Lexington Books Stories of Home: Place, Identity, Exile

Notions of home are of increasing concern to persons who are interested in the unfolding narratives of inhabitation, displacement and dislocation, and exile. Home is viewed as a multidimensional theoretical concept that can have contradictory meanings; homes may be understood as spaces as well as places, and be associated with feelings, practices, and active states of being and moving in the world. In this book, we offer a window into the distinct ways that home is theorized and conceptualized across disciplines. The essays in this volume pose and answer the following critical and communicative questions about home: 1) How do people "speak" and "story" home in their everyday lives? And why? 2) Why and how is home-as a material presence, as a sense and feeling, or as an absence-central to our notion of who we are, or who we want to become as individuals, and in relation to others? 3) What is the theoretical purchase in making home as a "unit of analysis" in our fields of study? This collection engages home from diverse contexts and disparate philosophical underpinnings; at the same time the essays converse with each other by centering their foci on the relationship between home, place, identity, and exile. Home-how we experience it and what it that says about the "selves" we come to occupy-is an exigent question of our contemporary moment. Place, Identity, Exile: Storying Home Spaces delivers timely and critical perspectives on these important questions. Review Communication scholars Devika Chawla and Stacy Holman Jones have gathered writings that examine the meaning of home. Most of the contributors are communication scholars, but anthropology, art, education, and counseling are also represented. The collection is full of captivating, rich personal stories providing insight into the authors' lives and the connection between personal experience and their perspectives of the meaning of home. For example, home can be a physical place in which banal chores and habits are performed or an integral part of the self that is constructed, to mention just two of many possibilities. The contributors' varied backgrounds lead to a variety of perspectives that span economic, ethnic, and regional boundaries. Taken together, these musings about home and the diversity of views of what home means to different people offer a coherent and engaging account of home from philosophical and personal perspectives. A valuable resource for those interested in the elusive nature of home. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. General readers.--CHOICE Complicating and interrogating the meanings of home, this text heightens our awareness of the diverse context- and culture-based stories of home. Each chapter invites reflection about the ways we construct home and carry it with us in our bodies. We resist, embrace, and question what we know, learn, and remember about home, across time, space, and place. mChawla and Holman Jones encourage us to feel the with and withoutness of home--to sense the nostalgia of making home anew in places we travel and to question the disembodying environments where home never was, never will be. The stories remind us of our desire to craft our home in unexpected ways, in unanticipated places.--Patricia Geist-Martin, San Diego State University We often struggle with the meaning of diversity and inclusion, but in Stories of Home, differences across experience, age, race, geography, and sexuality converge and co-exist. The many voices of home speak, sometimes softly and at other times with traces of anger, frustration, tenderness, and longing. This is a beautiful read.--Frederick C. Corey, Arizona State University About the Author Dr. Devika Chawla is associate professor and interim associate director for graduate studies in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University, Athens. Stacy Holman Jones is professor in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash Univ