MECM90003 Chap.7 The Home in Mobile Times
The Home in Mobile Times
Week 7 rebuilds home as both a physical location and an existential space under ubiquitous media, and as both private domesticity and an imagined community. Sara Ahmed's essay on home and away argues against romantic theories of the nomad and treats home as a porous skin, stretched between a mythic place of desire and a lived locality.
Maalsen and Dowling, writing in the 2020 lockdowns, show home was never private and that digital surveillance, from facial recognition entry to webcam exam proctoring, accelerated across its threshold. Both readings agree that home was never sealed, which makes it a rich site for analysis.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Home as physical location, existential space and imagined community
- 02
Ahmed against the figure of the nomad: which borders, for whom, at what cost
- 03
Brah's two registers: mythic place of desire and lived locality
- 04
Home as skin and uncommon estrangement
- 05
Maalsen and Dowling: home as not private and the acceleration of surveillance
- 06
Narrative, enforced and exposed spaces of home
- 07
Being open to the world while feeling safe at home
Worked example · free
Is a video-call kitchen still a private home?
- 1Narrative register: the call keeps a remembered home present, Ahmed's mythic place of desire, inside a new lived locality.
- 1Porous boundary: following Ahmed, the kitchen was never sealed; the call is one more crossing of home's skin.
- 1Exposure: following Maalsen and Dowling, the same stream passes through a platform that can see and store the domestic scene.
- 1Judgement: the call extends home emotionally while opening it technologically, so the answer depends on who controls the crossing.
Key terms
- Mythic place of desire
- A mythic place of desire is Brah's term for home as imagined in diaspora, a place of no return even when the territory can be visited.
- Uncommon estrangement
- Uncommon estrangement is Ahmed's idea that migrant community is built from different experiences of estrangement rather than a shared loss of home.
- Control creep
- Control creep is the extension of surveillance measures beyond the emergency used to justify them.
- Lived locality
- Lived locality is home as the immediate, everyday world of a concrete place, known through habit, sounds, smells and streets.
The Home in Mobile Times FAQ
What does Sara Ahmed argue about home and migration?
Ahmed rejects treating migrancy as inherently transgressive or as a condition defined by losing home. She asks which borders are crossed, by whom and at what cost, describes home as a porous skin between home and away, and argues that migrant communities form through uncommon estrangement rather than a shared loss.
How did the pandemic change the home, according to Maalsen and Dowling?
They argue it did not invent home's porosity but accelerated technologies already crossing its threshold. Stay-at-home policy relied on the myth of a private haven while landlords promoted facial recognition entry, and videoconferencing and exam proctoring made bedrooms and kitchens visible to employers, schools and strangers.
Is home a good site for the site analysis task?
Yes, a house is one of the examples the task suggests, provided it is a physical site. Connect it to the reading of the week you present in, for instance Week 7's narrative, enforced and exposed spaces, and show what moves through it, from people and stories to devices and data.
What is the difference between narrative, enforced and exposed space?
These are the lecture's three ways media produce the space of home. Narrative space stretches home across distance through stories and memory. Enforced space turns a dwelling's edge into a monitored boundary, as contact-tracing apps did. Exposed space opens private rooms to outsiders through cameras, videoconferencing and exam proctoring.
Assessment move
Pick one domestic technology you know well, such as a family group chat, a smart doorbell or a shared streaming account, and write it up three times: as narrative space, as enforced space and as exposed space. Then add a sentence on who decides where the boundary falls.
This exercise maps directly onto two essay questions on the list: home boundaries renegotiated by networked technologies, and the tension between being open to the world and feeling safe. Week 7 pairs well with the site analysis because a house, apartment block or shared kitchen is easy to observe and to describe with images.
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