Home-making at the margins: tensions of marginality, relationality, temporality and care

• Reframes home-making as an ongoing process shaped by constraint and care. • Shows how people actively make home even where normative ideals are unsettled. • Develops a thematic framework linking marginality, care, time, and relationality. • Advances debate beyond home unmaking by foregrounding adaptive everyday practices. • Positions home-making as a lived, political process across diverse housing contexts. This paper examines the creative, contested and often difficult processes of home-making that emerge in contexts where normative forms of home-making are constrained or continually unsettled. While geographies of home frequently emphasise how adverse circumstances unmake or erode home, we foreground the adaptive and relational practices through which people continue to make home under conditions of constraint. Attending to the everyday, affective textures of these practices reveals the agential spaces that persist, and the ways in which people inhabit, negotiate and rework them, even as economic, political, social and environmental forces restrict their capacity to sustain a sense of home. We identify four themes that underpin our understanding of home-making at the margins, as a process that unfolds across multiple spaces and scales: marginality, the relational co-constitution of home, temporalities, and care. Together, these themes frame this special issue and illuminate how home-making is lived, negotiated and felt as an ongoing, mutable and inherently unfinished process at the margins.