Pandemic Geographies of Home: Domestic Thresholding in Response to <scp>COVID</scp> ‐19

ABSTRACT With the home at the forefront of political and public health responses to COVID‐19, the thresholds between domestic space and the world beyond acquired a new significance in people's everyday lives. Whilst pre‐pandemic research stressed the porosity of domestic thresholds and the capacity of home to stretch beyond domestic space, ‘stay home’ directives and lockdown restrictions demarcated home as a place of containment, separation and immobility at the height of the pandemic. By analysing interviews conducted with adults in London and Liverpool and maps drawn by children and young people throughout the United Kingdom, this paper introduces the concept of ‘thresholding’ to address three key questions: How were domestic thresholds secured, crossed and remade during the COVID‐19 pandemic? How were people's everyday lives in pandemic times mediated by internal and external domestic thresholding practices? What are the wider implications for understanding geographies of home during and beyond the pandemic? We argue that the enhanced significance of domestic thresholds in pandemic times was materialised and embodied through new, reworked and more labour‐intensive thresholding practices. We reveal not only the changing relational dynamics of homespaces during lockdown, but also how people's everyday lives continued to be shaped in varied and uneven ways by the world beyond, as well as within, domestic space. The concept of thresholding reframes the relational spatialities of home by foregrounding the ways in which internal and external thresholds are understood and materialised through embodied practice.