Co-director (with Sonia Solicari, Director of the Museum of the Home)
Is home a building? A neighbourhood, city, or country? The objects that surround you? A sense of security or insecurity, belonging or alienation? As a partnership between Queen Mary and the Museum of the Home, the Centre for Studies of Home (CSH) has pioneered collaborative and cross-disciplinary research on the home over the past ten years. The museum has recently reopened following a major HLF-funded capital development project and features research from CSH in its displays and collections.
Through a £2m research programme funded by AHRC, ESRC, The Leverhulme Trust and Queen Mary, CSH has set the agenda for an expansive understanding of home. Staff at Queen Mary and the museum have worked with 13 PhD students, nine postdoctoral researchers and three artists-in-residence on home and work; home and religion; high-rise homes and gentrification; home, migration and the city; teenage bedrooms; and home histories.
A major new project at CSH on Stay Home Stories (funded by AHRC as part of the UKRI rapid response to COVID-19) explores experiences of home during and after three UK national lockdowns. Led by Alison Blunt, and with a research team at Queen Mary, Birkbeck, and the University of Liverpool, the project is co-creating podcasts, blog posts, short films, an interfaith toolkit, a virtual exhibition, learning resources, and policy briefs. The core partners are the Museum of the Home, National Museums Liverpool, and the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
Research at CSH studies home within and beyond the domestic sphere and over a range of co-existing temporal and spatial scales. The team has produced new knowledge about servants and residents of high-rise housing and housing estates. As part of a new research agenda on ‘home-city geographies,’ work at CSH has developed new concepts about the multi-layered temporalities of home and inhabitation on domestic and urban scales.
The researchers have studied the relationships between identity, material culture and domesticity and have developed new methodologies to document personal meanings of home within and beyond the domestic interior, including through ‘home-city biographies.’ The team also works with artists and filmmakers to explore diverse experiences and meanings of home.
Research-based in East London has focused on home, work and religion, including projects on home and work for Vietnamese Londoners and domestic religious practice and interfaith connections for Christian, Jewish and Muslim residents.
Through collaborative work with Hackney Archives, Eastside Community Heritage, artists and filmmakers, research at CSH has explored new understandings about the relationships between home, neighbourhood, and the city for residents who live close to the museum.
The work of the CSH has stretched the remit of the Museum by interrogating the meaning of home for diverse audiences and challenging how the concept of home is represented in a museum environment.— Director of the Museum of the Home and CSH co-director, Sonia Solicari
According to the museum’s director and CSH co-director, Sonia Solicari, CSH has "helped to transform the museum into an active space for debate and dialogue and a place for new research."
CSH has provided the intellectual framework to support the museum’s move from a focus on English domestic interiors of middle-class Londoners to a socially, spatially and temporally expansive understanding of home.
Research at CSH has shaped MoH’s more inclusive approach to collections and exhibitions by ‘interrogating the meaning of home for diverse audiences and challenging how the concept of home is represented in a museum environment’. CSH has expanded the museum’s research capacity and embedded research as a core activity through joint doctoral supervision, joint publications, and a programme of research events and activities.
Five co-curated exhibitions displaying CSH research have addressed under-represented subjects in the museum:
The exhibitions reached diverse audiences through the co-creation of school learning resources, performances, talks, tours (including for Hackney deafPLUS), youth, community holiday projects, craft-based multi-sensory workshops and private view events.
One visitor to Swept under the carpet? described the exhibition as ‘inventive and insightful and a great way to bring simple, real stories of “hidden” people alive’.
Key objects have been acquired for the collections as a result of research at CSH, including the 18th-century print ‘Moll Handy’, depicting a servant embodied by the tools of her trade, and a mezuzah, which marks the threshold of a Jewish home. These objects, together with photographs from research projects on teenage bedrooms and on Vietnamese, Jewish and Muslim homes, are on display in the museum's new permanent Home Gallery.
‘Home-city-street’ has deepened links with the local area through two indoor street parties, artist-led workshops, a workshop at Hackney Archives, and four short films screened at the museum, Hackney Archives, the kebab shop belonging to one of the participants and the crypt of St Peter’s Church.
The app-based audio walk ‘Home-city stories’ was developed in collaboration with the museum and Hackney Archives and runs from one to the other on and around Kingsland Road.
‘Home-city stories’ has been positively evaluated with groups of teachers, students, older residents on the digital project ‘Hello Hackney,’ and museum and archive staff from the museum, Hackney Archives and Hackney Museum.
A long-term Hackney resident said that the audio-walk ‘made me think about where I feel at home.’ The audio-walk made a geography teacher think about ‘different scales and understandings of home: where you are born or where you live? And how areas have changed.’
Four recent books showcase recent research at CSH:
Around the world, trust in the police has plummeted. How can we hold those who have sworn to protect us accountable?
Who joins or leaves a political party and why? What do parties think of their members and how does this impact their policies? And how does all of this play out in the media?
Since 2015, the Verbatim Formula (TVF) has collaborated with cohorts of care-experienced young people across the UK, developing a methodology to help adults listen better and young people to be heard.
Audio production can be time consuming, labour-intensive and expensive. A new cloud-based audio mastering service, LandR Audio, uses artificial intelligence algorithms to produce professional – but accessible – audio mastering.
The centre is an international hub for research on the home, past, present and future, for innovative research and learning on the theme of ‘home’. It combines the complementary expertise and interest of Queen Mary and the Museum to develop research, knowledge exchange, dissemination and learning projects.
'Stay home': rethinking the domestic in the COVID-19 pandemic,' funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of the UK Research and Innovation rapid response to COVID-19.