Stories of Home: Place, Identity, Exile

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Stories of Home: Place, Identity, Exile offers a window into the distinct ways that home is theorized and conceptualized across disciplines. The essays in this volume consider how people speak and story home in their everyday lives, why home is central to our notion of who we are, and how making home a unit of analysis in research makes a strong conceptual contribution to the field of communication. 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. Homehow we experience it and what it says about the selves we come to occupyis an exigent question of our contemporary moment. Stories of Home: Place, Identity, Exile delivers timely and critical perspectives on these important questions.

Reviews

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 *
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
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. Chawla and Holman Jones encourage us to feel the with and withoutness of hometo 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

Author Bio

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 University.