these research participants also discussed navigating spaces to generate an income to survive and meet their daily needs, such as farming and trading in the refugee camp. The support of the church and spirituality

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emerged as an important resource, which gave them some hope for the future: ‘There is hope for a better tomorrow…but we cannot return home before nothing has changed’ (Ameganvi, 2019, p. 37). Home is a country that you cannot go back to, even when experiencing ‘homelessness’ in a new host country. The experiences of refugees and the known lack of safety in refugee camps highlights the realities of being without a home or ‘homeless’ for forced migrants and refugees, which contrasts with broader Western ideas about homelessness and the material commodification of home through homeownership (Dovey, 1985, p. 34). Refugees and asylum seekers can be literally ‘homeless’, such as materially being without a house, as well as experiencing an emotional lack of home and sense of belonging (see also Zufferey et al., 2020). There are many reasons that a person is forcibly dislocated from their home. One area of concern has been the trafficking of women in the ‘symmetry of power relations in the new Europe’ because trafficking networks were the few labour migration networks that some women could access (Andrijasevic 2003, p. 265). In a study of Eastern European women trafficked to Italy, Andrijasevic (2003, p. 263) examined the recruitment and transportation of women being trafficked and the deception about conditions of work upon arrival, such as theft of money and confinement. She argued that trafficked women must present themselves as ‘powerless victims’ if they wanted to leave prostitution to participate in social protection programs and obtain a work permit and residence in Italy (Andrijasevic, 2003). She argued that trafficking is represented as being ‘coerced migration’ by reproducing racialised masculinity and femininity discourses, as traffickers being ‘violent foreign men in criminal gangs’ who ‘victimized foreign women’ (Andrijasevic, 2003, p. 265). However, this research showed complications and contradictions between representations of ‘trafficking’, legal and policy responses and how women’s lives are lived. Thus, Andrijasevic (2010) argued for a refocusing of scholarly and policy agendas, away from representations of sex slavery and organised crime, towards a focus on global inequalities, access to citizenship and women’s agency and empowerment.

Implications for social work First, social workers themselves are increasingly transnational migrants. Some social workers are personally embedded in transnational social fields, negotiating transnational lives and building a sense of ‘home’ and belonging transnationally. Social workers are members of a global profession, with international demands for their skills in the flows of professional transnationalism (Bartley et al., 2012). A study in New Zealand explored the demographics, induction, professional recognition and skills and experiences of 294 overseas-qualified social workers and found that the majority had migrated because of relationships (such as having a NZ partner) and were recruited from the UK and Ireland (Bartley et al., 2012). Bartley et al. (2012)

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found that whilst social workers in NZ were well inducted administratively, they felt that more induction was required for when working within First Nations communities in the New Zealand setting. At the local level, there are specific cultural practices and differences when working with First Nations Peoples (Bartley et al. 2012), which must be considered by social workers globally. There are localised challenges in preparing graduates for transnational employment opportunities (Bartley et al., 2012). Challenges confronting transnational social workers can include differences in employment practices, workplace cultures, legislation, political tensions as well as the recognition of their overseas educational qualifications (Bartley et al., 2012). Social work has a set of international and universal ethical standards, values and priorities but there is always a tension between universal and specific or local social work practices and ethics. Universal social work values associated with self-determination, confidentiality, being non-judgmental and respect for diversity are interpreted through national or regionally specific historical, social, political and cultural contexts (Bartley et al., 2012). Second, social workers are working in refugee resettlement work that intends to contribute to the reconstituting of home post migration. Research in Australia has found that whilst resettlement services cater to the material, health and social needs of refugees, they are less able to assist in developing a sense of belonging for people who have been uprooted from a familiar homeland to a culturally foreign and geographical distant new country such as Australia (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014a). When 77 humanitarian entrant refugees living in Western Australia were interviewed about their sense of belonging in Australia, the majority associated belonging as a civic right to access services, such as education, health care, employment and social security (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014a, p. 133). However, ‘while participants aspire to ethno-national belonging, it has not yet been achieved’, with recounted experiences of ‘outright racism’ to more subtle experiences of social exclusion due to cultural differences (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014a, p. 135). The lingering effects of the white history of Australia and the White Australia Policy were particularly identified by people of African and Middle Eastern backgrounds (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014a, p. 137). Refugees who were visibly different were often asked ‘where are you from?’, which ‘offers a constant reminder that they are not part of the taken-for-granted landscape of Australia’ and do not ‘belong’ (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014a, p. 137). It is important for social workers to interrogate normative and homogenous assumptions about migrants and refugees. Racism is intertwined with experiences of home, unequal power relations and normative identity markers (Lykke, 2010). Migrant and refugee experiences of resettlement and home are heterogenous and multiple, related to personal histories and biographies as well as access to basic human rights such as housing. A large study on refugee resettlement in Australia found that in photovoice images, participants documented ‘the remaking of home as a place of connection

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with others, of personal pride, of comfort and leisure, of family and commensality’ (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014b, p. 148). However, ‘structural issues’ included housing barriers associated with ‘the cost of housing, limited choice in the rental market, lack of public housing, poor quality, negative attitudes of real estate agents, lack of access to services, and complex tenancy procedures which are key factors influencing insecurity of tenure’ (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014b, p. 148). Overall, Fozdar and Hartley (2014a; 2014b) found that both ethno and civic belonging are important to refugees in Australia and that their rights as citizens were important parameters of home and belonging. Social workers are involved in negotiating transnational homes, in the reconstitution of home post migration in resettlement work and in responding to the traumatic effects of estrangements from a home country in situations of violence, war and alienation. The assertion of civic belonging may be one way of challenging the sense of exclusion refugees may feel when they are emotionally and materially resettling in a new home country. A sense of home and belonging is built through civil rights and improving access to services, which includes ‘education and training, health, employment, a liveable income, access to information, affordable housing, policing/ justice issues, transport issues (obtaining drivers’ licences), migration (family reunion), access to citizenship and providing social activities for youth’ (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014a, p. 138). As well, social workers can support policy initiatives and educational programs that recognise and respect different cultures; provide social and emotional support; encourage mutual trust and friendship and reduce racial and cultural tensions in the wider community (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014a, p. 139). This can include multilayered approaches such as family mentoring schemes, ‘anti-racism education’ (Fozdar & Hartley, 2014a, p. 139) and supporting macro social change through social activism that resists unfair government policies. A human rights and multi-systemic approach that ‘integrates the physical, social, political, economic, spiritual and cultural’ means that social workers are uniquely placed to work holistically with refugees and people seeking asylum (AASW, 2020, p. 9).

Conclusion Migration, home and belonging can be diversely lived across countries and geographical locations, contributing to a deeper analysis of the concept and complexities of home in social work. This chapter has provided a selfreflexive narrative by Dr Kalpana Goel to show how social workers themselves are transnational subjects who may have migrated to a new host country, often as skilled migrants. For new migrants and refugees, a sense of home and belonging interacts with access to material supports such as affordable housing and other basic human rights. Social workers can advocate for social justice for refugees, asylum seekers and new migrants, by

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making visible the effects of intersecting social inequalities and unjust state policies and political responses. The next chapter on classed mobilities and home presents social work research on meanings of home for privileged baby boomers and grey nomads, who are all homeowners.

References Ahmed, S. (1999). Home and away. Narratives of migration and estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2 (3), 329–347. Ahmed, S., Castaneda, C., Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (eds) (2003). Uprootings/ regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford UK: Berg Publishers. Ameganvi, A. (2019). What are the lived experiences of encampment of Togolese refugees in Krisan Refugee Camp (Ghana)? Social Work Honours Thesis. University of South Australia. Andersen, D.J. & Pedersen R.E. (2018). Practicing home in the foreign. The multiple homing practices of artisan journeymen on the tramp. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 8 (2), 82–90. Andrijasevic, R. (2003). The difference borders make: (Il)legality, migration and trafficking in Italy among Eastern European women in prostitution (pp. 251–272). In Ahmed, S., Castaneda, C., Fortier, A-M. & Sheller, M. (eds) Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford: Berg. Andrijasevic, R. (2010). Migration, agency and citizenship in sex trafficking. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW). (2020). Scope of social work practice: Refugees and people seeking asylum. North Melbourne: AASW. Bartley, A., Beddoe, L., Fouche, C. & Harington, P. (2012). Transnational social workers: Making the profession a transnational professional Space. International Journal of Population Research, 1–11. Accessed 7 June 2021, doi:10.1155/2012/527510. Davis, A. (2017). Belonging and ‘Unbelonging’: Jewish refugee and survivor women in 1950s Britain. Women’s History Review, 26 (1), 130–146. Dovey, K. (1985). Home and homelessness (pp. 33–64). In Altman, I. & Werner, C. (eds) Home environments. New York: Plenum Press. Fortier, A. (2001). ‘Coming home’: Queer migrations and multiple evocations of home. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4 (4), 405–424. Fozdar, F. & Hartley, L. (2014a). Civic and ethno belonging among recent refugees to Australia. Journal of Refugee Studies, 27 (1), 126–144. Fozdar, F. & Hartley, L. (2014b). Housing and the creation of home for refugees in Western Australia. Housing, Theory and Society, 31 (2), 148–173. Gardner, B., Alfrey, K.L., Vandelanotte, C. & Rebar, A.L. (2018). Mental health and well-being concerns of fly-in fly-out workers and their partners in Australia: A qualitative study. BMJ Open. Accessed 7 June 2021, 8:e019516. doi:10.1136/ bmjopen-2017-019516. Haas, A. & Osland, L. (2014). Commuting, migration, housing and labour markets: Complex interactions. Urban Studies, 51 (3), 463–476. Hoerder, D., Lucassen, J., & Lucassen, L. (2011). Terminologies and concepts of migration research (pp. xxv–xiii). In Bade, K., Emmer, P., Lucassen, L. & Oltmer, J. (eds) The encyclopedia of European migration and minorities: From the seventeenth century to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Kaplan, C. (2003). Transporting the subject: Technologies of mobility and location in an era of globalization (pp. 207–223). In Ahmed, S., Castaneda, C., Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (eds) Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Kenny, K. (2013). Diaspora. A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kissoon, P. (2015). Intersections of displacement: refugees’ experiences of home and homelessness. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Klis, M. & Karsten, L. (2009). Commuting partners, dual residences and the meaning of home. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 29, 235–245. Lykke, N. (2010). Feminist studies: A guide to intersectional theory, methodology, and writing. New York: Routledge. Mueller, D. (2015). Young Germans in England visiting Germany: Translocal subjectivities and ambivalent views of ‘home’. Population, Space & Place, 21, 625–639. Nash, C. (2003). They’re family! Cultural geographies of relatedness in popular genealogy (pp. 179–203). In Ahmed, S. et al. (eds) Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford, UK: Berg. Noble, G. (2005). The discomfort of strangers: Racism, incivility and ontological security in a relaxed and comfortable nation. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26 (1–2), 107–120. Plüss, C. & Chan, K.B. (eds) (2012). Living intersections: Transnational migrant identifications in Asia. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Probyn, E. (1996). Outside belongings. New York and London: Routledge. Saunders, R. (2003). The concept of the foreign: An interdisciplinary dialogue. Oxford: Lexington Books. UNHCR. (2020). Figures at a glance. Accessed 25 May 2021, www.unhcr.org/en-au/ figures-at-a-glance.html. Watindi, H. (2020). What does it mean for skilled African migrants living in South Australia, to age in a country other than that in which they were born? A Transnational ageing perspective. Social Work Honours Thesis. South Australia: University of South Australia. Wiles, J. (2008). Sense of home in a transnational social space: New Zealanders in London. Global Networks, 8 (1), 116–137. Zufferey, C., Yu, N. & Hand, T. (2020). Researching home in social work. Qualitative Social Work, 19 (5–6), 1095–1110.

11 Classed mobilities, older generations and home Kathryn Burgess, Carole Zufferey and Chris Horsell

Introduction Globally, the population is ageing. In Western contexts, the privileges of homeownership intersect with age, ability, class and economic status, shaping people’s mobility and sense of home. Drawing on a social work study that researched meanings of home for baby boomers and grey nomads in South Australia (Burgess, 2018), this chapter discusses the aged and classed privileges of baby boomers over 55 years of age, who were homeowners and travelled. There is limited research on how home is understood by baby boomers and Australian grey nomads, how they experience and understand ‘home’, how they feel about where they live and their expectations as they age. The romanticising of mobility for grey nomads and their sense of returning home after travelling was associated with their desires to live in safe homes, communities and neighbourhoods, to ‘age in place’, downsize and have a ‘lock up and leave home’. Four key themes were found about home and travel: ‘home as sanctuary’, ‘home as social connectedness’, ‘the freedom and space of travelling’ and ‘returning home after travelling’. In this chapter we also acknowledge that some older people with limited income and mobility are constrained from socially engaging in everyday activities, both outside and inside their houses (or homes). We discuss implications for social workers who are working at building a sense of home for people as they age.

Home and older generations The home environment and sense of place experienced by older people in different contexts has been an area of concern for numerous years (Rubinstein, 1989; Rowles, 1983), which has been connected to health and quality of life (Eyles & Williams, 2008; Oswald et al., 2006). Previous studies on ageing and home have explored meanings of home for older women and men living in different housing circumstances, which includes photovoice research on home with older adults in an assisted living facility (Lewinson, 2015); older women living in congregate housing and when transitioning DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-13

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from long-time residences into assisted living facilities and nursing homes (Leith, 2006; Johnson & Bibbo, 2014); people aged 80 years and over who are living in nursing homes (Rijnaard et al., 2016) and when receiving inhome care to support ‘ageing in place’ (Sixsmith et al., 2014). Home for older people can be a place imbued with habitual practices, feelings, a sense of identity and purpose (de Jonge et al., 2011), as well as connections to individual and collective experiences and past personal and professional identities (Lewinson, 2015). One nursing study in England examined meanings of home for baby boomers using photovoice, life histories and photographs to elicit deep layers of meaning (Board & McCormack, 2018; Board, 2014, p. 3). She found that having a sense of choice is central to the meaning of home, which is influenced by the broader policy and social contexts, demographic changes, different living arrangements and the family structures of baby boomers in the UK (Board, 2014). These studies have alluded to difficult transitions into assisted living facilities and the problematic notion of the ‘home away from home’ for those whose ‘home’ is now in residential facilities, including in nursing homes (Tuckett, 2007; Lewinson, 2015). In the context of congregate living in the US, Leith (2006, p. 331) argued that it is important to ‘integrate an aging-in-place philosophy into the design of a wide selection of long-term care housing options’, to ‘facilitate the ongoing, dynamic process of becoming and feeling at home’. However, as Tuckett (2007) and Vreugdenhil (2014) demonstrate, the move for older persons into aged care facilities is rarely a positive transition. Universally, care within these institutions is seen primarily in terms of tasks, with minimal, if any, attention given to the dimensions of social and affective care (Fine, 2013; 2014). Social workers are also operating within formalised structures, funding models and neoliberal imperatives that prioritise efficiencies and cost cutting and mitigate a sense of home and the provision of care beyond the instrumental. In Ontario, Canada, Struthers (2018) traced the ‘development of caregiving institutions and their discursive framing from the poorhouse to modern-day facilities’ (Chivers & Kriebernegg, 2018, p. 26). The Ontario government’s policy response to care homes for the aged from 1949 to 1972 showed that ‘long-term residential care was portrayed in a mostly positive light’, as delivering ‘comfort, dignity’, within a ‘homelike’ and ‘luxurious’ communal context, with very few ‘vulnerable older adults who were senile, bed-ridden’ (Struthers, 2018, p. 299). These representations reflected the broader post war suburban ‘home dreams’ for older generations (Struthers, 2018, p. 299). In contrast, Ontario’s nursing-home industry was increasingly being medicalised to free up hospital beds, regulated and scandalised, as not being ‘homelike’ (Struthers, 2018, p. 299). The unpleasant hospital-like atmosphere of medical facilities, with elevators and nurses, pastel colours, plastic vases, and disinfectant smells engendered an uneasy feeling about these ‘surrogate’ homes (Chivers & Kriebernegg, 2018, p. 21). By the 1990s, stories of ‘homes for the aged’ and ‘nursing homes’ converged, with medical themes associated with rising costs, overcrowded hospitals and panic

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about an aging population dominating over concerns about social care (Struthers, 2018, p. 299). These institutions as ‘homes’ reflect an interrelationship between medical and social and community care discourses, as further discussed in Chapter 12. More recently, a new emphasis on ‘community care’ or ‘aging in place’ has dominated conversations, with family care and family obligations moving back into the spotlight (Struthers, 2018, p. 299). In high income countries, people are living longer. This trend has significant implications for social policy and societal attitudes to ageing, including ideas about home, care, independence and what it means to age. The ageing of the population offers opportunities for privileged individuals to live longer and healthier lives. At the same time, it brings social challenges, particularly for the growing numbers of those living into very old age (Fine, 2013; 2014; Vreugdenhil, 2014). Globally, the population aged 65 years or over increased from 6% in 1990 to 9% in 2019. In Australia, between 2000 and 2020, the proportion of the population aged 65 years and over increased from 12.4% to 16.3% (ABS, 2020). In 2008, there were 5.5 million baby boomers in Australia (born in 1946 to 1965), who were starting to turn 65 and thinking of retiring, which is projected to increase to 7.5 million by 2050 (ABS, 2006; 2008; AIHW, 2018). The ageing population is expected to have significant financial and policy implications, with strains on retirement funds, health care, housing and the workforce of human and social services (DeVaney, 1995; Quine & Carter, 2006). The housing situation of the baby boomer cohort is influenced by economic restructuring, retrenchments, divorce, increased female participation in the workforce and delayed childbirth (Beer et al., 2006). Many baby boomers attain homeownership and prefer to remain in their own homes over entering nursing homes (National Seniors Australia, 2012). Previous research has found that those who reside in their homes for ten years and longer form stronger emotional investments with a sense of place, which is associated with the memories and personalised items that assist them in constructing their homes and identities (Scannell & Gifford, 2010; Riger & Lavrakas, 1981). Depending on their financial ability, some baby boomers will sell up their home, pack up and ‘hit the road’ traveling around Australia in their caravans and campervans. This group of baby boomers (usually over 55 years old) who take extended leisure vacations are identified as ‘grey nomads’ in Australian statistics (National Seniors Australia, 2012; Patterson et al., 2011). The ABS (2006) census defined grey nomads as being in ‘visitor only households’, reporting ‘no usual address’, not in the labour force and staying in a caravan, cabin or houseboat. The numbers of grey nomads in 2001 was 1,670 (15% of persons in ‘visitor only households’ with ‘no usual address’) which increased in 2006 to 2,469 (or 22%). Of these, 2,144 or 87% owned the dwelling (that is, a caravan, cabin or houseboat) outright, 30 were owners with a mortgage and 114 were renting the caravan, cabin or houseboat (ABS, 2017). Previous literature highlights that some grey nomads did not have a home to return to after ‘selling up’ because their life savings were in the caravan or campervan that they purchased (Westh, 2001; Glover &

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Prideaux, 2009; Davies & James, 2011). However, the perspectives of baby boomers and self-identified grey nomads discussed in this chapter were all homeowners and travelled for leisure. In the context of the active ageing policy agenda, later life leisure travel and the mobility of baby boomers has been constructed as ‘marvellous’ for independence and wellbeing (Hitchings et al., 2018, p. 7). Aged care policy reforms have occurred within the broader neoliberal political agenda that emphasises the role of the market in the provision of aged care services. The neoliberal discourse of individual responsibility can be evidenced in the shift towards private provision, self-funded retirement, superannuation and the policy rhetoric about successful and active ageing. For example, Australia has been implementing considerable reforms in the aged care sector since The Living Longer Living Better (LLLB) reform package was passed into legislation in 2013, with a vision for the aged care system up to 2022. This package represented a ten-year program of reform to the aged care system, with the aim of building a sustained consumer driven and market-based system that responded to a rapidly ageing population. This vision related to providing increased choice and flexibility for older consumers, supporting people to stay at home and in their communities, with increased access to home-based care support services as well as providing additional residential care places (Australian Government, 2021). In South Australia, local government policies such as the Ageing Strategy 2016–2021 (LGA, 2015) focused on building age-friendly places, space and experiences in local communities for ageing cohorts, including baby boomers. As Barusch (2013) has noted, there is a broader shift within public discourse and policy for senior citizens that acknowledge the significance of social inclusion and civic commitment, which includes the contribution of agefriendly communities and physical environments for the wellbeing of ageing populations. However, there is a gap between the lived experiences of ageing and the policy rhetoric about choice and control, which is limited for some people who are unable to afford expensive housing and care choices. Unequal power relations shape people’s choices and sense of control in relation to access to housing, home, leisure and travel. The baby boomer cohort tend to be well educated, financially better off than previous generations, generally have good health and have redefined sexuality, gender, leisure and employment. Baby boomers are known to have preferences when it comes to housing, leisure, social interaction, vacations, finances, employment and volunteering (LGA, 2015, p. 5). The privileged status of baby boomers when travelling can be akin to Bauman’s notion of the ‘tourist’. As Bauman (2000, p. 77) has argued, ‘Nowadays we are all on the move…moving homes or travelling to and from places which are not our homes.’ Yet, how we travel is stratified and classed. In the context of post modernity, Bauman’s (1996) concepts of tourists and vagabonds highlight social and economic inequalities in mobility across local and global borders, which shape a situated sense of home. Prior to the global coronavirus

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pandemic restrictions in 2020, those of us who were fortunate enough and had the privilege to do so, could consume exotic experiences and had the freedom to choose where to travel, as ‘tourists’ (Bauman, 2000; 1996). However, ‘vagabonds’ (such as ‘rough sleepers’ as discussed in Chapter 6) have no choice but to move on because they are unwelcome and out of place; they are ‘the victims of the world which made the tourists into its heroes’ (Bauman, 1996, p. 15). Research on the changing aspirations of baby boomers regarding later-life travel as they age is limited (Hitchings et al., 2018, p. 5). Much is known about the travel preferences of American ‘snowbirds’ but little is known about the Australian ‘grey nomads’ (Onyx & Leonard, 2007). The American snowbirds like to travel and stay at resorts that offer activities, whilst the Australian grey nomads like the freedom of travelling and constructing their own journey (Patterson et al., 2011). One ethnographic Australian study by Onyx and Leonard (2007) surveyed 216 grey nomads (mostly couples) and completed 26 interviews. They found that grey nomads were influenced by a sense of freedom, adventure, beauty, learning and social networks; that they often preferred bush camping and resisted their ‘commodification as aged travellers’ (Onyx & Leonard, 2007, p. 67). Patterson et al. (2011) also argued that Australian grey nomads prefer to be self-sufficient. Like the American snowbirds, grey nomads tend to travel to warmer parts of Australia, moving away from the colder climates (Onyx & Leonard, 2005). This chapter presents findings from a South Australian study that interviewed both baby boomers and self-identified grey nomads (who were not currently travelling) to explore how they constructed ‘home’.

The study Drawing on a social constructionist lens, it must be noted that baby boomers’ meanings of home are socially constructed within broader social inequalities and policy and cultural contexts. Social constructionism requires a critical stance towards taken for granted knowledge that shapes our own views and wider understandings of the world (Burr, 2006). Meanings of home are socially, historically and culturally derived, associated with how, where (and when) in the world we live. Socially constructed knowledge is sustained by social processes and interactions (Burr, 2006). Knowledge and social action go together and as there are many different understandings of the world, with this, comes different types of action (Burr, 2006). The social action that people can take depends on their social positioning, whereby some groups of people in society are attributed more power and privilege than others. Interpretations of the world, including meanings of home, are related to social locations and intersecting privileges or disadvantages, associated with income, age, ability, gender, class, cultural background, family composition and so on (Anthias, 2001; 2016; Christensen & Jensen, 2012; Winker & Degele, 2011). This brings attention to intersecting and unequal

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social and economic power and how people are differentially socially positioned to engage in the privilege of housing choice and leisure travel. The meanings of home for baby boomers and grey nomads were explored through completing semi-structured face to face interviews, with nine individuals, all over 55 years of age, who were identified as baby boomers and self-identified as grey nomads. The respondents were living in the City of Holdfast Bay council area in Adelaide because this area has the highest number of people in the 55–64 age group in South Australia (Hugo et al., 2008). The baby boomers and grey nomads who volunteered to participate in this study were aged between 55 and 71 years of age, of Anglo-Saxon background, privileged, middle class, married homeowners and none of them had recent migration experiences. All the participants, even the selfidentified grey nomads, had lived in their current fully owned home for six to 36 years. Those who have lived in their ‘homes’ for ten years or less reported that they had downsized. They were all born in South Australia. Qualitative in-depth exploration of how people subjectively interpret their lives and tell their own stories (Walter, 2013) can assist social workers to understand diverse experiences of home and belonging. Social work researchers can gain first-hand knowledge about people’s lived experiences, feelings, perceptions and how they see their world (Neuman, 2011; Bryman, 2008). The research interview questions were open and broad, such as: Can you explain what home means to you? What is important to you as you age? How do you feel about where you live? The data was thematically analysed (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006; Braun & Clarke, 2006).

Findings and discussion The four major themes about baby boomers’ and grey nomads’ meanings of home are discussed next: ‘home as sanctuary’, ‘home as social connectedness’, ‘the freedom and space of travelling’ and ‘returning home after travelling’. When discussing where and what home is, the participants spoke about their emotional connections to multiple homes – but their current, mostly fully owned house (or dwelling) was their home and ‘sanctuary’, which was also associated with their sense of social connectedness in their communities and neighbourhoods. Home as a place: ‘a sanctuary’ When participants were asked where home was for them, multiple places were referred to as home, including emotional connections to family, the rural geographical landscape, a special place such as the beach and the city of Adelaide. For example, one male participant discussed family, space, freedom and the emotional connectedness that he felt to a ‘bush’ place from his childhood:

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I still have some ties to Broken Hill [a small outback town in New South Wales], my sister is there, as are some of my friends and I love it because we used to go to ‘the bush’ a lot, and that is about the only thing I miss. This idea of home in ‘the bush’ draws on a long and complicated relationship with masculinised legends about battling ‘the bush’ in the Australian imaginary (Watson, 2016). Another participant said that she felt at home on the beach, which provided good memories and a sense of freedom. Another stated that Adelaide would always be his place of home because it was where he grew up, went to school and the lifestyle was ‘better’. He said: ‘Adelaide is always home to me – the DNA is in that sort of place’. In general, the ‘place’ in which participants felt most ‘at home’ was in their current house, often referring to the relationships they formed with family and friends within it. Participants discussed their current houses as homes, as they provided stability for them and their family. Home was: ‘Where there are people that I know and love’. When asked what home meant to them, two men strongly identified home as their current house being their ‘sanctuary’. For example, ‘It’s a sanctuary for me and my family, where we feel comfortable, and I spend most of my time’. As well, ‘It’s a place, it’s your sanctuary, it’s where you go to be yourself…it’s family, it’s the heart of your existence really’. Their ‘sanctuary’ (or home) was their house which was ‘comfortable’ and provided them the opportunity to relax after a day’s work, watch sports, build relationships with friends and family, ‘potter around’ in the garden and arrange ‘things’ ‘just the way I like it’. This description of home as a sanctuary is evident in the literature that posits home as a ‘retreat’ where one feels safe and secure, within a ‘sacred place’ (Zingmark et al., 1995; Leith, 2006). Home was a connection to a ‘place’ produced from subjective and historical experiences and memories, the relationships formed there and feelings of connection within their everyday lived environment. Twigg (2006) argued that the house as home signifies the quality of private space, as the path from the external to the internal world, away from the public domain and into the private. As well, when discussing the geographical location of their house, such as their local suburbs and neighbourhoods, the participants identified that this external environment also influenced their sense of home and belonging, which was linked to emotional wellbeing and social participation. Home as social and environmental connectedness The geographical location of their home was central to their wish to remain active and healthy, continuing their social activities and community connections (see also, de Jonge et al., 2011). Being close to shopping centres, public transport, medical care, the beach, entertainment venues and recreation areas such as parks were the reasons why they chose where they lived. For

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example, ‘I love where I live, very central to all the amenities and even though it may be a little noisy, it is a lively area which is what we like’. Similarly, another man stated that he enjoyed walking to the shop to get the paper on the weekend, as he greets and chats to people that he knows along the way. Therefore, in the same way that home predominantly signifies a comfortable place, with physical and emotional meanings that originate from the familiarity of individual practices and customs with the house, neighbourhood characteristics can contribute to a sense of home and the health and wellbeing of those living in it (Cristoforetti et al., 2011; Van Dijk et al., 2015; Day, 2007; Young et al., 2004). One exception was a 58-year-old female participant, who did not feel safe and secure in her home because of the gentrification of her neighbourhood. She stated that they no longer feel secure and relaxed because of the density of the housing and the increased population in the area. She was concerned about graffiti, trolleys full of rubbish left in driveways and the safety and security of her environment. She stated that she had a prowler in the backyard and police attending to this incident. She said: We’ve had graffitied houses in our street and constant shopping trolleys in our street, shopping trolleys left all over the footpath, sometimes there’s 13 trolleys parked on the driveway next door which is just hideous and they become filled with rubbish….I’m really starting to feel like the environment has changed quite a bit, that condensed feeling that changes the identity of where we are living, a lot of that sort of stuff going on as well, not home owners, they really don’t care…that sort of feeling when people start graffitiing other people’s homes, that’s just yuck, that’s a real invasion of your privacy, we can’t leave the car in the driveway, it has to be locked up in the garage overnight or it gets broken into. When imagining home, considerations about the safety of the house and its physical environment influence people’s decisions to move (Clark & Coulter, 2015). This is apparent for this participant who wanted to move because: ‘It has become a concrete jungle’. Previous literature indicates that experiencing disappointment with one’s neighbourhood and environment may contribute to social isolation because people’s integration within the community has been compromised. This social isolation affects the quality and quantity of relationships and their sense of belonging and marginalisation (ACSA, 2015). As Twigg (2006) states, privacy, security, safety and social identity are central to constructions and experiences of home. The participants in this study also articulated that the privacy, security and safety of their houses and local neighbourhoods were especially important to their daily lives and meanings of home. Home was therefore associated with a sense of safety and security and emotional connection to one’s house and neighbourhood. However, does the emotional connection to one’s house or dwelling as a home apply to ‘grey nomads’ who travel

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extensively throughout the year? Do ‘grey nomads’ have different perceptions of home and housing requirements?

Travelling baby boomers: grey nomads The four self-identified grey nomads in this study were all homeowners, mortgage free and had the financial ability to travel safely. They discussed their enjoyment and satisfaction when travelling in ‘comfort’, with ‘home like’ features in their caravan. However, they also felt an emotional connection to ‘returning home’, after the ‘freedom and space’ of travelling. Their appreciation of ‘coming home’ also displayed their attachment to the physical dwelling that they called home. Freedom and space While there is no one reason as to why baby boomers travel (Patterson et al., 2011), these retired ‘grey nomads’ enjoyed the ability to travel, see beautiful scenery, discover new places, meet new people and have the freedom to do ‘what they want, when they want’. As one male participant explained: Before retiring I worked long hours, day, night and weekends. I would work as much overtime that was available, so not being committed to a particular destination or time frame is liberating…when we travel on smaller holidays, it is sometimes to places where we have been before, as we know how long it will take us to get there and we are familiar with the area. However, on longer trips when we are away for three to four months travelling up to…any other warmer place in Australia, we tend to just drive and stop wherever we like, staying for as long as we want, either in a caravan park, or at the side of the road before moving on. Another male ‘grey nomad’ explained: Australia is amazing. We enjoy driving from place to place, with no fixed time or pre-arrangements, enjoying the sites and meeting new people and let’s not forget the warmer weather. Occasionally we stay at a caravan park but when we can we just pull up and set ourselves up for the night or however long we wish to stay…We have friends who go on planned trips through the travel agent, where day trips and other activities and their food are arranged for them, but we’re not into that so much. We like to just do our own thing, in our own time. A sense of timelessness, natural beauty, freedom and space was also expressed by a female participant:

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Practice considerations Driving along the coast is beautiful. The smell of the sea and the warmth of the sun shining on me as I drive…I pull up and sometimes sit on one of the bench chairs at the beach, make myself a cuppa while enjoying the scenery…There are no pressing time commitments when I travel, so I stay for as long as I like in that location before moving on. The freedom to be able to do this excites me.

Two out of the four grey nomads said that they enjoyed being able to ‘pull up’ (at free camps) and stay for as long as they wished, enjoying the scenery. They did stay at caravan parks, yet only for short periods of time before moving on to the next destination. As a female self-identified grey nomad said: ‘Home means to me feeling safe, secure…also when we are away travelling, as I am comfortable there, space and freedom to move. We travel around Australia in our caravan’. In contrast, when discussing travelling, the other baby boomers (who did not self-identify as ‘grey nomads’) preferred shorter luxury travel: ‘no, not going to grab a caravan but would travel in the car and go places, staying at a hotel’. Similarly, another baby boomer said: ‘My wife is dead against caravans, as she had them as a kid and she hated it. She said she would rather have two five star holidays every two years’. This shows how travelling as ‘tourists’ is also stratified and classed. ‘Returning home’ after traveling The four grey nomads in this study all had a ‘usual address’ that they returned to and a house they fully owned and called ‘home’. They all expressed their desire and love for travel but were privileged homeowners and did not report ‘no usual address’. What was notable was their new-found perspective and their sense of emotional connectedness when ‘returning home’. Their sense of home was connected to material objects, routines and their familiarity with their house and community. Although none of the participants had a recent history of migration of the permanent kind, they did travel seasonally and for long distances, to then return ‘home’. As one male participant said: We go away for three or four what we call smaller holidays as they would only be in South Australia and then once every two years, we go away for about four months or longer…each time we return from these holidays, I feel I am home. I walk into my house put my keys on the table, flick the kettle on for a cuppa and start unpacking the car. I like travelling but I certainly love returning home. Similarly, a female participant said: My husband and I have had many great times travelling before he passed. I now travel with a dear friend and we catch up with other friends along our way. I have always enjoyed travelling very much,

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seeing many different places, and meeting interesting people along the way. It’s a wonderful experience…[but] I do like pulling up in my driveway though, knowing I am home. I enter my house, put the keys on the key hook and make a cup of tea before unpacking the car. I walk out into my garden feeling relaxed and safe. I just feel at home. As well, one male participant stated he enjoyed travelling to warmer locations but having the comforts, ‘as if we were home’: We have a large caravan…We wanted to have as many comforts as possible when travelling, you know making it as if we were home. We travel for three to four months of the year, along the coast and through the middle parts of Australia. We like it where it is warmer…even though we enjoy travelling, as we have done so for many years, it’s good to be back home. I have noticed over recent years that with each holiday, I have begun to look forward to getting back home even more. I enter the house, my books, music and personal items are all there, I know I am home. These findings resonate with Pink’s (2004) research that home is associated with the senses (smells and sounds) and material and domestic objects in our everyday lives. These grey nomads aimed to replicate as ‘many [home] comforts as possible’ when travelling in caravans because the spaces and places of their houses and communities (such as their garden, kitchen and suburb) is what they called ‘home’. This feeling of home was likely to be related to the lengthy period that research participants lived in their current houses (six to 36 years), which shaped their sense of home and belonging. Despite different travelling habits, all participants were ‘tourists’, middle class homeowners and similarly grounded in their house called home. Even with the extended travel of grey nomads, for these homeowners, their house was home. Thus, home was related to having a good quality of life, a comfortable house, a connection to personal objects, to being connected to the local community and where friends and family are. They also mostly wanted to remain in their own homes as they aged. When asked what is important to them as they age, the participants had already downsized or imagined their future homes as downsized and had a desire to ‘age in place’ (in their local area). One participant was considering moving to a retirement village.

Imagining a future home The findings indicated that these middle class baby boomers who are homeowners wanted to be supported in safe and age-friendly environments, to ‘age in place’, to have ‘lock up and leave’ housing, as well as have access to downsizing as housing options.

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Age in place All participants expressed that they preferred to stay in their own home and ‘age in place’. As one participant said: ‘I want to “age in place” and would renovate my home in a heartbeat’. The participants did have the resources to modify their houses as needed, to enable them to remain as independent as possible, as they aged in their own homes. One male expressed a desire to ‘age in place…in my home and enjoy the beautiful city’, as well as having a ‘lock up and leave home’ so he can travel overseas, maybe ‘studying, volunteering, different pursuits’. The idea of a ‘lock up and leave home’ implied a low maintenance house and a travelling lifestyle. Consistent with the active ageing policy agenda, these baby boomers expressed the importance of maintaining their physical and mental wellbeing and wanted to access services and activities that enabled them to remain healthy and active. These findings resonate with research by Olsberg and Winters (2005), which highlighted that people who are homeowners tend to want to ‘age in place’. There are two different meanings of ‘ageing in place’, one being associated with remaining in one’s home and the other as remaining in one’s local geographical area (Olsberg & Winters, 2005). The participants in this study tended to conflate a safe house and neighbourhood and believed that both were important to their sense of home. Downsizing Downsizing is a typical pattern of housing mobility and is particularly prevalent to those who are ‘empty nesters’ (Beer et al., 2011; Judd et al., 2014). Downsizing occurs because of the desire for a change in lifestyle, the inability to take care of the garden and home, children leaving home, retirement, changes in relationships and the impact of health and disability (Olsberg & Winters, 2005). However, there is a mismatch between aspirations to downsize in the local area and existing housing stock, with limited downsizing options, housing choices and affordability (Judd et al., 2014). Whilst three out of the nine participants had already downsized, others were also ‘looking at downsizing in the next couple of years’. One participant stated that he would move from his current home and downsize, because his children have now moved into their own homes, and he and his wife would like a smaller more manageable home. Another male participant stated he would move to a more accessible home, as they lived on a slanting block. He connected housing options with ageing and health: ‘as we are ageing, and my health is declining, we are already thinking of what our options could be for when we move’. Participants mostly stated that their preference would be to downsize within the same geographical location, as they were familiar with the area and family and friends lived nearby. Only one participant, the previously discussed 58-year-old female participant, who was not yet retired and did not identify as a grey nomad,

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was unhappy with her neighbourhood. She stated that she and her partner will be moving out of the area, as they wanted ‘enough space to move’. A retirement village as home One participant who was in his 70s was considering moving into a retirement village, accessing residential care and associated support options. He stated that he and his wife have been researching retirement villages and have a set of criteria that they believed they needed. They wanted to be able to remain independent within that retirement village, to be able to ‘come and go’ as they pleased, to cook, entertain guests and rest peacefully. Facilities such as a gym and a common area were also very important to him, as he wanted to remain active, to exercise and socialise. He wanted to choose a future housing option that supported his aspirations for achieving a healthy and active lifestyle. He also mentioned that he did not want any gates to get in or out of the village, as this was akin to being ‘locked in like a prisoner’. If they were to move into a retirement village, he believed that one of the challenges would be that he would not own the home, that it would not be his ‘own’ bricks and mortar, which made him feel vulnerable and less secure.

Implications for social work These research findings vividly portrayed classed privileges of home through gathering the perspectives of baby boomers who are more likely to travel than previous generations. Baby boomers in this study wanted to: downsize, have access to social activities and service supports, ‘age in place’ in a safe environment, have a ‘lock up and leave’ home and have high expectations of what retirement villages should offer. The social policy and social work implications of this study are associated with supporting the development of diverse housing options that include the possibility of downsizing in the local area; ensuring that the safety of the local area is not compromised by gentrification and listening to the wishes of baby boomers about their future housing aspirations and choices. This study highlighted interrelations between ‘meanings of house (objective space), home (emotional space) and dwelling (comfortable space)’ (Cristoforetti et al., 2011, p. 225). Both the baby boomers and grey nomads had a sense of emotional connection to objective spaces (such as their neighbourhoods, gardens, material objects) and their comfortable houses as ‘home’, to which they felt the strongest emotional attachment. As well, their sense of security and belonging was related to maintaining their long-term relationships with the people living in their local community. When considering their expectations as they age, the conveniences of their urban geographical location was important, especially when discussing ‘ageing in place’. They wanted to remain active and healthy, be connected to local social activities and feel safe and secure in their current houses and urban geographical location. The comforts

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of one’s house and the safety and security of their environment contributed to a feeling of rootedness, connectedness and belonging. However, whilst all participants acknowledged that the house in which they lived was where they felt most at ‘home’, they also felt emotional connections to multiple places. Their travel experiences were associated with a sense of freedom, seeing beautiful scenery, meeting new people and discovering new places, with no time constraints or commitments, unlike their previous experiences in the workforce. These findings resonate with Bell and Ward’s (2000) research on homeownership, temporary movement and seasonal migration, which always implied ‘a return to home’. For the participants in this study, the sense of space and freedom they experienced when travelling was triumphed by returning ‘home’ (akin to being ‘tourists’), which would differ if the grey nomads who were interviewed had no house to return to (akin to being ‘vagabonds’). Subsequent research could explore more diverse travelling narratives and the perspectives of ‘houseless’ grey nomads about what constitutes their sense of having temporary or permanent ‘home/s’. When taking a broader social work and social justice perspective, it must be acknowledged that these findings can contribute to the development of age-friendly communities as they relate to the wellbeing of highly privileged senior citizens who are homeowners. This study did not capture meanings of home for those with limited financial choices and options, who cannot afford to travel and are unable to ‘age in place’. The research sample did not include people with migration experiences, of diverse cultural identities, nationalities, ethnicities, religions and social classes. Therefore, more research is needed about intersecting influences on home for older generations and how financial inequalities can contribute to their sense of home and housing choices as they age. With the commitment from different layers of government to support people to stay at home longer during their ageing years and a shift in the expectations of the ageing population, further research could consider how a larger cohort of the ageing population may want to ‘age in place’, in both urban and rural communities.

Conclusion Intersectional social work research can interrogate how both privileges and oppressions contribute to understandings of home. This chapter presented the perspectives of a small group of privileged baby boomers and grey nomads who lived in a high-income suburb in South Australia. It showed how economic privileges, homeownership and classed mobility shaped their meanings of home. Home was inextricably linked to the social status of being homeowners living in comfortable homes and safe neighbourhoods. Future housing aspirations resonated with neoliberal aged care policy discourses about choice and control, active ageing and taking individual responsibility for retirement. However, it is important for social workers to consider that these privileges are not equally distributed to all people as they

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age. The next chapter examines disability, ableism and home and notes that experiences of violence and abuse contribute to the making of disabling homes and communities.

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Vreugdenhil, A. (2014). ‘Ageing in place’: Front line experiences of intergenerational family carers of people with dementia. Health Sociology Review, 23 (1), 43–52. Walter, M. (2013). Social research methods. South Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: Oxford University Press. Watson, D. (2016). The bush. Penguin. Westh, S. (2001). Grey nomads and grey voyagers. Australasian Journal on Ageing, 20 (3), 77–81. Winker, G. & Degele, N. (2011). Intersectionality as multi-level analysis: Dealing with social inequality. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 18 (1), 51–66. Young, A.F., Russell, A. & Powers, J.R. (2004). The sense of belonging to a neighbourhood: Can it be measured and is it related to health and wellbeing in older women? Social Science and Medicine, 59 (2), 2627–2637. Zingmark, K., Norberg, A. & Sandman, P.O. (1995). The experience of being at home throughout the life span. Investigation of persons ages 2–102. International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 41, 47–62.

12 Disability, social work and home Carole Zufferey and Chris Horsell

Introduction This chapter focuses on disability, home and social work, which is under researched in social work literature. The notion of disability is contested. The idea of having a disability is a multidimensional concept. It is associated with multiple ‘physical, mental, intellectual and sensory impairments’ (Prince, 2016, p. 188). The term disability has historically encompassed a range of medical categories, such as mental illness, physical, intellectual, learning, developmental and cognitive disabilities, neurological and orthopaedic disorders, health conditions and low vision and deafness (Albrecht et al., 2001). Some children are born with disabilities, but most disabilities are experienced later in life, affecting our ‘cognitive, intellectual, physical and social functioning’ as we age (Albrecht et al., 2001, p. 1). There are also debates about terminology, whether the term ‘disabled people’ (as preferred in the UK) or ‘people with a disability’ (as preferred in America, Canada and Australia) is used (Prince, 2016, p. 175). Mostly, in this book, we use the term ‘people with a disability’. Furthermore, social work scholar Bob Pease (2010) has written about reflecting on disablism, ableism and able-bodied privileges, which we cannot avoid as authors of this book. Disablism refers to conscious and unconscious social assumptions and practices that promote unequal treatment of people with actual or presumed disabilities, at structural, cultural and personal levels (Pease, 2010, p. 155). Key considerations include the physical inaccessibility of buildings and ‘homes’; dominant cultural norms that privilege able-bodied people and personal prejudices and patronising practices (Pease, 2010, p. 156). Disablism is about the ‘production of disability’ and ableism is the ‘production of ableness’ (Pease, 2010, p. 156). Ableism validates abled bodies and devalues and renders negative ‘impairments’, which is internalised by both disabled and non-disabled people, reinforcing a sense of self-worth (Pease, 2010, p. 156), and arguably, a sense of home and belonging. We write this chapter as two able-bodied social workers and academics. We have not experienced oppression through disability and cannot speak of that experience. However, we have most likely internalised ableism.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-14

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Disability policy context Social assumptions and consequent policy and service responses to disability have a historical context. Historically, in the UK the English Poor Law (1601) designated state responsibility for people unable to care for themselves when their families were unable to assist. There was a complex relationship between community, family, religious and medical supports, and the provision of public welfare was dehumanising and stigmatising (Braddock & Parish, 2001, p. 23). After the 17th century, the rise of medical and custodial residential institutions socially and geographically segregated people with a disability (Braddock & Parish, 2001, p. 52). With the expansion of new state institutions in the 19th century, many people with disabilities were moved from their communities into asylums and workhouses. Social work ‘played a part in these processes, assisting with identification and diagnosis and arranging the institutionalisation of many of those identified as having learning difficulties, physical and sensory impairments, mental health difficulties or infirmity due to older age’ (Boxall & Beresford, 2013, p. 591). These stigmatising practices gave rise to collective, political activism in the late 20th century. People with differing disabilities shared oppressive histories of segregation, abuse, neglect, forced sterilisation, stigma and institutionalisation (Braddock & Parish, 2001, p. 52), affecting their sense of home and community belonging. Since the 1960s, the process of ‘deinstitutionalisation’ moved people with disabilities and mental illnesses out from institutions into community-living, with the intention to ‘support autonomous decision-making and full participation in society’, which has variably occurred in some European Union countries, the UK, USA, Canada and Australia (McCarron et al., 2019). McCarron et al. (2019) completed a systemic review of 13 studies about how a move from a residential to a community setting affected the quality of life (QoL) for adults (over 18) with intellectual disabilities. They found that a move to a community-based setting was associated with improved QoL compared with living in a larger institution (McCarron et al., 2019), supporting the benefits of deinstitutionalisation. The individualist, biomedical model of disability has traditionally presumed the biological reality of impairment, which has shaped deficit responses to disability (Williams, 2001). The influences of the sociological and social science disciplines have contributed to the social model of disability. The social model of disability has arguably contributed to the development of individualised funding, person-centred models of care, deinstitutionalisation, and the improved physical accessibility of buildings (and homes) (Horsell, 2020). In the 1980s, UK sociologist Michael Oliver (1983; 2013, p. 1024) first discussed individual and social models of disability when teaching social work students, to distinguish between ‘disabled by our impairments’ and ‘the disabling barriers we faced in society’, whilst not claiming that the ‘social model was an all-encompassing framework’.

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The social model has since been criticised for failing to focus on impairment and conflating ‘difference’ amongst the wide range of people labelled as ‘disabled’ (Boxall & Beresford, 2013, p. 590), including differences associated with age, sexuality, class, gender and race (Oliver, 2013). Oliver (2013, p. 1026) argued that emphasising impairment and difference created divisions within the disability movement and did not protect people with a disability from government cutbacks, that justified providing more support to people ‘who are severely impaired (and hence deserving) and not to those who are not (and hence undeserving)’. In the UK context, he argued: ‘Our differences are being used to slash our services as our needs are now being assessed as being moderate, substantial or critical and many local authorities are now only providing services to those whose needs are critical.’ Thus, to defend access to benefits and services, people with a disability have been forced ‘back into the role of tragic victims’ (Oliver, 2013, p. 1026). In the Australian context, Horsell (2020) has examined current policy discourses and ableism in the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) using Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ (WPR) framework. He argued that the concept of disability remains locked in the medical paradigm because the decision-making powers continue to be possessed by ableist state policy institutions that exercise ‘significant control and surveillance’ over people with a deemed ‘biological impairment’ (Horsell, 2020, p. 4). The background policy influences on the development of the Australian NDIS agenda include the Shut-out: The experience of people with disabilities and their families in Australia (2009) report; National Disability Strategy (NDS) 2010–2020; Productivity Commission Report: Disability Care and Support (2011); Every Australian Counts grassroots campaign (launched in 2011), and the NDIS Act 2013. The Shut-Out report bought together the voices of people with disabilities, families, carers, friends and support organisations, highlighting an extensive range of areas of exclusion, including housing, which informed the development of the NDS 2010–2020 (Hallahan, 2015). Importantly, the suggested policy solutions placed an emphasis on addressing negative community attitudes and to a lesser degree, structural barriers (Australian Government, 2009). The NDS 2010–2020 provided an overall strategic framework for addressing some structural barriers that prevented people with a disability from exercising their rights, including access to community participation, buildings, justice, economic security, personal supports, education and health (Australian Government, 2009). The Productivity Commission inquiry into disability care and support highlighted four key themes: limited funding for disability services; uncertainty in how services are funded; a lack of service integration and a lack of choice and control for people with disabilities and their carers (Australian Productivity Commission, 2011). Subsequently, the Commission recommended the development of the NDIS, to increase funding and combine funding under one model. The Shut-Out report (2009) and the Productivity Commission highlighted the humiliation and exclusion that people with a disability experienced,

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while obscuring the evidence of powerful and vested interests, particularly regarding resource allocation concerned with disability services. The policy solution was the provision of more welfare provisions but within a market model. While the Shut-Out report did point to areas of reform which shaped the NDS 2010–2020, including appropriate access to education, health, justice, employment, physical infrastructure, appropriate housing and specialist services, the Productivity Commission focused primarily on service reform. The subsequent Everybody Counts campaign, including service providers, carers and disability peaks, advocated for a better service system, underpinned by an individualised, person-centred, needs-based discourse, as enshrined in the NDIS Act 2013. As Horsell (2020, p. 3) argued, ableist policy assumptions construct disability ‘within a neoliberal and market agenda’ and the notions of choice and control remain unproblematised. In the NDIS, the idea of ‘choice and control’ assumes that there is an adequate supply of providers shaped by market mechanisms; that people have access to information, the capacity and cultural knowledge to use it, and that people with a disability will be taking on ‘the role of employer’ (Horsell, 2020, p. 7). What is invisible from these policy assumptions is that the choice of services is very limited in rural and regional areas; there is a dearth of services that respond to dual diagnoses, and questions have been raised about the capacity of the market to respond to First Nations people with a disability, and to people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds (Horsell, 2020). Bacchi (2009) has argued that policy assumptions can have disempowering effects on the people who are subjects of government policies, including discursive, subjectification and lived effects. The discursive effects relate to the language and discourses used about people with disabilities, in government processes and decision making. As well, the social positioning of ‘disabled people’ through categorisations and dividing practices of deserving/ undeserving (or us/them) has subjectification effects. The lived or material effects include the reduction of payments and benefits to people deemed as having a ‘less serious’ disability (Bacchi, 2009; Oliver, 2013). These policy assumptions and their effects can contribute to supporting or diminishing people’s sense of belonging and home. Policy practices affect people’s sense of social connectedness, of being valued, capable and empowered citizens, who belong to a community and society. There has been an uneasy relationship between social policy, social work, social control and responses to people with disabilities (Stainton et al., 2010). However, the social approach to disability has changed the policy and practice landscape and provided opportunities for social work engagement with disability more aligned with human rights and social justice (Horsell, 2020). The social model of disability asserts that people are ‘not disabled by their bodies but by society’ and that institutional discrimination produces disabling experiences (Pease, 2010, p. 152), including through ableist policy discourses. Ableist assumptions and unequal power relations are not just associated with

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unequal access to resources but are embodied and experienced (Pease, 2010). Thus, feelings and meanings about home, housing and domestic life cannot be dissociated from the materiality of the body (Imrie, 2004). Yet, experiences of dis/ability and ableism are diverse and intersects with other areas of oppression associated with, for example, poverty, class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and age (Pease, 2010, p. 154). Ableist social relations are embodied and interact with racism, sexism, ageism, classism, homophobia and so on, shaping meanings and experiences of home and belonging.

Disabling homes and communities When thinking about home for people with disabilities, home can be a physical environment, such as a residential house or institutional care setting, as well as an interactional and relational space that provides for a sense of home and belonging (Imrie, 2004). The places and spaces that contribute to a sense of home and belonging can also be inaccessible and threatening to people with a disability. There are ‘tensions between ideal conceptions of the home and the material, lived, domestic realities of disabled people’ (Imrie, 2004, p. 760). These tensions include people with a disability experiencing violence and abuse within their own ‘homes’. People with a disability experience high rates of abuse and violence. In a systematic review of 20 primary research studies published between 1990–2010, Hughes et al. (2012) found that, despite gaps in research in some low–middle-income countries and differences in types of disability and violence, adults with disabilities (including people with a mental illnesses) are at a higher risk of violence than are non-disabled adults. In the Australian context, the Royal Commission into Violence, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability established in 2019 highlighted that despite the closure of large institutions for housing people with disability and the subsequent development of groups homes, institutional forms of violence, abuse and neglect continues. The Royal Commission (2020) report provided evidence from a range of witnesses (including people with a disability living in group homes) and highlighted that far from feeling protected, significant numbers of residents experienced sexual assault, physical and verbal abuse. The report highlighted that while experiences were varied, issues such as a lack of adequately trained staff, lack of control over their own lives and autonomy in their choice of accommodation, contributed to ongoing experiences of abuse, violence and exploitation, particularly for people with intellectual disabilities. When reviewing how disability accommodation services addressed the abuse and neglect of people with intellectual disability in Australia, Robinson and Chenoweth (2011) found that more attention needed to be paid to systemic and institutional cultures of abuse. They argued that ‘the prevention and protection of people from harm’ is focused ‘primarily on responding to individual instances of maltreatment’ (Robinson & Chenoweth, 2011, p. 63).

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The managerial, procedurally driven, compliance-based systems that respond to the abuse and neglect of people with intellectual disability in residential facilities may resolve ‘individual instances of abuse’ but fails to systemically recognise and respond to ‘patterns and trends of abuse and neglect’ (Robinson & Chenoweth, 2011, p. 70). They argued: Complaints-based systems rely on articulate, assertive and empowered complainants. The abuse and neglect of highly marginalized people – those living in segregated settings, in prisons, with multiple disability, with very high support needs – is less likely to be uncovered within a complaints regime, unless that person has a staunch advocate. (Robinson & Chenoweth, 2011, p. 71) The prevention of abuse needs collective action, resourcing and a strategic focus, in dialogue with the sector, with people with disabilities and families and advocates who support them (Robinson & Chenoweth, 2011, p. 71). These concerns about abuse and violence are central to considering the safety of homes and communities for people with disabilities. An underrepresented area of research is gendered violence experienced by women with an intellectual disability (Pestka & Wendt, 2014). Women with an intellectual disability have a heightened vulnerability to abuse in institutional settings and in residential homes (Pestka & Wendt, 2014; Wendt & Zannettino, 2015). Women with an intellectual disability are ‘being abused by multiple perpetrators over longer periods of time’ and are ‘less likely to report or disclose abuse’ (Wendt & Zannettino, 2015, p. 190), which includes sexual violence and assault by service providers. In a small South Australian study about significant relationships and the concept of belonging in the lives of four women with a mild intellectual disability, it was found that women ‘shared similar stories of devaluation and rejection in childhood’ and ‘the women’s search for belonging contributed to their vulnerability to exploitation and abuse in domestic violence relationships’ (Pestka & Wendt, 2014, p. 1031). Gendered discourses of passive femininity and constructions of women with an intellectual disability as being needy, vulnerable and dependent shape how domestic violence is seen to be normative and an individual, ‘personal problem’ for women with an intellectual disability (Pestka & Wendt, 2014, p. 1031). A sense of safety, home and belonging is severely threatened and disrupted when experiencing abuse and violence. When considering community-based abuse and violence, literature on urban design and urban social work can contribute important knowledge. For example, William (2016, p. 79) has highlighted that people with a disability are denied their ‘right to the city’. When discussing the relationship between urbanisation, people with disabilities and social work, Prince (2016, p. 178) explains how stigma and the urban design of cities are disabling, such as through physical inaccessibility. Domestic spaces and community places are rarely designed with the needs of people with disability in mind. Ableism

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positions people with a disability as outsiders and as deviant from the norm (Prince, 2016). Ableist urban design can contribute to (or diminish) a sense of home and community belonging that may be invisible to able-bodied social workers. In the UK, US, Canada and some EU countries, ‘hate crime’ legislation has been passed to respond to discriminatory acts associated with ‘race’, religious belief, disability, sexuality and transgender (Hall & Bates, 2019, p. 100). In England and Wales, there has been a reported increase in disability hate crimes, although far lower than race-related hate crimes (Hall & Bates, 2019). A Scottish study co-designed with a learning disability advocacy organisation and the local division of Police Scotland included ‘walking interviews’ and focus groups with 15 people with learning disabilities (Hall & Bates, 2019). Hall and Bates (2019, p. 109) found that ‘disabled people’ are commonly subjected to ‘low-level microaggressions’ and ‘prejudicial attitudes and actions’ that ‘create anxiety and fear’. This research documented and geographically mapped hate crime and harassment in the city; social encounters; routes into and mobility within the city; spaces of fear and anxiety, as well as inclusion and welcome (Hall & Bates, 2019, p. 100). There is a dynamic relationship between people and community places, which includes both negative and positive emotional experiences and encounters (Hall & Bates, 2019). Hall and Bates (2019, p. 100) found that ‘disabled people experience significant social discrimination and spatial exclusion in their everyday lives in the city’. For people with a disability, disabling community attitudes affect ‘everyday movements through the city and encounters with others’ which produce a sense of ‘anxiety and precarity, as well as experiences of belonging’ (Hall & Bates, 2019, p. 100). Therefore, Hall and Bates (2019, p. 100) argue that disability ‘hate crime’ discourse needs to shift from the focus on ‘individual victimisation’ to examining prejudice in social relations and wider sociopolitical and environmental contexts. The action for change needs to focus on ‘the agency and desire of disabled people to be included in the city’ and how to support this (Hall & Bates, 2019, p. 109). A sense of home can be supported by challenging negative and prejudicial social attitudes more broadly and enabling ‘inclusionary spaces’ and ‘welcoming encounters’ as ‘safe havens’ (Hall & Bates, 2019, p. 109). This research advocacy for social and community inclusion from the perspectives of people with a disability can contribute to policy initiatives that build a sense of home and belonging.

Age, disability and institutional homes When considering ageing and disability, ‘older adults living with a disability prefer to remain in their own homes as they age’ (Ellison et al., 2011, p. 175). However, an Australian study of 60 individuals with a disability aged 50 years or more found that without additional community-based supports, ‘people with a disability may not be able to avoid moving into residential aged care’ (Ellison et al., 2011, p. 175). Research participants who received community-based aged care supports reported benefits such as

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‘opportunities to develop relationships, maintain daily living skills and participate in community activities’ (Ellison et al., 2011, p. 175). For other research participants, the ‘undesired early relocation into residential aged care or congregate disability services appeared inevitable’ (Ellison et al., 2011, p. 175). The notion of care institutions being like ‘home’ is ‘held up as an unquestioned good’ in the context of the ‘widespread desire of people to age in place…in their homes’ (Chivers & Kriebernegg, 2018, p. 20). This notion of ‘home is a thorny concept that benefits from interdisciplinary and international scrutiny’ because capturing the image of home to people of diverse backgrounds is a perennial challenge (Chivers & Kriebernegg, 2018, p. 20). In the field of aging studies and institutional care, Chivers and Kriebernegg (2018) examine how institutional care or ‘nursing homes’ are experienced and imagined, as both a ‘home’ and a ‘hospital’. The social, cultural and political messages related to the ‘homelike’ ideal associated with long-term residential ‘nursing home, care home, retirement home, assisted living’ or other forms of institutional care are virtually unquestioned (Chivers & Kriebernegg, 2018, p. 15). Stories of ‘home’ and ‘care’ told from different perspectives can highlight the multiple and subjective experiences of the ambiguities and contradictions of institutional life (Chivers & Kriebernegg, 2018). For example, when recounting the long-term institutionalisation of her young husband after a car accident, Lanoix (2018, p. 44) argued that ‘when a close family member is institutionalized, those who are left behind are faced with an incomplete or somewhat broken home’. Whilst she initially felt comfort in her husband moving to a ‘home’ after the transitory nature of numerous medical settings, Lanoix (2018, p. 45) discussed the ‘twohome syndrome’ as a ‘liminal space’: ‘one is never quite at home when one is at the old home [where she used to live with her husband], and the other place [care home] is not really a home’. In the new ‘home’, which is not experienced as a home, she negotiated institutional structures and a lack of privacy and sat in an uncomfortable chair, watching television with her husband who spent most of his time in bed (Lanoix, 2018, p. 44). She sensed that her constant presence disrupted the care staff and interrupted their ‘flow of care’ and ‘patterns of work’ (Lanoix, 2018, p. 45). She intended to encourage ‘homelikeness’ but never achieved it because she realised that home cannot be produced by institutionalised physical environments and practices of care (Lanoix, 2018, p. 45). A study in Canada was also concerned about young people with a disability having to access institutional care (Gibson et al., 2012). They found that as ‘long-term care is primarily oriented to elderly persons and affordable accessible housing is limited’, ‘younger disabled adults may be living in circumstances that do not meet their health needs and contribute to their social exclusion’ (Gibson et al., 2012, p. 211). There are issues raised about institutional homes for older people and people with disabilities, reflected in the interrelationships between medical and social and community care discourses (Struthers, 2018), as discussed in the previous chapter.

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Dignity enabling homes The dwelling or home environment has been of considerable concern, especially for people with mobility impairments (Imrie, 2004). The ‘home environment’ is more than a physical dwelling, it is a site of social interaction, a relational space and a place imbued with meaning (Imrie, 2004). In Ontario, Canada, Gibson et al. (2012) completed interviews with ten younger adults (ages 18–55) with mobility disabilities, and with ten ‘decision-makers’, including policy makers, program administrators and discharge planners. The study explored what was considered an ‘adequate’ home environment for younger adults with ‘significant mobility disabilities’ (Gibson et al., 2012, p. 211). The people with a disability who were consulted lived in different housing arrangements, including supported housing units, a private home with direct funding, complex continuing care units, a university residence with direct funding and a transitional care unit (Gibson et al., 2012, p. 213). Gibson et al.’s (2012, p. 211) study found that a ‘dignity enabling home’ allowed access to the maintenance of meaningful relationships; community and civic life; control and flexibility in daily activities; opportunities for selfexpression; respectful relationships with care attendants; opportunities to participate in school, work or leisure; and physical and ontological security. As one study participant said: Home is the place where I have choice, control, dignity, privacy, where I can socialize, entertain, people can come in. There’s a certain sense of pride to it and you have some flexibility about when you get up, when you’re going to go to bed, what you’re going to wear, how you’re going to wear your hair, what you’re going to eat. To me that’s pretty simple. (in Gibson et al., 2012, p. 211) The social conditions of the home environment can provide a sense of belonging, safety and security. A disability enabling home supports people’s physical and psychological wellbeing and engagement in employment and social life (Gibson et al., 2012). However, for people with mobility disabilities, the private spaces and public places of home may be ‘at odds’ with ideal conceptions of home (Imrie, 2004) and may even be inaccessible. Research that draws on the embodiment of home and the perspectives of people with different disabilities complicates how disability and home is imagined and constructed by ableist social workers. Previous research has focused on lived experiences, including a study on domestic violence as experienced by women with a learning disability (Pestka & Wendt, 2014); the city as experienced by people with a learning disability (Hall & Bates, 2019); and the dwelling, home environment and meanings of home as experienced by people with physical mobility disabilities (Imrie, 2004; Gibson et al., 2012). This lived experience research challenges ableist assumptions and extends debates in disability and social work literature,

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beyond the ‘medical as deficit’ or ‘disability as socially oppressive’ paradigms. In Portugal, Loja et al. (2012, p. 190) interviewed seven people with a visible impairment (four men and three women) about their lived experiences of ableist discourses. They found that ableism and ‘the non-disabled gaze invalidates impaired bodies undermining the physical capital of disabled people’ (Loja et al., 2012, p. 200). However, ‘the stories of disabled people are marked by strategies of resistance that embody individual and collective struggles for recognition’ (Loja et al., 2012, p. 201). More research is needed on how ableism varies across different countries, in diverse people’s lives, as well as how ability intersects with class, sexuality, age, race and so on. More social work research is needed about ‘the types of agency and resistance that emerge out of the struggle against the non-disabled imaginary’ (Loja et al., 2012, p. 201). As well, co-designing social work research with people with disabilities about their multidimensional experiences of home would enhance social work research and practice knowledge.

Implications for social work There has been growing interest in participatory community action, co-designed research models, the involvement of service users in research and service user-led research (Boxall & Beresford, 2013, p. 587). However, there are historical and organisational tensions for social work practitioners and researchers who wish to ‘challenge medicalised individual model understandings of service users’ (Boxall & Beresford, 2013, p. 592). Social work research has tended to align itself with medicalised disability research rather than radical social work approaches (Boxall & Beresford, 2013, p. 591). As well, contemporary neoliberal policies and organisations continue to ‘reflect the disabling practices of traditional social work approaches’ (Boxall & Beresford, 2013, p. 592). Social workers cannot avoid the unequal power relations between service users and service providers. However, broadening social work research to further enhance our understanding of service users’ experiences can ‘offer a helpful basis for collaboration’ between disability studies and social work (Boxall & Beresford, 2013, p. 587). Social work is a profession that occupies the space between the state and its citizens, allocating collective resources through human service organisations (Prince, 2016). The responses of social workers affect how people with various disabilities are supported, shaping their experiences of home. However, social workers are also ableist and people with a disability report experiencing provider-led (not person-centred) responses and socio spatial exclusions in social care (Prince, 2016, p. 182). Further social work research is needed to examine what is considered ‘home’ for people of diverse backgrounds and with differing abilities. Although there has been an uptake of disability studies in academic institutions, there are concerns about academics ‘retreating from the radical socio/political approaches of the social model’ and avoiding ‘partnerships between activists and the academy’

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(Boxall & Beresford, 2013, p. 591). An informed and reciprocal working relationship with activists and people with disabilities ‘seeking greater selfdetermination and political power’ (Braddock & Parish, 2001, p. 53) can further enhance social work as a profession. In social work education, it is important that ‘social work programs provide students with a learning environment that aligns with social work values’ and reflects a ‘commitment to inclusion and multiple dimensions of difference’ (Kattari et al., 2020, p. 602). In the US, Kattari et al. (2020, p. 601) researched student and faculty staff responses to supporting students with a disability through a mixed-methods disability needs assessment, which was completed by 586 respondents in 2016. They asked who identified as having a disability, impairment and/or medical condition (DIMC) and a total of 522 responded, with 120 out of 344 students (34.9%); 24 out of 80 faculty (30%); ten out of 30 general staff (33.3%) and no field supervisors identifying with having a DIMC (Kattari et al., 2020, p. 605). This research found that microaggressions, such as minimising or being dismissive, bullying, bad jokes, inappropriate comments and unprofessional or unethical conduct, were experienced by 28.3% of the DIMC identified students in their social work classes, with another 15.8% being unsure, and 24.1% of students without a DIMC shared that they had witnessed DIMC related microaggressions in a social work classroom (Kattari et al., 2020, p. 609). It was suggested that ongoing training should be provided to faculty staff and field liaison supervisors that covers how to address ableist microaggressions (including ableist language), the depth and breadth of disabilities, advocacy and ways of creating supportive learning environments, for more inclusive social work education (Kattari et al., 2020, p. 609). Social workers intend to pursue ‘social justice for people and groups experiencing injustice and inequality due to oppressive cultures and structures’ (Stafford, 2020, p. 359). However, ableism must be contested and exposed because it pervades social work, especially when the ‘medicalisation of bodies’ is ‘teamed up with neoliberalism’ and service access is mediated through ‘deservingness and paternalism’ (Stafford, 2020, p. 365). Stafford (2020, p. 359) argues for disrupting ableism in social work pedagogy using Merleau-Ponty’s work on the body as ‘lived, agentic and knowing’, which occurs within a ‘social, historical and political context’. Her ‘call to action’ is to disrupt ableism through embedding the lived body and critical disability studies in mainstream social work pedagogy, by first, doing ‘an audit’ of social work courses, and second, inviting people with a disability to speak to students about their lived experiences (Stafford, 2020, p. 369). Social work scholars have also found ableist discrimination in government policy assumptions. For example, the Australian NDIS (Horsell, 2020) and the Australian immigration processing system normalises ableism, ‘making it appear to be a natural, logical course of action’ to exclude people from Australia based on disability (Yu, 2014, p. 259). In contemporary neoliberal Western societies, ‘the privileging of market forces and economic rationalist

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thinking’ excludes people with disabilities because ‘they represent a significant and unacceptable cost’ to the state (Yu, 2014, p. 260; Oliver, 2013). These state government policy actions ‘fall short of the spirit and intent of international standards on human rights and disability discrimination’, requiring an interrogation of the dominance and ‘ethos of ableism’ (Yu, 2014, p. 259). The task for social work is to make visible disablism, ableism and to ‘reimagine’ and shape more inclusive policies and societies (Yu, 2014, p. 260). When considering social work research, taking a ‘social model’ of disability would avoid focusing on pathologising medical and individualising blame discourses (Boxall & Beresford, 2013, p. 597). Co-designed research can create the space for service users’ perspectives and service user-led research, acknowledging that service users may not always be ‘representative’. Co-research design can prioritise access to, and funding for, service user involvement in social work and includes service user researchers as equal participants in journal papers and funding proposals. As well, social work and disability studies research can invite commentary from the perspectives of service users and others who support them (Boxall & Beresford, 2013, pp. 597–598).

Conclusion This chapter has explored ableism, disablism, disability policy discourses, discrimination, violence and abuse and how institutional care homes and communities can be disabling. It advocates for ‘dignity enabling homes’ for people with a disability, drawing implications for social work. The next chapter discusses research on home, social work and sexuality, highlighting how heteronormativity imbues social work and has been privileged in society.

References Albrecht, G.L., Seelman, K.D. & Bury, M. (2001). Handbook of disability studies. Thousand Oaks California USA: Sage. Australian Government. (2009). Shut out: The experience of people with disability and their families in Australia. National Disability Strategy Consultation Report. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia Australian Productivity Commission. (2011). Disability care and support. Report No. 54. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing social policy, What’s the problem represented to be?Australia: Pearson. Boxall, K. & Beresford, P. (2013). Service user research in social work and disability studies in the United Kingdom. Disability & Society, 28 (5), 587–600. Braddock, D. & Parish, S. (2001). An institutional history of disability (pp. 11–68). In Albrecht, G.L., Seelman, K.D. & Bury, M. (eds) Handbook of disability studies. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications. Chivers, S. & Kriebernegg, U. (2018). Introduction (pp. 15–26). In Care home stories: Aging, disability, and long-term residential care. Bielefeld, Germany: Verlag.

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Ellison, C., White, A. & Chapman, L. (2011). Avoiding institutional outcomes for older adults living with disability: The use of community-based aged care support. Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability, 36 (3), 175–183. Gibson, B.E., Secker, B., Rolfe, D., Wagner, F., Parke, B. & Mistry, B. (2012). Disability and dignity-enabling home environments. Social Science & Medicine, 74 (2), 211–219. Hall, E. & Bates, E. (2019). Hatescape? A relational geography of disability hate crime, exclusion and belonging in the city. Geoforum, 101, 100–110. Hallahan, L. (2015). Disability policy in Australia: A triumph of the scriptio inferio on impotence and neediness? Australian Journal of Social Issues, 50 (2), 191–207. Horsell, C. (2020). Problematising disability: A critical policy analysis of the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme. Australian Social Work, doi:10.1080/ 0312407X.2020.1784969. Hughes, K., Bellis, M.A., Jones, L., Wood, S., Bates, G., Eckley, L., McCoy, E., Mikton, C., Shakespeare, T. & Officer, A. (2012). Prevalence and risk of violence against adults with disabilities: A systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies. Lancet, 379 (9826), 1621–1629. Imrie, R. (2004). Disability, embodiment and the meaning of the home. Housing Studies, 19 (5), 745–763. Kattari, S.K., Ingarfield, L., Hanna, M., McQueen, J. & Ross, K. (2020). Uncovering issues of ableism in social work education: A disability needs assessment. Social Work Education, 39 (5), 599–616. Lanoix, M. (2018). Home interrupted (pp. 39–52). In Chivers, S & Kriebernegg, U. (eds) Care home stories: Aging, disability, and long-term residential care. Bielefeld, Germany: Verlag. Loja, E., Costa, M.E., Hughes, B. & Menezes, I. (2012). Disability, embodiment and ableism: Stories of resistance. Disability & Society, 28 (2), 190–203. McCarron, M., Lombard-Vance, R., Murphy, E., May, P., Webb, N., Sheaf, G., McCallion, P., Stancliffe, R., Normand, C., Smith, V. & O’Donovan, M.A. (2019). Effect of deinstitutionalisation on quality of life for adults with intellectual disabilities: A systematic review. BMJ open, 9 (4), e025735. https://doi.org/10.1136/bm jopen-2018-025735. Oliver, M. (1983). Social work with disabled people. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Oliver, M. (2013). The social model of disability: Thirty years on. Disability & Society, 28 (7), 1024–1026. Pease, B. (2010). Undoing privilege, unearned advantage in a divided world. London UK: Zed Books. Pestka, K. & Wendt, S. (2014). Belonging: Women living with intellectual disabilities and experiences of domestic violence. Disability and Society, 29 (7), 1031–1045. Prince, M. (2016). Disabling cities and repositioning social work (pp. 173–192). In William, C. (ed.) Social work and the city. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Robinson, S. & Chenoweth, L. (2011). Preventing abuse in accommodation services: From procedural response to protective cultures. Journal of Intellectual Disabilities, 15 (1), 63–74. Royal Commission. (2020). Public hearing report – Public hearing 3 – The experience of living in a group home for people with disability. Canberra: Australian Government. Stainton, T., Chenoweth, L. & Bigby, C. (2010). Social work and disability: An uneasy relationship. Australian Social Work, 63 (1), 1–3. Stafford, L. (2020). Disrupting ableism in social work pedagogy with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and critical disability theory (pp. 359–372). In Morley, C., Ablett, P.,

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Carolyn Noble, C. & Cowden, S. (eds) The Routledge handbook of critical pedagogies for social work. London: Routledge. Struthers, J. (2018). Home, hotel, hospital, hospice. Conflicting images of long-term residential care in Ontario, Canada (pp. 283–302). In Chivers, S. & Kriebernegg, U. (eds) Care home stories: Aging, disability, and long-term residential care. Bielefeld, Germany: Verlag. Yu, N. (2014). Ableism and economic rationalism in Australian immigration. International Journal of Social Welfare, 23 (3), 254–261. Wendt, S. & Zannettino, L. (2015). Domestic violence in diverse contexts. Oxon: Routledge. William, C. (2016). Social work and the city. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, G. (2001). Theorizing disability (pp. 123–144). In Albrecht, G.L., Selman, K.D. & Bury, M. (eds) Handbook of disability studies. California: Sage.

13 Sexualities, home and social work Carole Zufferey and Chris Horsell

Introduction Sexuality is central to one’s experience of home and belonging (Cook, 2014; Gorman-Murray, 2007; 2008; 2012). Sexuality has multiple dimensions, as an institutionalised structure, a practice, a meaning and a subjectivity or reflexive selfhood (Jackson & Scott, 2010). This chapter discusses sexuality, home and migration, queer theory, the state governance and maintenance of heteronormative family home/s and queer identified people’s experiences of violence, family, home and community, including Two Spirit perspectives. A focus on sexuality is important for enhancing social work research and understandings of home. Heterosexuality has been privileged by the heteronormative state in legislation and policy that has explicitly and implicitly marginalised other forms of sexuality. Same-sex or multiple parents are often invisible in the imaginings of social workers, in the community, government policy, schools, workplaces and in childcare (Rawsthorne, 2010). This chapter also discusses research about homophobic attitudes reported by social work students, drawing implications for social work (Chonody & Yu, 2014, p. 5). However, it must be noted that there are limitations in same-sex research, particularly in Western contexts, that tend to predominantly access research samples that are white, educated, cyberliterate and middle class (Pallotta-Chiarolli et al., 2013). This chapter seeks to disrupt constructions of heterosexuality as ‘natural and normative’ (Pease, 2010, p. 130). However, social workers are never external to power systems they seek to disrupt (Self, 2015). Intersectional and queer research includes interrogating the researcher’s own reflexivity, positionality and social location. It must be acknowledged that as a heterosexual couple writing this book, we gain considerable privileges from institutionalised heterosexuality (see also Pease, 2010, p. 128). Our worldviews are inscribed by our own experiences of heteronormativity. We have not been confronted with the state violence that criminalises and denies our relationship. For example, there has been no national debate about whether (or not) we should be able to marry or adopt and have children (Sullivan,

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2003). We are also not subject to hate crimes, violence, discriminatory practices and homo/bi/transphobia. Despite recent shifts in addressing legislative inequalities, homophobia continues. A Stonewall report in the UK surveyed 5,000 lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) people across England, Scotland and Wales. It found that hate crimes, abuse and violence in the community, and discriminatory practices in public and housing services, local shops, gyms, schools or places of worship, persisted (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017). Furthermore, ‘anti-LGBT abuse online is endemic’, with four in five victims not reporting this to police (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 4). Homophobic violence can render people homeless and service providers can also be complicit with this abuse, as one homeless young person reports: The first time I was homeless was because my brother threatened to kill me. I was told by a council worker to say sorry to my brother for my gender identity being difficult for him. The second time I got help but it took months to get a hostel space. (Flynn, 21, East of England, in Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 26) Heteronormative and discriminatory practices have significant effects on people’s sense of home and belonging. Early feminist activists positioned sexuality as a political issue, challenged assumptions that sexual practices and desires are fixed (Jackson & Scott, 2010) and suggested that sexuality as a concept is socially constructed as dichotomous (Sullivan, 2003; Ross & Dobinson, 2013). Queer scholars have acknowledged the complexity, ambiguity and multiplicity of identities, which includes intersections of race, culture, gender and sexuality (see also Zufferey & Buchanan, 2020, p. 7). However, Adrienne Rich’s (1980) notion of compulsory heterosexuality is still relevant today. Normative ways of knowing about sexuality are historically and institutionally embedded, drawing on ethnocentric imaginaries of heterosexuality, as the ‘us’ who ‘belong’. It has been argued that compulsory heterosexuality is culturally and socially constructed through social stigma associated with ‘homosexuality’ (Spargo, 1999, p. 54). This is illustrated by the prevalence of hate crimes and their underreporting because of the fear of not being taken seriously by police (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 4). In a heterosexist and homophobic society, homophobia can also become internalised, which may affect how gay men and lesbians view themselves and how they are responded to (Mezey, 2013, p. 62), including by social workers. There has been increasing attention paid to the complexities of sexuality and home, including how this intersects with gender, race, class and other status markers, in the ‘sphere of everyday life’ (Pilkey et al., 2015, p. 127). Previous research has sought to challenge heteronormativity and destabilise the ‘heteronormative ideology of home and domesticity’ (Pilkey et al., 2015, pp. 127–130). Heterosexual domesticities in the material environment of the

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physical home shape dominant imaginaries of (fixed) homes (Harper & Price, 2018). However, fluid constructions of home in sexuality and queer migrations and movement studies highlight that people can move towards new sites of ‘home’, constructing new queer homes and memories (Fortier, 2001; 2003). When researching sexuality, home and migration, sociologist Fortier (2001; 2003) explored narratives of queer memories and diasporic spaces. She argued that there are multiple possible engagements with ‘home’ and that there is no need to deploy ideas of home as either/or an origin, as mobile or static (Fortier, 2001). ‘Home’ can thus be constructed as a destination with no final arrival, rather than as an ‘origin’ (Fortier, 2001; 2003), or as ‘where we start from’ (Winnicott, 1990), as discussed in Chapter 8. The idea of the movement towards an ‘ideal’ or ‘queer’ home with no final arrival sits in contrast with the more realist theorising of material domesticities in the house (or dwelling). It also differs from the lived realities of children who have been removed from their ‘family homes’ by social workers, into residential, foster care or kinship care ‘homes’ (also discussed in Chapter 8). Queer movements ‘back’ to the childhood home can be reimagined through memories that render home as being strange and unfamiliar, challenging assumptions about the familiarity of childhood homes. By refusing to appropriate the past to explain the present, Fortier (2001, p. 42) challenges ‘commonly held assumptions about the fluidity of time and the stillness of space’. Drawing on queer theory and intersectionality, this chapter makes visible institutionalised heteronormativity and how the heteronormative family and home has been maintained.

Queer theorising, intersectionality and home The influence of post structural and postmodern perspectives has led to the development of queer theory and feminist politics that challenge the use of language and essentialising biological assumptions and heteronormative practices. For example, the singular category of assumed heterosexual ‘mother’ leaves lesbian parents, as biological and non-biological parents, struggling to find language that reflects their lived experiences (Rawsthorne, 2010). Although the term ‘queer’ can resist the constructing of fixed categories, it is not accepted by all people in preference for more specific identifications. However, queer and LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual) scholars can ‘operate in tandem’ to recognise diverse lived experiences and co-construct strategies for social change (Chan & Howard, 2020, p. 350). Queer theory centralises a postmodern and post structural lens on identity categories and the social distribution of power and subordination (Chan & Howard, 2020, p. 353). Post structural theorising does not fix a ‘home’ as a house/dwelling, an internal state or as only about attachment and socialisation, as in the psychoanalytical type of home (Winnicott, 1990). Post structural feminists acknowledge that gender, sex and sexuality categories are the products of discourses and ‘regulatory fictions’ (Butler, 1990). Butler (1990; 2004)

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has argued that queer approaches can contribute to understanding intersecting social identities (such as ethnicity, class, ability and so on) within social produced and performed sexuality and gender. Queer politics challenge heterosexual and homosexual binaries, biological sex and culturally determined notions of being a man or a woman, with the intentions to destabilise binary oppositions (such as man/woman and straight/gay) and not construct fixed sexuality categories (Butler, 1990; Spargo, 1999). Queer theory prioritises social change; focuses on communities centred in ‘sexual, affectional, and gender identity’ and challenges ‘historical, temporal, cultural, and political claims’ that perpetuate ‘heteronormativity and cisnormativity’ (Chan & Howard, 2020, pp. 349–350). Queer theory has produced a collection of ‘intellectual engagements with the relations between sex, gender and sexual desires’, which has presented critical readings of sexuality in literary texts, mass media and public images, including about the heterosexual or queer home, as immortalised in the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy television series (Spargo, 1999, p. 9). Queerness can thus be reconfiguring within the spatiality of homes (Fortier, 2001, p. 405). Intersectionality has a distinct critical history in black feminism and critical race theory, to promote equity and a social justice agenda, which can be used in tandem with queer theory (Chan & Howard, 2020, p. 353) The foundational principles of intersectionality include examining power, complexity, social context, social inequality, relationality and social justice (Collins & Bilge, 2016). Intersectionality is interdisciplinary and examines ‘multiple overlapping forms of oppression’ to provide an ‘in-depth analysis of individual experiences at the microsystemic level’, which mirrors unequal ‘social structures at the macrosystemic level’ (Chan & Howard, 2020, p. 355). The social justice intentions of a multilayered intersectional analysis can resonate with queer theory and social work ethics of social justice. A critical analysis of sexuality and home needs to include the ‘dismantling of hegemonic matrices of power relations interwoven into the fabric of social structures and heteronormative thinking’ (Chan & Howard, 2020, p. 346). Using queer theory to transform ‘LGBTQ studies, education, gender studies, ethnic studies’ and so on, drawing on the ‘messiness’ of personal experiences and the ‘cultural, political, and social claims’ made about these experiences can extend queer theory ‘beyond its initial promise’ (Chan & Howard, 2020, p. 346). Queer identity can also be constructed as ‘homecoming’ (Fortier, 2001, p. 405). There has been a dominant narrative in queer politics from the 1990s related to ‘coming out as coming home’, which is still experienced by some (see for example, Rowntree & Zufferey, 2017; Zufferey & Rowntree, 2014). However, this is complicated for people in social positions of double marginality, such as identifying as queer as well as a racialised or ethnicised ‘other’, as neither alone can carry the promise of home (Kuntsman, 2009; Petzen, 2012). Sexuality intersects with other categories of difference and social relations, such as age, gender, race and class but sexual identity is subjected to ongoing heterosexual scrutiny, including by social workers.

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Aligned with the intersectional lens underpinning the theoretical orientation of this book, Crip Theory also claims the potential to disrupt normative constructions of gender, disability and sexuality (Kafer, 2013). Robert McRuer coined the term Crip Theory during the 1990s and expanded his ideas in his 2006 book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. He sees it as a subset of queer theory in that it establishes a political identity that resists the normative construct of ablebodiedness. According to McRuer (2006), like queer, the word ‘crip’ is a community reclaiming a negative word (cripple) and announcing pride in a nonnormative status, to challenge dominant power relations. He sees disability as a parallel power structure to queerness in that the system of ablebodiedness that produces disability is interwoven with the same system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness. To identify with Crip Theory means that you identify as a member of the disability community and that you recognise a distinct disability culture, for all people with a disability. It signifies a willingness to challenge and reclaim negative words that have been used to objectify and pathologise people with disability (McRuer, 2006). Akin to queer, people without a disability can also claim a Crip identity, to identify coalitions with other marginalised groups, to create a ‘we’ not dependent on dis/ability and the reclaiming of a slur as politically generative (Shalk, 2013). The limitations of such theorising not linked to lived experience are highlighted by Bone (2017, p. 1297) who advocates for ‘a new discourse that originates in the disabled community itself’. As well, Sherry (2013) argues that scholars who choose the term and a Crip identity tend to be privileged people because it has become a fashionable term amongst disability scholars. According to Sherry (2013), using the term ‘crip’ masks the embodied, gendered, sexualised and racialised privileges embedded in an act of reclaiming a derogatory term by people who are disconnected from the actual experiences and needs of the disability community. However, an overemphasis on sociocultural constructions can work against queer identified people with a disability, especially when there is minimal action to change state policies, laws and to re-envision lived experiences of home and belonging. For example, discrimination is institutionally embedded in public services, as described by Ani who wanted to adopt children: My partner and I are adopters and encountered heterosexism and homophobia at each stage in the process when dealing with local authority social workers and lay people involved in the approval process. This discrimination was direct and indirect, individual and systemic. Ultimately, we were successful and are now parents to a wonderful child but we had to be better, more perfect, more capable than the mixed gender couples we know who’ve adopted. Our natural faults, our life choices were amplified because we’re queer. (Ani, 44, Scotland, in Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 26)

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This quote shows how the heterosexual family is maintained by the state by, for example, regulating access to adopting children. The acceptance of queer parenting has increased (Goldberg & Allen, 2013). However, in the US, current state-based legislation differs regarding adoption and concerns have been expressed about uneven legal protection (Shapiro, 2013). Previous studies have predominantly researched lesbian and gay parents who had been in heterosexual relationships (Tasker, 2013, p. 16). Research in the US has found that heterosexual parents have invoked the sexuality of the newly identified gay or lesbian parent, to disqualify him/her from having custody (Shapiro, 2013, p. 294). As well, it has been reported that in the UK in the 1980s, up to 90% of lesbian mothers lost their children in contested custody cases (Rawsthorne, 2020, p. 79). The cultural meaning of assumed biological ‘mother’ can be problematic for lesbian parents because biological and heteronormative parenting continues to be assumed. Governing the heteronormative family home Dominant heterosexual ideals of the family and home continue to imbue the social imaginary, social institutions and social work. Heteronormative, classed, gendered and racialised assumptions about home contribute to who is defined as a morally responsible or a deficit and unfit parent. For example, mothers are most likely to be held accountable for maintaining the morality of the family home, with working-class mothers and First Nations mothers being under considerable scrutiny. Families are increasingly governed by the state through direct interventions into family homes, including in the removal of children, which is of particular concern to disadvantaged First Nations families who are frequently seen to be unfit parents (Parkes & Zufferey, 2020). The heteronormative family home is also maintained through urban planning and the creation of housing that draws on heterosexual assumptions about home and nuclear families. In the discipline of history and urban planning, in California, US, Knudten (2017) examined how gender and sexuality shaped the development of the modern city. The early move from rural life to city apartment living offered new possibilities for unmarried women to ‘depart from the heteronormative ideal of the nuclear family’ and ‘queer sexualities gained new visibility’ (Knudten, 2017, p. vi). However, by the 1950s, the detached ‘single-family home dominated the urban environment’, ‘rates of marriage and childbirth had increased’ and municipal authorities constructed (white) ‘heteronormative homeowners’ as being essential to the ‘prosperity’ of cities (Knudten, 2017, p. vi). This dominant imaginary of white heterosexual nuclear families limited the diversity of lifestyles and sexualities. Ideals of homeownership, heterosexuality and marriage ‘channeled women and men’s sexual identities into a domestic life’ and a ‘cooperative domesticity’ (Knudten, 2017, p. 21). As well, children developing a heterosexual cooperative identity were seen to be ‘normal’ and ‘civilized’, with state institutions such as ‘public schools, detention homes, and reform schools’

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partaking in instructing children in ‘proper behavior’, by using ‘varying degrees of punishment to correct what they viewed as unacceptable actions and attitudes’ (Knudten, 2017, p. 156). French scholars have examined the policing and governing of the family commencing with the ‘ancient regime’ when the man as ‘head’ of the heterosexual nuclear family was accountable for his family members and public order (Donzelot, 1979, p. 48). The key unit of social order was seen to be the heteronormative ‘bourgeois family within which the future workforce would be produced’ (Spargo, 1999, p. 19). Moralising processes categorised the deserving and underserving families when state assistance was needed, in the form of almshouses, individual alms, charity, advice giving and philanthropy, which were provided based on religious and family respectability (Donzelot, 1979, p. 58). The move of rural workers (‘journeymen’) to the city to ‘unhealthy dwellings’ in search of better paid employment raised concerns about the immoral life of industrial cities and the breakdown of families (Donzelot, 1979, p. 71). The compulsory schooling of children, and state responses to ‘children in danger’ of abuse, abandonment and exploitation and to ‘dangerous children’, meant that the state could intervene directly in the family and the home, including the removal of children from ‘morally deficient’ parents (Donzelot, 1979, p. 83). For dispossessed First Nations Peoples across the colonial world, ‘embodied subjectivities’ of home and family are disrupted and diminished by colonising state policies and discriminatory social, legal and cultural practices of the nation state (Moreton-Robinson, 2003 p. 36). For example, Aboriginal Australian women were often defined by the colonial state as ‘unfit m/others’, which has intergenerational effects (Parkes & Zufferey, 2020). As discussed in Chapter 8, the contemporary unprecedented removal of First Nations children from their families into out of home care (OOHC) by child protection systems is akin to the historical practices of child removal that created the ‘Stolen Generations’ (Funston & Herring, 2016, p. 51). Social work practices and child protection responses continue to define Aboriginal Australian families as unfit by, for example, conflating neglect with poverty (Funston & Herring, 2016). The idea of being a ‘morally fit’ parent intersects with racialised, gendered, classed and heteronormative power relations associated with how home and family is imagined and experienced. One limitation of sexuality research is that research samples tend to be limited to white, middle and upper middle class lesbians and gay men (Goldberg & Allen, 2013, p. 361). In Australia, 25% of lesbian parents had dependent children in the 2016 census, compared with only 4.5% of male same-sex couples (Rawsthorne, 2020, p. 80). The experiences of trans-people, rural, working class and First Nations lesbian parents remains obscured because the stories of highly educated, well paid, inner-city lesbians tend to be foregrounded in research (Rawsthorne, 2020, p. 80). Yet, it is known that in the US, African American and Hispanic women and men in same-gender couples are up to three times more likely to be bringing up children than

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white American couples (Tasker, 2013, p. 14). Despite same-sex couples being recently granted the right to marry in Australia, more attention needs to be paid to the experiences of same-sex attracted parents from less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds, as this intersects with race, geographical location and ability (Rawsthorne, 2020, p. 86). Also, in the Australian context, Riggs et al. (2016, p. 59) have found that a growing number of ‘trans and gender diverse people desire to become parents’ but many ‘experience a lack of support and recognition’, including from their family of origin. Dominant heterosexual ideals of the family and home continue to imbue the social imaginary, social institutions, legal practices and many disciplines, including social work.

Resistances and apologies Some research has posited that the heterosexual family is the original site of trauma (Fortier, 2001; 2003), which can contribute to the loss of home and the onset of homelessness, for family members who do not identify as heterosexual (Gold, 2005). However, this is not the situation for all people because some gay, lesbian or bisexual young people are well supported by their heterosexual families (Gorman-Murray, 2008). The ‘sexual mosaic’ of society is a ‘dynamic network’ with a long history of diverse sexualities (Spargo, 1999, p. 23). Power cannot be reduced to ‘a negative force acting upon individuals and groups’ because it ‘simultaneously polices and produces’ resistance (Spargo, 1999, p. 19). Family homes can become sites of resistance to wider practices of heterosexism, making space for non-heterosexual subjectivities (Gorman-Murray 2008, p. 31). The making of home and family can shift and change over time and place, and includes experiences of belonging, alienation, conformity and resistance (Gorman-Murray, 2012, p. 2), in different rural and urban geographical locations (Gorman-Murray et al., 2013). In more recent times, governments in Britain, Germany, New Zealand, Canada, Scotland and Ireland have apologised for the ‘historical wrongs’ of past anti-homosexual laws (Redd & Russell, 2020, p. 591). These apologies craft a ‘progressive state identity’ that is perceived to be moving away from a state of denial (Redd & Russell, 2020, p. 591). Redd and Russell (2020) conducted a critical discourse analysis of the Victorian state government’s apology in 2016 about unjust laws that criminalised homosexual acts. They found that historical homophobia was positioned as being inexplicable and that homophobia was individualised through cultural heterosexism. A ‘posthomophobic’ society was presented through the transforming of shame into state pride, ‘subsuming the “unhappy queer” through the expectation of forgiveness’ (Redd & Russell, 2020, p. 591). However, when positioning regret in the past, this renders invisible that queer communities continue to experience high rates of psychological and physical violence, which allows the states to defer blame to its predecessors and overidentify with its own

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‘perceived goodness’ (Redd & Russell, 2020, p. 591). Through ‘the discourse of apology, the shameful past becomes a source of pride in the power and superiority of the institution in the present’ (Redd & Russell, 2020, p. 599). The politics of regret have become new grounds for the legitimation of the power of the state (Redd & Russell, 2020). This type of analysis is also relevant to national state apologies to First Nations Peoples (Maddison, 2019). Thus, a ‘benevolently queer-inclusive state’ emerges, which ‘coheres political identities and re-establishes material and affective citizenship’ (Redd & Russell, 2020, p. 599). The contemporary state is then presumed to be transformed, akin to producing a sense of home and belonging. However, in the UK, there has been an increasing in the reporting of hate crimes and homophobic attacks, from 9% in 2013 to 16% in 2017 (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 11). Community violence and abuse works against a lived sense of home and belonging.

Home and sexuality: age, gender, violence, Two Spirit perspectives Previous research on sexuality and home has explored the perspectives of young homeless lesbian, gay and bisexual people and found that sexuality has an impact on young people’s housing circumstances (Dunne et al., 2002) and sense of home. There is also burgeoning literature in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans older adults (Almack & King, 2019). Almack and King (2019, p. 93) argued that it is important to pay attention to ‘distinct health and care systems and legislation’ that influence ‘perceptions and access to resources’ for older adults of diverse sexualities. Previous studies have documented the experiences of older gay men in London and their engagement with homemaking practices that contribute to the queering of heteronormativity (Pilkey, 2014). Historian Cook (2014) has analysed social constructions of queer men through two different classed typologies. The first typology includes ‘sissy home boys’ with domestic, beautiful homes, who are estranged from their kin (Cook, 2014, p. 146). The second typology includes homeless (mostly young) ‘outsiders’ finding a room or bedsit in the crowded city and in gay squats, constructed in ‘opposition to the supposed norms of home and family’ (Cook, 2014, p. 146). These stereotypical constructions about queer domesticities, home life and gay men in the 20th century continue to shape how sexuality and home is imagined. However, what is missing in the research literature is a focus on intersectionality and ‘Black, Asian, and other Minority Ethnic LGBT older people’, who are particularly ‘hard to reach’ community groups (Almack & King, 2019, p. 103). When considering lesbian experiences of home, Waitt and Johnston (2013) studied lesbian mobilities and homemaking in Townsville, Australia. They found that feelings of ‘home’ related to an embodied sense of belonging associated with different geographical locations and lesbian subjectivities. There has also been research that has found that lesbian women (akin to single women) can experience discrimination, harassment and financial

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disadvantage when accessing housing (Egerton, 1990; Elwood, 2000). In London, Kawale’s (2004, p. 565) research highlighted the emotional work associated with performing sexuality in the context of the ‘institutionalization of heterosexuality’, arguing that heteronormative assumptions regulate emotions and perpetuate ‘spatial inequalities between sexualized groups’. In the UK, older lesbians expressed a strong sense of community and friendship bonds, against the backdrop of stigmatisation, homophobia and heterosexism (Traies, 2015). In Israel and Palestine, Kuntsman’s (2009) ethnographic study of Russianspeaking, queer immigrants explored the intersections of nationhood, migrant belonging and queer sexualities. She examined diasporic cyberspace and the negotiating of home and belonging. She found an evocative interplay of physical, verbal, social, psychic, discursive as well as material violence, tormented subjectivities and conflicting constructions of victimhood (Kuntsman, 2009). She engaged with the idea of national belonging through examining two historical figures that shaped imaginings of home and belonging: ‘the humiliated homosexual and the persecuted Jew’, supporting claims to home and belonging through anti-homophobic organising (Kuntsman, 2009, p. 133). In Canada, Ristock et al. (2019) engaged with 50 First Nations Peoples who identified as Two Spirit, which means having both a masculine and feminine spirit. This resembles but is not the same as the more categorical, colonising terms of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ). When listening to Two Spirit First Nations Peoples’ stories of mobility, migration and violence, Ristock et al. (2019) found multiple layers of state and personal experiences of violence, from childhood to adulthood. For Two Spirit Peoples, ‘living at the intersections of indigeneity, class, gender, sexuality, forced mobility and migration can create vulnerabilities such as lack of social and formal supports, isolation, disconnection, and lack of options for staying safe’ (Ristock et al. 2019, p. 780). Institutionalised discrimination, state-based violence, relational and community violence affecting First Nations Peoples need to be made visible and addressed within broader anti-violence campaigns (Ristock et al. 2019). Multilayered experiences of institutionalised state violence constitute how sexuality, family, home and identity are imagined and experienced.

Implications for social work Jen Self (2015) argued that critical queer and feminist scholarship can disrupt entrenched systems of sociopolitical power in social work praxis. This can be achieved by social work researchers making ‘transparent’ their assumptions, engaging in critical reflexivity, asking questions that interrogate norms about sex and sexuality and the reproduction of homonormative whiteness, and being creative methodologically (Self, 2015, p. 240). Previous studies have indicated that lesbian, gay and bisexual people are twice as likely to experience an occurrence of discrimination (compared to heterosexual people) and more likely to experience depression, anxiety and substance use/

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abuse, which is associated with social prejudice and discrimination (Mays & Cochran, 2001). The queering of social work can expose and disrupt heteropatriarchal power and normalising intervention strategies (Self, 2015). There has been a call for making visible the invisibility of everyday heterosexuality in social work practice and education (Dunk, 2007; Rowntree, 2014). Sexuality in social work has been examined in a book from the UK by Julie Bywater and Rhiannon Jones (2007) that explored sex and sexuality across the life course, at the intersections of gender, ethnicity and class. They focused on social work responses to diverse sexualities, young people, older people, people with a disability, as well as responses to different social issues, such as sexual rights, abuse, and exploitation, health (such as the human immunodeficiency (HIV) virus) and mental health (Bywater & Jones, 2007). As well, quantitative research in the US has examined the sexual prejudice of 303 heterosexual social work students about the sexuality of gay men and lesbian women (Chonody et al., 2014). A multivariate analysis showed that race, political ideology and sexism contributed to sexual prejudice towards both groups, while religiosity was significant for prejudicial attitudes towards gay men (Chonody et al., 2014). An Australian study explored how ‘educational factors may help to explain the attitudes of 121 undergraduate social work students toward lesbian women and gay men’ (Chonody & Yu, 2014, p. 5). Three correlates were examined: ‘coursework prior to attending the university that included information about sexual diversity’; ‘coursework at the university that included information about sexual diversity’ and ‘identification with one’s degree’ (Chonody & Yu, 2014, p. 1). They found that ‘more exposure to education about sexual minorities prior to attending the university exhibited greater bias against gay men’, and that identification with their degree was significantly correlated to less antigay men bias (Chonody & Yu, 2014, p. 1). In the UK, Melville-Wiseman (2013, p. 290) discussed the tensions that exist for pre-registration social work students ‘when one group expressed faith-based views that homosexuality is sinful, and the other, that anyone who thinks that homosexuality is sinful is not suitable to become a social worker’, mirroring conservative-progressive social tensions in social work and society. These contested values and perspectives arguably shape how social work graduates may respond to people’s diverse sexualities and experiences of home/s, with implications for making heteronormativity more visible in social work education. The importance of advocating for social justice and the dignity and worth of individuals has been enshrined in social work codes of ethics across the world. It is important to acknowledge that the normalising practices of social work are multilayered and imbued with unequal power relations that are heteronormative, racialised, abled, classed and gendered. At both individual (micro) and collective (macro) levels, sexuality intersects with other aspects of identity, to shape constructions and experiences of home. A socially just social work practice would include challenging social injustices associated with homophobia as it intersects with other axes of difference, to contribute to improving state policies and practices. Previous suggestions have included

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working with police to better support people affected by violence and to identify hate crimes, as well as engaging with people ‘across multiple identities such as black, Asian and minority ethnic or disabled LGBT people, to target prevention and support’ (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 13). As well, when managing social media campaigns, it is important to ‘clearly communicate to all online users that anti-LGBT abuse is unacceptable’, with appropriate privacy, safety and reporting mechanisms (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 19). Social workers can interrogate homophobia in social work and how institutionalised heteronormativity, racism, sexism, ageism and so on intersect in our practice and in human service organisations. Social workers can advocate for enacting ‘a zero-tolerance policy on anti-LGBT abuse and language, with clear sanctions for staff and customers’ (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 23). This could include the training of real estate agents about anti-discrimination laws (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 25). The Stonewall report advocated for the mandatory training of staff, to ‘promote clear anti-bullying and harassment policies, including a zero-tolerance approach to homophobic, biphobic and transphobic abuse’ (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 31). The report also recommended that organisations ‘reflect LGBT people in advertising materials and on websites, so that all customers feel safe, welcome and know they will be treated equally’ (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 25). Training can use ‘practical, real-life examples which cover use of appropriate language and challenge stereotypes’ (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017, p. 27). These types of considerations are pertinent to enabling safe, queer inclusive homes and communities. Institutionalised heteronormativity (or heterosexism) is often invisible in the everyday practices of social workers and in social services, which can be made visible and resisted. As Gates (2006, online) argues, ‘heterosexism is equally hurtful and harmful’ and needs to be challenged by social workers. For example, social workers can make visible heteronormativity in assessment tools that ask about ‘marital status’ and assume heterosexual families, or in everyday heteronormative language, such as when partners are referred to as ‘husbands and wives’, and so on (Gates, 2006). Some other potential advocacy strategies could include challenging heterosexist agency policies and procedures, making visible support through inclusive practices and displays, having posters of diverse families, flying the rainbow flag and providing inclusive magazines in the waiting lobby of human service organisations (Gates, 2006). Through recognising individual differences, social workers can acknowledge how heterosexism, homophobia, racism, sexism, ableism and ageism (to name a few) intersect in everyday lives, with disempowering effects. Social workers revealing and disrupting heteropatriarchal power and normalising interventions can contribute to the queering of social work (Self, 2015), to expand understandings of sexuality and home. When disrupting everyday discriminatory practices and policies, social workers can begin to contribute to the building of safer homes and communities.

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Conclusion This chapter has engaged with queer theory and intersectionality, arguing that both have their place. It has made visible institutionalised heteronormativity and examined how the heteronormative family has been maintained. It has discussed intersectional research on sexuality and home as well as research about the homophobic attitudes of social work students, drawing implications for social work. Heterosexuality has historically been privileged by the state as evidenced by legislation and policy that has explicitly and implicitly marginalised other forms of sexuality. Recent public government apologies express regret about past harmful policies, which aim to engender a politics of belonging (Redd & Russell, 2020). However, these apologies position violence and discrimination in the past, when it is well known that LGBTQIA+ community members continue to experience abuse, violence and discrimination in their everyday lives, and in accessing public services (Bachmann & Gooch, 2017). This chapter has advocated for disrupting heterosexism in social work and service systems. It has positioned social work practices within institutionalised heteronormative practices that have a long history, which are governed by the state. When discussing multidisciplinary and intersectional research on sexuality and home, it has become clear that multilayered experiences of state violence must be made visible. State sanctioned discrimination and violence shapes how home and belonging is imagined and experienced. The next chapter concludes the book, drawing together how home can be reimagined in social work research, policy, practice and education.

References Almack, K. & King, A. (2019). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans aging in a U.K. context: Critical observations of recent research literature. International Journal of Aging & Human Development, 89 (1), 93–107. Bachmann, C.L. & Gooch, B. (2017). LGBT in Britain. Hate crime and discrimination. London: Stonewall. Bone, K.M. (2017). Trapped behind the glass: Crip theory and disability identity. Disability & Society, 32 (9), 1297–1314. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge. Bywater, J. & Jones, R. (2007). Sexuality and social work. Exeter, UK: SAGE Chan, C.D. & Howard, L.C. (2020). When queerness meets intersectional thinking: Revolutionizing parallels, histories, and contestations. Journal of Homosexuality, 67 (3), 346–366. Chonody, J. & Yu, N. (2014). Educational correlates of antigay bias: A survey of Australian social work. Journal of Baccalaureate Social Work, 19, 1–20. Chonody, J., Woodford, M., Brennan, D., Newman, B. & Wang, D. (2014). Attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women among heterosexual social work faculty. Journal of Social Work Education, 50 (1), 136–152.

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Collins, P.H., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Cook, M. (2014). Queer domesticities: Homosexuality and home life in twentieth-century London. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Donzelot, J. (1979). The policing of families. New York: Random House. Dunk, P. (2007). Everyday sexuality and social work: Locating sexuality in professional practice and education. Social Work and Society International Online Journal, 5 (2), 135–142. Dunne, G.A., Prendergast, S. & Telford, D. (2002). Young, gay, homeless and invisible: A growing population? Culture, Health and Sexuality, 4 (1), 103–115. Egerton, J. (1990). Out but not down: Lesbians’ experience of housing. Feminist Review, 36, 75–88. Elwood, S. (2000). Lesbian living spaces. Multiple meanings of home. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 4 (1), 11–27. Fortier, A. (2001). ‘Coming home’: Queer migrations and multiple evocations of home. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4 (4), 405–424. Fortier, A. (2003). Making home: Queer migrations and motions of attachment (pp. 115–135). In Ahmed, S., Castaneda, C., Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (eds) Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford: Berg. Funston, L. & Herring, S. (2016). When will the stolen generations end? A qualitative critical exploration of contemporary ‘child protection’ practices in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Sexual Abuse in Australia and New Zealand, 7 (1), 51–58. Gates, T. (2006). Challenging heterosexism: 6 suggestions for social work practice. The New Social Worker. The Social Work Careers Magazine. Accessed 23 April 2020, www.socialworker.com/feature-articles/ethics-articles/Challenging_Heterosexism% 3A_Six_Suggestions_for_Social_Work_Practice/. Gold, D. (2005). Sexual exclusion: Issues and best practice in lesbian, gay and bisexual housing and homelessness. London: Shelter and Stonewall Housing. Goldberg, A.E. & Allen, K.R. (eds) (2013). LGBT-parent families innovations in research and implications for practice. New York: Springer. Gorman-Murray, A. (2007). Reconfiguring domestic values: Meanings of home for gay men and lesbians. Housing, Theory and Society, 24 (3), 229–246. Gorman-Murray, A. (2008). Queering the family home: Narratives from gay, lesbian and bisexual youth coming out in supportive family homes in Australia. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 15 (1), 31–44. Gorman-Murray, A. (2012). Experiencing home: sexuality (pp. 152–157). In Smith, S. (ed.). International encyclopedia of housing and home. Netherlands: Elsevier. Gorman-Murray, A., Pini, B. & Bryant, L. (eds) (2013). Sexuality, rurality and geography. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Harper, B. & Price, H. (2018). Domestic imaginaries. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG. Jackson, S. & Scott, S. (2010). Theorising sexuality. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Education. Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Kawale, R. (2004). Inequalities of the heart: The performance of emotion work by lesbian and bisexual women in London, England. Social & Cultural Geography, 5 (4), 565–581. Knudten, C.A. (2017). Straight space: Cities, domesticity, and the heterosexual ideal in California, 1920–1941, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.

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Kuntsman, A. (2009). The currency of victimhood in uncanny homes: Queer immigrants’ claims for home and belonging through anti-homophobic organizing. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 35 (1), 133–149. Maddison, S. (2019). The colonial fantasy. Why white Australia can’t solve black problems. NSW: Allen & Unwin. Mays, V.M. & Cochran, S.D. (2001). Mental health correlates of perceived discrimination among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults in the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 91, 1869–1876. Melville-Wiseman, J. (2013). Teaching through the tension: Resolving religious and sexuality-based schism in social work education. International Social Work, 56 (3), 290–309. Mezey, N.J. (2013). How lesbians/gay men decide to be parents or remain childfree (pp. 59–70). In Goldberg, A. & Allen, K. (eds) LGBT-parent families: Possibilities for new research and implications for practice. New York: Springer Publishing Company, Moreton-Robinson, A. (2003). I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society (pp. 23–40). In Ahmed, S., Castaneda, C., Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (eds), Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers. McRuer R. (2006). Crip theory: Cultural signs of queerness and disability. New York: University of New York Press. Pallotta-Chiarolli, M., Haydon, P. & Hunter, A. (2013). ‘These are our children’: Polyamorous parenting (pp. 117–133). In Goldberg, A. & Allen, K. (eds) LGBT-parent families: Innovations in research and implications for practice. New York: Springer. Parkes, A. & Zufferey, C. (2020). Aboriginal mothering in the Australian context (pp. 104–116). In Zufferey, C. & Buchanan, F. (eds) Intersections of mothering: Feminist accounts. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Pease, B. (2010). Undoing privilege. London: Zed Books. Petzen, J. (2012). Queer trouble: Centring race in queer and feminist politics . Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33 (3), 289–302. Pilkey, B. (2014). Queering heteronormativity at home: Older gay Londoners and the negotiation of domestic materiality. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 21 (9), 1142–1157. Pilkey, B., Scicluna, R.M. & Gorman-Murray, A. (2015). Alternative domesticities. Home Cultures, 12 (2), 127–138. Rawsthorne, M. (2010). Mother impossible: The experience of lesbian mothers (pp. 195–215). In Goodwin, S. & Huppatz, K. (eds) The good mother: Contemporary motherhoods in Australia. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Rawsthorne, M. (2020). Life’s a Mardi Gras (pp. 77–89). In Zufferey, C. & Buchanan, F. (eds) Intersections of mothering: Feminist accounts. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Redd, C. & Russell, E.K. (2020). ‘It all started here, and it all ends here too’: Homosexual criminalisation and the queer politics of apology. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 20 (5), 590–603. Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. Signs, 5, 631–660. Riggs, D.W., Power, J. & von Doussa, H. (2016). Parenting and Australian trans and gender diverse people: An exploratory survey. The International Journal of Transgenderism, 17 (2), 59–65. Ristock, J., Zoccole, A., Passante, L. & Potskin, J. (2019). Impacts of colonization on Indigenous Two-Spirit/LGBTQ Canadians’ experiences of migration, mobility and relationship violence. Sexualities, 22 (5–6),767–784.

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Ross, L.E. & Dobinson, C. (2013). What is the B in LGBT Parenting? A call for research on bisexual parenting (pp. 87–103). In Goldberg, A. & Allen, K. (eds) LGBT-parent families: Possibilities for new research and implications for practice. New York: Springer Publishing Company. Rowntree, M. (2014). Making sexuality visible in Australian social work education. Social Work Education, 3 (33), 353–364. Rowntree, M. & Zufferey, C. (2017). Lesbians embodied and imagined homes: ‘It’s an internal journey’. Sexualities, 20 (8), 943–958. Self, J. (2015). Critical feminist social work and the Queer query (pp. 240–258). In Wahab, S., Anderson-Nathe, B. & Gringeri, C. (eds) Feminisms in social work research: Promise and possibilities for justice-based knowledge. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Shalk, S. (2013). Coming to claim crip: disindentification with/in disability studies. Disability Studies Quarterly, 33 (2). Accessed 1 June 2021, http://dsq-sds.org/article/ view/3705/3240. Shapiro, J. (2013). The law governing LGBT-parent families (pp. 291–304). In Goldberg, A. & Allen, K. (eds) LGBT-parent families: Possibilities for new research and implications for practice. New York, NY: Springer. Sherry, M. (2013). Crip politics… Just no. The Feminist Wire, 23 November 2013. Accessed 6 June 2020, http://the feminist wire.com/2013/11/crip-politics-just-no. Spargo, T. (1999). Foucault and queer theory. Cambridge UK: Icon Books. Sullivan, N. (2003). A critical introduction to queer theory. Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Tasker, F. (2013). Lesbian and gay parenting post-heterosexual divorce and separation (pp. 3–20). In Goldberg, A. & Allen, K. (eds) LGBT-parent families: Possibilities for new research and implications for practice. New York: Springer. Traies, J. (2015). Old lesbians in the UK: Community and friendship. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19 (1), 35–49. Waitt, G. & Johnston, L. (2013). ‘It doesn’t even feel like it’s being processed by your head’: Lesbian affective home journeys to and within Townsville, Queensland, Australia (pp. 143–158). In Gorman-Murray, A., Pini, B. & Bryant, L. (eds) Sexuality, rurality, and geography. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Winnicott, D.W. (1990). Home is where we start from: Essays by a psychoanalyst. London: Norton. Zufferey, C. & Rowntree, M. (2014). Finding your community wherever you go? Exploring how a group of women who identify as lesbian embody and imagine ‘home’. Adelaide: The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) Conference. Zufferey, C. & Buchanan, F. (eds) (2020). Intersections of mothering: Feminist accounts. Oxon, UK: Routledge.

14 Revisioning home in social work Conclusion Carole Zufferey and Chris Horsell

Introduction This book on home has broadened and re-visioned how home can be understood in the social work discipline. It argued that the violence of the state, colonial policies, service systems and social work responses can affect a sense of home and belonging. The book is threaded with points about intersectionality and diverse intersections associated with family, geographical location, culture, class, age, ethnicity, gender, migration, ability and sexuality, as they relate to housing, home, belonging and social work. It highlighted the perspectives of First Nations Peoples and their experiences of social discrimination and state violence that disrupted and annihilated homes. Homes have been Stolen from First Nations Peoples across the world (see Chapters 1 and 5). Chapter 1 with Amy Cleland acknowledged that this book was written on Stolen Homes in the Australian context. The book focused on both disadvantaging and privileging policy processes that contributed to social inequalities associated with a sense of home (Chapter 4). It pointed to social work considerations about the complexities of home, when working in homelessness (Chapter 6), gendered violence (Chapter 7), family and child welfare (Chapter 8), with young people (Chapter 9), in migrant resettlement (Chapter 10), in aged care (Chapter 11), in disability (Chapter 12) and with diverse sexualities (Chapter 13). Chapter 3 has integrated learnings from multidisciplinary and intersectional research on home and belonging for social work. This book has expanded on previous social work research about home and belonging (see Zufferey et al., 2020). It has advocated for social and systemic change to address how home and belonging can be broadly imagined and responded to in social work. This chapter concludes the book with summary implications for social work research, policy making and practice. In this book we have asked: how do social workers understand and use the notions of home and belonging? For example, is home seen to be a safe and secure house, with a supportive nuclear family? As discussed in Chapter 4, meanings of home are frequently associated with housing and homeownership policies that imagine a sense of security, stability, privacy, safety DOI: 10.4324/9781003032489-16

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and the ability to control a living space (Gurney, 1999). However, this may not be the experiences of women, children and young people who are abused in the family home and feel disempowered by state violence and service systems (see Chapters 7, 8 and 9). Safety in the privacy of home is disrupted for women experiencing domestic and family violence, who find it difficult to leave (Zufferey et al., 2016). When and if they do leave, women tend to initially depend on friends and relatives, with little state housing support. Women often don’t feel ‘at home’ in the homes of ‘others’, which is not their own ‘home’. Women’s citizenship includes a sense of home, belonging and social participation, which is severely curtailed by experiences of gendered abuse and violence (Zufferey et al., 2016; Franzway et al., 2019). As well, in situations of migration, is home imagined to be a country of origin or a destination to a new host country? We cannot assume that home is the ‘final’ destination because home can be a journey and a process of homemaking, and feelings of ‘being-at-home’ can be fleeting and temporal (Mallett, 2004, p. 62). For example, forced migrants and refugees who live in racist host countries may never feel ‘at home’ and are often made to feel ‘out of place’. There are other theoretical questions about home we attempted to grapple with. Is ‘home’ subjective and remembered? Is it real or imagined? Is it embodied? Is it fixed or fluid? All these ideas and questions about home are relevant to this book that engaged with multidisciplinary research to revision home in the social work imaginary. Home/s can be multiple, experienced, embodied and imagined, as both an ‘ideal’ and a ‘reality’ and an ‘actual’ and ‘remembered’ journey, which occurs across time, and in diverse places and spaces (Mallett, 2004, p. 69). Home and belonging are connected and sometimes conflated in this book. Belonging and home are multidimensional and dynamic processes. Feelings about home and belonging evolve throughout our lives and in our relationships with others (Yuval-Davis, 2011). Yuval-Davis (2011) differentiated between belonging and the politics of belonging. Belonging can be related to diverse social locations and positionalities, emotional attachments to collective group identities, and a commitment to political ethics and values (Yuval-Davis, 2011, pp. 10–18). Belonging can be an emotional attachment to a sense of being ‘at home’ and imagining a ‘safe home’, which may change over the life course and in different social circumstances. Yet, home is commonly understood to be a fixed notion, as a house or a physical dwelling, including in social work. This book broadens social work definitions and understandings of home, as being a fluid sense of belonging that interrelates with the intersectional effects of power inequalities, including in situations of abuse and state violence. A sense of home and belonging can be constituted by the responses of the state and social workers, such as through legislation, social policies and service systems, as well as the social inclusiveness or exclusiveness of community attitudes. The politics of belonging refers to the power involved in constructing social boundaries, which include and exclude certain categories of people, such as through nationalism and citizenship (Yuval-Davis, 2011,

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pp. 10–18). Home can be interrelated with the exclusionary potential of global and local mobilities, relationalities, geographical locations, nationalism and citizenship. For example, when examining racism in policy and social work responses to refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, Masocha (2015) and Masocha and Simpson (2011) introduced the idea of xenoracism to highlight the shifting parameters of exclusionary discourses, which raises ethical dilemmas for social workers. Self-reflexivity by social workers is also important to make visible matrixes of oppression and privilege in society (Murphy et al., 2009), through sharing social workers’ own experiences of home and belonging. Therefore, this book has provided four differing selfreflexive accounts of home by social work academics (Chapters 1, 2 and 10).

Social work research and home Home is an emerging area for social work research. Social work researchers are invited to explore meanings of home in their quest to understand their contributions to developing a sense of community and belonging (Zufferey et al., 2020). As well, incorporating intersectionality in social work research can expand the social work vision about home and social change, by broadening how social workers engage with intersecting social and systemic inequalities that constitute a sense of home and belonging. The over or under inclusion of intersecting disadvantages in social work research gives attention to the privileging of different social locations and what is rendered invisible in social work (Murphy et al., 2009, p. 12). An important social work research imperative is to address the impacts of intersecting social injustices and human rights violations, including by state and service systems. This book has interrogated how a sense of home and belonging is disrupted by colonial state violence, gendered violence, homelessness, forced migration, child abuse, systemic abuse, disabling and heteronormative assumptions, including by social workers.

Social policy and home Social and public policy is often seen to be political, short term, reductionist and incremental, posing challenges for incorporating intersectionality within policy making processes (Murphy et al., 2009, p. 66). More specifically, there are challenges to incorporating subjective notions of home in, for example, homelessness and housing policies because of the very uniqueness of each person’s experience. Ideas about co-designing policy with people whom the policies most affect requires a major rethink about how policy is developed and dominant assumptions underpinning them. Policy analysis in social work can draw on Carol Bacchi’s (2009) What is the problem represented to be? (WPR) questioning framework, to examine how problems and solutions are represented in policies, what is missing in policy assumptions and the effects of these policies. For example, in social work, the WPR approach has

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been used to highlight ableist assumptions in disability policies (Horsell, 2020), as well as to examine representations of women’s alcohol consumption in drug and alcohol policies (Smith et al., 2021). Drug and alcohol policies tend to focus on mothers and reproduction, excluding lesbians and women who ‘deviate from expected reproductive decisions’, who refuse motherhood, choose to be childless and terminate their pregnancies (Macleod et al., 2020, p. 30). It is important to acknowledge that normative policy assumptions are heterosexist, gendered, racialised and colonising, with enduring effects on a sense of home. There has been a long history of defending unjust policies and state violence that continue to exclude the voices of First Nations Peoples, as discussed in Chapter 1. This book has broadened ways of thinking about how home and belonging can be examined in social work research and social policy, which has included highlighting the effects of normative and colonial policy assumptions.

Social work practice and home In social work practice, social workers are ethically bound to recognise and act to address social injustices and breaches of human rights, including at the intersections of age, race, gender, ability, class, sexual orientation and so on (IFSW, 2018). For example, it is well known that a sense of home and belonging is affected by gendered violence (Zufferey et al., 2016). However, social work responses to gendered violence need to consider women’s multiple social locations, experiences of social exclusion, marginalisation, poverty and housing circumstances, which differ for different women and across geographical locations. Home connects to an emotional sense of belonging, which overlaps with the material experiences of housing. The complexities of home include not having a physical shelter but not identifying as ‘homeless’ as well as having a physical home (or shelter) but identifying as ‘homeless’, such as when experiencing abuse and violence (Chapters 6, 7 and 8). Debates about the ideological constructs of home and homelessness have a long history (Somerville, 1992). Symbolically, ‘figures who dwell on the margins – from strangers, to refugees, to rough sleepers – are characterized as embodiments of unhomeliness’ (Lenhard & Samanani, 2020, p. 3). However, these imagined characterisations do not reflect subjective experiences of home and homelessness. Home and homelessness are multilayered, associated with state violence, colonialism, displacement and forced cultural detachment (Christensen, 2013, p. 810). This book has covered multiple dimensions and subjectivities of home (see Chapter 5). Home is socially represented, imagined and lived within global and local contexts and in public places and private spaces. Unequal power relations shape how home is experienced and responded to by social workers, which is especially relevant in supporting the rebuilding of safe homes, in, for example, situations of forced dislocation, social alienation and in abuse and violence. The complexities of home can relate to how ‘home is

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the space, the practice, or the imagined idyll where alienation might be undone’ (Lenhard & Samanani, 2020, p. 17). Home can also ‘be a site of displacement, a place where one is made to feel out of place, an ideal that has not yet arrived, or something which is subject to continual improvement’ (Lenhard & Samanani, 2020, p. 17). Depending on how social workers imagine and respond to home, they can be ‘complicit in reproducing a sense of alienation, experienced as exclusion, dislocation, instability’ (Lenhard & Samanani, 2020, p. 17). In social work practice, it is important to make a distinction between these two vastly different experiences of home, whether it is a site of alienation or if it is a place where alienation can be undone, and to respond accordingly.

Social work education and home The fields of practice covered in this book, namely homelessness, gendered violence, working with children and their families, working with young people and older people, people with disabilities and diverse sexualities, can all be included in social work education, including how they interrelate with home and intersectionality. An important theme in this book is that state sanctioned violence is central to the making of home and belonging. Home can be re-visioned and co-constructed by social workers and the people they work with, especially in the remaking of homes that have been lost through violence and displacement. However, discriminatory practices and unjust state policies shape how home and belonging are experienced. In social work education, it is important to discuss how home is subjectively experienced at an individual micro level as well as how it is created through the social work imaginary and macro policy processes.

Conclusion This book has contributed to expanding social work knowledge about home and belonging. It has invited social workers to engage with a broader dialogue about how home is diversely experienced, imagined and understood. In the spirit of social work self-reflexivity, we have reflected on our own privileges and oppressions and social locations of home. Home can be associated with people’s individual past experiences, diverse histories, present circumstances and future imaginings. This book has also positioned experiences of home and belonging within a discussion of colonial state policies, policy debates and different areas of social work practice. A central point in this book is that home and belonging in social work needs to be understood in relation to intersecting and unequal power relations. As well, macro social processes, state policies and social work practices can continue to enact state violence, systemic abuse and social discrimination. Therefore, supportive state policies and social work practices are inextricably linked to building a sense of home and belonging.

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References Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing social policy, what’s the problem represented to be?Australia: Pearson. Christensen, J. (2013). ‘Our home, our way of life’: spiritual homelessness and the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous homelessness in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada. Social & Cultural Geography, 14 (7), 804–828. Franzway, S., Wendt, S., Moulding, N., Zufferey, C. & Chung, D. (2019). The sexual politics of gendered violence and women’s citizenship. Bristol UK: Policy Press. Gurney, C.M. (1999). Pride and prejudice: Discourses of normalisation in public and private accounts of home ownership. Housing Studies, 14 (2), 163–183. Horsell, C. (2020). Problematising disability: A critical policy analysis of the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme. Australian Social Work, doi:10.1080/ 0312407X.2020.1784969.. International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) (2018). Global social work statement of ethical principles. Accessed 2 June 2021. Global Social Work Statement of Ethical Principles – International Federation of Social Workers (ifsw.org). Lenhard, J. & Samanani, F. (eds) (2020). Home: Ethnographic encounters. London: Routledge. Macleod, C., Feltham-King, T., Mavuso, J. & Morison, T. (2020). Failed mothers, failed women (pp. 30–43). In Zufferey, C. & Buchanan, F. Intersections of mothering: Feminist accounts. Oxon: Routledge. Mallett, S. (2004). Understanding home: A critical review of the literature. The Sociological Review, 52, 62–89. Masocha, S. (2015). Asylum seekers, social work and racism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Masocha, S. & Simpson, M.K. (2011). Xenoracism: Towards a critical understanding of the construction of asylum seekers and its implications for social work practice. Practice, 23 (1), 5–18. Murphy, Y., Hunt, V., Zajicek, A.M, Norris, A.N. & Hamilton, L. (2009). Incorporating intersectionality in social work practice, research, policy and education. Washington, DC: NASW Press. Smith, T., Zufferey, C., Bilic, S. & Loeser, C. (2021) Questioning policy representations of women’s alcohol consumption: implications for social work. Qualitative Social Work. Early Online, doi:10.1177/14733250211025086. Somerville, P. (1992). Homelessness and the meaning of home: Rooflessness or rootlessness? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 16 (4), 529–539. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging. SAGE Publications, London. Zufferey, C., Chung, D., Franzway, S., Wendt, S. & Moulding, N. (2016). Intimate partner violence and housing: Eroding women’s citizenship. Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, 31 (4), 463–478. Zufferey, C., Yu, N. & Hand, T. (2020). Researching home in social work. Qualitative Social Work, 19 (5–6), 1095–1110.

Index

able-bodied privileges 169 ableism 21, 169, 172, 172–173, 174–175, 177–178, 179–180, 202 Aboriginal Australians 189; classification 65–66; concept of home 65; dispossession 60; domestic violence 100, 104; forced child removal 116–117; homelessness 85; homeownership 55; housing policy 52, 54–56; knowledge systems 117; language groups 64; protectionist e 65; stolen homes 1–8, 64–67; whitening 65 active ageing 162 affordability 50, 51, 53 age-friendly communities 164 Ahmed, S. 67, 136, 137, 138–139 aims 12 Alaazi, D. 86 Albrecht, G. 105 Allen, B.S. 114 Almack, K. 191 Ameganvi, A. 145, 146 Andersen, D.J. 137 Anderson, G. 31 Anthias, F. 62 anthropology 32 architecture 33 assisted living facilities 151–153 asylum seekers 27, 68, 144–146 Australia 18, 54–56; case management research 124–125; Closing the Gap strategy 55; colonisation 3–4; Commonwealth Housing Commission 52; Commonwealth State Housing Agreements 50, 52; decline in homeownership 51; disability 173–174, 175–176, 179–180; disability policy 171–172;

dispossessions 60; domestic violence 99–100, 101, 104; forced child removal 116–117, 118; homelessness 52–53, 70, 81–82, 84, 84–85, 88–89, 90, 93; homeownership 20, 30, 35, 49, 49–54; housing options 49; housing policy 46, 47, 49, 49–56; housing tenure 48, 53; migrants and migration 139–140, 140–142, 144; National Affordable Housing Agreement 52; National Housing and Homelessness Agreement 52–53; National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing 55–56; older people 151–165; public housing policy 51–54; refugees 88–89, 145–146, 147–148; sexuality 190, 193; social housing 35, 49; social inequalities 17; state violence 5; stolen homes 1–8; transitioning into further education and/or employment 123–133; unconscious bias 6 Bacchi, C. 46, 171, 172 Bachmann, C.L. 184, 194 Badcock, B.A. 30 Baker, C.S. 90 Bartley, A. 146–147 Bates, E. 175 Bauman, Z. 20, 154–155 Beer, A. 30 being here 31 Bell, M. 164 belonging 11, 19, 31, 61–62, 200; children 70; civic 148; cultural 72; ethno-national 147; politics of 200–201; sense of 21, 27, 38, 83, 89, 107, 117, 124, 129, 201, 202; sense of not 67 Benjamin, P. 64

206

Index

Bennett, K. 87 Beresford, P. 178, 178–179 bias, unconscious 6 Bird, L. 63 Blunt, A. 30 Bograd, M. 107 Bone, K.M. 187 Borlagdan, J. 131 Bourdieu, P. 34 Boxall, K. 178–179, 178–180 Bryant, L. 38 Buoy, L. 115 Burgess, C. 116 Butler, J. 185–186 Butler, R. 131 Bywater, J. 193 Canada 18, 28, 31; disability 176, 177; First Nations Peoples 60, 63–64, 66–67, 86, 192; homelessness 86; older people 152; sex workers 73; Two Spirit perspectives 192 capitalism 47 case management 122, 124–126, 127, 127–130 case management research 124–125 Chamberlain, K. 92 Chan, C.D. 186 Chan, K.B. 137–138 Chapman, T. 31 Charlie, R. D. 64 Chenoweth, L. 173–174 child abuse 36 child protection 116, 122–123; home visits 29 child welfare 18, 29, 111–112 childhood 70 childhood home 19, 111–119, 185; and child welfare 111–112; forced removal 116–117, 118; idealisation 112–113; institutional care 114–116; multiple 112, 118–119; psychoanalytical 113–114; removal from 111; and social work 118–119 children: abuse of 12; belonging 70; and domestic violence 101, 104; forced removal 63–64, 66–67, 116–117, 118; homelessness 70, 87, 92–93; housing expectations 71; institutional care 114–116; intersecting subjectivities 69–70, 70–71; removal 111; residential fixity 111–112; wellbeing 112–113 Chivers, S. 176 Choi, K.W.Y. 71

Chonody, J. 193 Christensen, J. 86 Cieraad, I. 19, 32, 112 cisnormativity 186 citizenship rights 68, 87 civic belonging 148 civil rights 148 Cladera, S.B. 91–92 Cleland, A. 1–8 Colic-Peisker, V. 35 collective identities 11 Coloma, R.S. 72–73 colonial discourses 1 colonialism 1–8, 64–65, 203 colonisation 3–4, 104 commodification 89 Commonwealth Housing Commission, Australia 52 community-based approaches 106 community care 153 community engagement 122 community participation 132 commuter migrants 136, 143–144 compulsory heterosexuality 184, 187 consumerism 64–65 consumption 34 Cook Islands 70 Cook, N. 47 cosmopolitanism 62 Covid-19 global pandemic 10, 14–15, 27 Cramp, K. J. 103 Crenshaw, K. 29 Crip Theory 187 critical reflection 7 Cuervo, H. 123 cultural belonging 72 cultural diversity, and domestic violence 103–104 cultural genocide 63 cultural identity 32, 61, 86, 117, 138, 139–140 cultural marginalisation 68 cultural studies 32 Cuthill, F. 68, 89 Davies, P. 19 Davis, A. 139 de St Croix, T. 128 de Witt, L. 31 deinstitutionalisation 170 dementia 31 Denmark 35 Dewey, S. 73 diaspora 62, 137

Index difference, multiple markers of 73 dignity 193 dignity enabling homes 177–178, 180 disability 21, 169–180; abuse and violence 173–175; and ageing 175–176; biomedical model 170; conceptualization 169; deinstitutionalisation 170; dignity enabling homes 177–178, 180; discriminations 72; gendered violence 174; and home 173–175; home environment 177–178; and homelessness 89–90, 93; and housing 28, 90; institutional care 176; intersecting subjectivities 72; key considerations 169; lived experiences 177–178; microaggressions 175, 179; policy context 170–173; resource allocation 172; and sexuality 187; social assumptions 170; social model 170–171, 180; and social work 178–180; terminology 169 disability policy, ableist assumptions 90 disablism 169 disadvantage 7 disciplinary state power 67 disempowerment 124 dislocated homes 20 dislocation, forced 144–146 dispossession 32 Dixon, P. 63 domestic violence 18, 31, 36, 87, 98–108; challenging assumptions 102–103; and children 101, 104; costs 107; and cultural diversity 103–104; culturally appropriate responses 104; and disability 177; effects on home 99–102; escaping 99, 99–100, 101; the home in 98, 98–99, 103; migrants 105; and motherhood 101; post separation 101–102; research 102; and sense of home 100; and social work 106–108; South Africa 102–103, 107; urban–rural divide 100; Western concepts 102, 107 Dovey, K. 83, 84 Dowling, R. 30, 35–36 downsizing 162–163 Dupuis, A. 34–35 Durban, J. 113–114 Easthope, H. 35 Egerton, J. 37 Ellison, C. 175–176

207

Elwood, S. 37 emotional attachments 11, 27 emotional connection 20, 67, 163–164 emotional investment 45 emotional wellbeing 30, 99 emotionalisation 107 emotions 33 employment 19 environmental psychology 33 environmental violence 105 estrangements, from home country 20 ethno-national belonging 147 Eurocentric service systems 1 Eurocentrism 2 European Typology of Homelessness and Housing Exclusion 81 family: and home 4–5; idealisation of 19; policing 188–190 family home 19, 36–37, 87, 89, 111–119, 185, 190; and child welfare 111–112; forced child removal 116–117, 118; heteronormative 188–190; home visits 111–112; idealisation 112–113; multiple 112, 118–119; nostalgia 37; policing 112–113; psychoanalytical 113–114; and social work 118–119 family relations 35 Farrugia, D. 123 FEANTSA 81 Feinberg, M. 112 feminist geographers 30, 35–36 Ferguson, H. 19, 29 financialisaton 52 Finland 28 First Nations Peoples 114, 189; classification 65–66, 67; concept of home 65; cultural belonging 72; denial of rights 62; disability 172; dispossession 11, 32, 60; domestic violence 104; forced child removal 116–117; homelessness 84–86, 92; housing policy 54–56; sense of place 18; spiritual homelessness 54; state apologies 191; stolen homes 1–8, 62–67, 75; subjectivities 60, 62–67; Two Spirit perspectives 192 Fitzpatrick, S. 83 fixity 28 Forrest, R. 49 Fortier, A. 111, 185 foster care system 114, 115–116 Foucault, M. 67, 72 Fozdar, F. 148

208

Index

France 15, 189 France 24 15 Friedan, B. 36 further education and/or employment, transitioning into 122–133, 131–132; barriers 127; case management 124–126, 127, 127–130; challenges 130–131, 131, 133; intensive support 124–125; mutual obligation policies 125–126; study 126–127; teachers’ perspectives 130–131; young people’s experiences and perceptions 128–130 Gardner, B. 144 gender, intersecting subjectivities 71–72 gendered power relations 21 gendered violence 12, 18, 174, 202; see also domestic violence genocide 63 gentrification 158 Ghana 114 Gibson, B. 28 Gibson, B.E. 177 Goel, K. 20, 136, 140–141, 148 Gooch, B. 184, 194 Gorman-Murray, A. 37, 71–72 Grenfell Towers fire 45 grey nomads 151, 153–165; returning home 160–161; sense of freedom and space 159–160; travelling 159–161 Guiboche, M. 64 Haas, A. 143 Habermas, J. 31 habitus 34 Hall, E. 175 Hartley, L. 148 hate crimes 175, 191, 194 Heidegger, M. 31, 34 heteronormativity 36–37, 185, 186, 191, 192, 194 heterosexism 194, 195 heterosexual domesticities 184–185 heterosexuality 183, 184, 187, 192, 193, 195 Higgins, J. 115 Hirayam, Y. 49 Hockey, J. 31 home: conception of 10–11, 12, 15–16, 27–28, 37–38, 39, 199–200; definition 4, 27, 83, 122; in domestic violence 98, 98–99, 103; domestic violence effects on 99; and family 4–5; gendered 98–99; and homelessness

83–84; and housing 34–35; identifications with 81; as a journey 137; location 157–159; migrants and 136–149, 200; multidisciplinary accounts 30–37; and older people 151–155, 163–165; political and environmental violence in 104–106; positioning 17; psychoanalytical 113–114; revisioning 199–203; safe 98–99; sense of 10, 18, 20, 21, 27, 30, 38, 60–61, 62, 83, 91–92, 98, 100, 113, 143–144, 173, 175, 200, 201, 202; and sexuality 184–185, 191–192; situated intersectional analysis 61–62; and social policy 201–202; and social work 28–29, 202–203; and social work research 201; Two Spirit perspectives 192 home away from home 152 home country, estrangements from 20 home environment 28 home visits 29, 38, 111–112 homeland 4, 28, 67 homelessness 12, 14–15, 18, 28, 68, 81–93, 85–86; Australia 52–53, 70, 81–82, 84, 85, 88–89, 90, 93; Canada 86; causation 82–83, 84; children 70, 87, 92–93; definition 81, 81–83, 84, 85; and disability 89–90, 93; First Nations Peoples 84–86, 92; and home 83–84; Housing First approaches 81, 86, 91–92, 93; and housing policy 51; imaginary of 90; migrants 88–89, 93, 146; New Zealand 92; policy level 92; primary 82; psychoanalytical 113; sense of 82; and sexuality 89, 93, 184; and social work 92–93; spiritual 54, 74; subjective 82; United Kingdom 82, 87, 89; United States of America 89; women 87–88, 92–93, 103; women’s liberation movement 36 homelife 34–35 homelikeness 176 homemaking 32, 72, 88 homeownership 11, 12, 17, 20, 30, 45; Aboriginal Australians 55; affordability constraints 50; Australia 30, 35, 49; benefits 35, 49; decline in 51; first-time buyers 49, 51, 56; historical development 48–49; and housing policy 45, 48–54, 56; material aspirations 38; neoliberal ideology 49; New Zealand 34–35; older people 151; prioritised 49, 50; psychological

Index significance 31; United Kingdom 49; United States of America 49; and wealth creation 46 homes, differentiation 107 homing 32 homophobia 18, 183, 184, 192, 194 Hong Kong 71 hooks, b. 36 Horsell, C. 13–14, 171, 172 housing 202; definition 47; and disability 28, 90; and home 34–35 housing disadvantage 54 housing distribution 12 housing expectations, children 71 housing finance system 49 Housing First approaches 81, 86, 91–92, 93, 127 housing inequity 45–46 housing policy 17, 45; Aboriginal Australians 52, 54–56; Australia 46, 47, 49–56; definition 47–48; direct 46; and homelessness 51; and homeownership 45, 48–54, 56; indirect 46; and individual choice 53–54; neo-liberal ideology 46–47, 47–48, 49, 51, 54; priorities 46–47; public housing 51–54; United Kingdom 46; United States 46 housing prices 50–51 housing quality 35 Housing Studies journal 33–34 housing tenure 48, 53, 123 Howard, L.C. 186 Hughes, K. 173 Hulko, W. 11 human rights 3, 38, 74, 132, 147, 148, 172, 201 human trafficking 146 Husserl, E. 31 Hyacinthe, A. 63 hybridity 62, 136, 137–138, 141 idealisation 107, 112–113 identifications 11 identity 33, 34, 113–114, 138; Aboriginal 4; collective 11; cultural 32, 61, 86, 117, 138, 139–140; queer 186; social 185–186 imagined kinship 138 immigration policies 122–123 Imrie, R. 21, 90 inequality 19, 22 institutional care 114–116, 176 interior design 33

209

International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home (Smith) 30 intersectional complexities 11–12 intersectional social work approaches 106 intersectionality 27, 29–30, 199, 201; foundational principles 186; migrants and migration 138–140; sexuality 186, 195; situated 61–62 intimate partner violence: see domestic violence isolation 158 Israel 29, 112, 192 Johnson, G. 35 Johnston, L. 37 Jones, R. 193 Jørgensen, C.J. 35 Kaplan, C. 144 Karsten, L. 142 Kasiram,M. 116 Kattari, S.K. 179 Kawale, R. 37 Kayseas, M. 64 Kemeny, J. 49 Kenny, K. 138 King, A. 191 King, P. 47 Kissoon, P. 88, 144 Klis, M. 143 Knudten, C.A. 188–189 Kriebernegg, U. 176 Kuntsman, A. 192 Laloche, J. B. 64 Lanoix, M. 176 Lapierre, S. 104 Lauster, N.T. 35 Lavalette, M. 106 Lebenswelt 31 Leggatt-Cook, C. 92 Lenhard, J. 32, 202, 203 life courses, subjectivities 69–72 life expectancy 153 lifeworld 31 liminal borderlands 73 literature, multidisciplinary 27–39 lived experiences 17, 21–22, 60–75; and disciplinary state power 67; First Nations Peoples 60, 62–67; and migration 67–69; and reflexive research 72–75; situated intersectional analysis 61–62; and social work 74–75; through the life course 69–72

210

Index

Loja, E. 178 Longhurst, R. 36 Mccarthy, L. 87 McRuer, R. 187 Madigan, R. 33, 102 marginalisation 1 masculinities 71–72, 157 Masocha, S. 201 material aspirations 38 material experiences 30 meaning-making 35 memory 19 mental illness 90, 91–92 Merleau-Ponty, M. 179 Meth, P. 99, 102–103, 107 microaggressions 175, 179 migrants and migration 12, 17, 20, 32, 142, 201; Australia 88–89; cultural identity 138; definition 136–137; domestic violence 105; ethno-national belonging 147; experiences 136, 139, 140–143, 146, 148; forced 138, 144–146; and the home 136–149, 200; and home state violence 69; homelessness 68, 88–89, 93, 146; housing barriers 148; hybridity 137–138; inclusionary policies 144–145; intersectionality 138–140; legal status 68; negative attitudes towards 145; pull factors 136–137; push factors 136–137; racism 139, 147; return 138; skilled 140–144, 146–147; and social work 146–148; subjectivities 67–69; support 145–146; trafficking 146; unanticipated costs 143 Mohanty, C.T. 10 moralising processes 189 Moreton-Robinson, A. 32 Morley, D. 32 Moxley, D.P. 125 Muir, K. 131 Mulder, C.H. 35 multidisciplinary literature 27–39 multiple homes 136 Munro, M. 33 Murray, S. 115–116 mutual obligation policies 125–126, 129 Nash, C. 138 neo-liberal ideology 46–47, 47–48, 49, 51, 54 neoliberal rationalities 17

Netherlands, the 143 New Zealand 18, 34–35, 85–86, 92, 146–147 Noble, G. 139 nostalgia 37 nursing homes 152 O’Connor, P. 31 O’Halloran, D. 125–126 older people 28; age in place 162; Australia 151–165; care policy reforms 154; disability 175–176; downsizing 162–163; future homes 161–163; global population 153; grey nomads 151, 153–165; health 162; and home 151–155, 156–163, 163–165; homeownership 151; move into aged care facilities 151–153; retirement villages 163; returning home 160–161; safety 158–159; sense of freedom and space 159–160; social and environmental connectedness 157–159; and social work 163–164; study 155–156; travelling 159–161; women 151–152 Oliver, M. 170 Olsberg, D. 162 online platforms 123 Onyx, J. 155 Orchard, T. 73 O’Shane, P. 66 Osland, L. 143 Palestine 69, 105–106, 192 Parsell, C. 84 participant observation 126 partnership, reflexive 5–6 Pease, B. 93, 169, 183 Pedersen R.E. 137 Pennycook, A. 66 person-based approaches 119 person-centred case management 125 Perumal, N. 116 Philippines, the 72–73 Pilkey, B. 37, 184 Pink, S. 161 place-based approaches 119 place, sense of 11, 18, 33–34, 143–144, 156–157 Plüss, C. 137–138 policy processes 12 political violence 69, 104–106, 106 Portugal 178 post structural theorising 185–186

Index poverty 7, 90 power and power relations 6, 21, 29, 30, 35, 35–36, 38, 62, 74, 91, 137, 147, 178, 202 Pratt, G. 35–36 Prince, M. 89–90, 174 privatisation 52 Probyn, E. 60, 137 psychoanalysis 113 public housing 51–54 public places 15 queer domesticities 191 queer identity 186 queer theory 36–37, 185–186, 195 queerness 187 racism 1, 5–6, 54, 68, 86, 103, 139, 147, 201 Randall, B. 65 Redd, C. 190–191 reflection, critical 7 reflexive ethnography 127 reflexive partnerships 5–6 reflexive research, and subjectivities 72–75 refugees 17, 27, 38, 68, 144–146; Australia 88–89, 145–146, 147–148; resettlement 147–148; see also migrants and migration renting 35 researcher reflexivity 12–16 residential fixity 17, 19, 20, 27, 28, 111–112 residential mobility 34 retirement housing 20 retirement villages 163 Rich, A. 184 Richardson, J. 33 Riggs, D.W. 190 Robinson, C. 84 Robinson, S. 173–174 rootedness 34 Rose, G. 99 Rowntree, M. 37 Russell, E.K. 190–191 Samanani, F. 32, 202, 203 Sánchez, B.J. 45 sanctuary 156–157 Sanders, W. 55 Saunders, P. 34 Scicluna, R. 36–37 Scotland 116, 118

211

Scott, A. 63 segregation 54 Self, J. 192 self-reflexivity 73, 92, 106, 201 self-worth 122 services, access to 148 sex workers 73 sexuality 21, 183–195; biological assumptions 185; dimensions 183; and disability 187; discrimination 192–193; the heteronormative family home 188–190; and home 184–185, 191–192; and homelessness 89, 93, 184; intersecting subjectivities 71–72; intersectionality 186, 195; legislative inequalities 183–184; queer theory 185–186, 195; research samples 189–190; state apologies 190–191, 195; support 190; Two Spirit perspectives 192; and violence 190, 194 Sheppard, J. 51 Sherry, M. 187 Simpson, M.K. 201 situated intersectional analysis 17, 61–62 Sixsmith, J. 152 skilled migration 140–144, 146–147 Smith, S. 30 snowbirds 155 social and environmental connectedness 157–159 social change 30, 186 social exclusion 35 social housing 35, 49 social identity 185–186 social inclusion 19, 133 social inequalities 17 social insideness 27 social justice 28, 38, 74, 132, 148–149, 172, 179, 186, 193, 201 social life 62 social policy 46, 47, 201–202 social positioning 73 social relationships 142 social services 153 social welfare 19 social work education 203 social work research 17, 19 socioeconomic power relations 29 Soderqvist, Å. 91, 114–115 solastalgia 105–106 Somerville, P. 84 Sousa, C.A. 69, 105 South Africa 18, 98, 102–103, 107, 116, 118

212

Index

space, and subjectivity 60–61 Spargo, T. 189, 190 spatial imaginery 30 spiritual homelessness 74 Stafford, L. 179 stasis 28 state power, disciplinary 67 state violence 1, 5, 66–67, 69, 74, 75, 106, 116–117, 199, 203 stolen homes 1–8, 62–67, 75 strength 7 Struthers, J. 152 subjectification 67, 72–73, 114 subjectivities 17, 21–22, 60–75; children 69–70, 70–71; disability 72; and disciplinary state power 67; First Nations Peoples 60, 62–67; gender 71–72; and migration 67–69; and reflexive research 72–75; sexuality 71–72; situated intersectional analysis 61–62; and social work 74–75; through the life course 69–72 subjectivity: previous research 61; and space 60–61; understandings of 61 subjectivity work 61, 73 supportive housing 91–92 Sweden 114–115 symbolic representations 30, 74 Thorns, D. 34–35 Todres, L. 31 tourists 20, 155, 160 trans-locational subjectivities 17 transcalarity 61 translocality 61 translocational positionalities 62, 68 transnational homes 20, 136, 137, 148 transnational social work perspectives 93 transnational urbanism 142 transtemporality 61 Tregeagle, S. 125 Tuckett, A. 152 Tunaker, C. 89 Twigg, J. 158 two-home syndrome 176 Two Spirit perspectives 192 unconscious bias 6 United Kingdom: disability policy 171; homelessness 82, 87, 89; homeownership 49; homophobia 184; housing policy 46, 49; migrants and migration 138–139, 142–143, 144–145; older people 152

United Nations General Assembly 99 United States of America: disability 179; the heteronormative family home 188–189; homelessness 89; homeownership 49; housing policy 46, 49; older people 152, 155; sex workers 73; sexuality 189–190, 193 urban design 83, 174–175 urbanisation 174–175 Vacca, J.S. 114 vagabonds 20, 155 Valentine, G. 37 violence: and disability 173–175; gendered 12, 18, 174, 202; homophobic 184; political 69, 104–106, 106; and sexuality 190, 194; state 1, 5, 66–67, 74, 106, 116–117, 199, 203; state violence 69. see also domestic violence violence again women: see domestic violence Vreugdenhil, A. 152 Ward, G. 164 Wardhaugh, J. 36 Watson, J. 123 wealth creation 46 Webb, S. 74 Wehling, E. 112 welfare dependency 126 welfare identities 19, 123 wellbeing 30, 99, 112–113 What is the problem represented to be? (WPR) questioning framework 201–202 white race privilege 1, 2, 3, 18, 66 whiteness 6, 66, 192 whitening 65 Wiles, J. 142, 143 William, C. 174 Williams, C. 38 Williams, P. 34 Wilson, N. 34–35 Winnicott, D.W. 113, 118, 185 Winstanley, A. 34 Winters, M. 162 Wise, J. M. 32 women: citizenship rights 87; disability 174; financial capacity 102; homelessness 87–88, 92–93, 103; older 151–152; political violence 69; sense of belonging 107; sex workers 73; trafficking of 146; see also domestic violence women’s liberation movement 36

Index xenoracism 201 yarning research methodology 1–2 young people: and belonging 122–133; case management 124–126, 127, 127–130; challenges 130–131, 131, 133; community engagement 122; community participation 132; with a disability 176; intensive support 124–125; mutual obligation policies 125–126; pressure to conform 129–130; social inclusion 133; social

213

dynamics 123; and social work 131–132; systemic challenges 131; transitioning into further education and/or employment 122–133; transitions 19; welfare dependency 126 youth employment policies 123 Yu, N. 180, 193 Yuval-Davis, N. 61–62 Zufferey, C. 1–8, 12–13, 19, 28, 37, 100, 103