There’s No Place Like It: Making Space for Home in the Sociology Classroom

Sociological attention to home has increased in the last couple decades, yet home has remained largely hidden within disparate subfields, not treated as an organizing concept in and of itself until recently. Recognizing the centrality of home to people’s life experiences and the (re)production of inequality, sociologists are now advocating for a new sociology of home. This conversation builds on those calls by appealing specifically to sociologists as teachers. Sociologists are already teaching about home, just not typically as the focus of a course. This conversation argues that home deserves to be centered. The personal relevance of this concept to most students offers pedagogical advantages. The wealth of existing instructional resources on this subject also makes centering home quite feasible. To illustrate how this could be done, this conversation provides suggestions for how the five essential concepts of the sociological literacy framework can be addressed with a focus on home.