Home space? Public and private in new welfare settings

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The proposed seminar series will explore feelings of 'home' and 'belonging' when using public services, in spaces including childcare settings, hospitals and sites of care for older people, at a time of significant change to such services. Through focusing on ideas of 'home spaces' and 'homeliness' the seminars will ask wider questions about public and private lives within the spaces. Specifically the series will ask who 'feels at home' or not in these spaces and how they are experienced by users and workers. It will develop a new framework for understanding institutional, semi-institutional and domestic spaces in relation to service provision. A particular set of issues will be the context of sweeping change and cuts to the UK welfare state at the present moment, which potentially affects different groups in different ways. The seminars draw on a variety of ways of thinking about home and public and private lives, including feminist theory which has often seen homes as places of repression, and among social policy-makers, who often have aspirational models of home and domestic life in mind when designing policies. This suggests that 'home spaces' have contradictory qualities and that what might feel 'homely' for one group excludes others. The seminars also draw on new approaches to researching spaces within institutions, for example using visual media and understanding sensory and emotional aspects. Existing research in this area has focused only on one particular kind of space, for example childminders' homes or housing for older people, and therefore this proposal is highly innovative in bringing together researchers and workers concerned with different kinds of public service spaces, used by different groups at different stages of life. In considering the spaces together the seminars will ask how far experiences of feeling at home are changing overall within public service provision, and what is different across areas. The seminars bring together researchers from different disciplines, policy makers and practitioners in order to develop new insights, create new connections and develop new research agendas. Five events will be held: the first one will set out theoretical frameworks around homeliness and home spaces, the second will look at home spaces in relation to policy agendas and programmes, the third will will look at spaces of 'care' at different stages of the lifecourse, the fourth will examine research methods and the final one will reflect on new research agendas and issues for practitioners looking forward.Findings from the seminars will be disseminated to diverse groups of other researchers, policy makers, and practitioners, via a range of publications, an interactive website and a summary pamphlet.