Five - The Contested Home

Summary

While working from home is claimed to alleviate problems including work– life balance and commuting, the COVID-19 pandemic has undeniably provided us with a more nuanced understanding of using our homes for work. This enforced live experiment has helped expose how we interact with our private spaces. Thrust into appropriating dining rooms as classrooms and kitchen tables as meeting rooms, we suddenly found ourselves in a space with multiple meanings and uses. What was once private was made (partly) public and the boundaries of work and home were broken and re-established. These new ways of working have provoked questions about how, why and where we work: how has being ‘on show’ in our homes on Zoom positively contributed to our relationships at work (or not)? How have control and monitoring measures been reshuffled, and how has it affected boundary making while working from home? How have the liminal spaces in our homes – stairs, hallways, rooftops – offered newfound and important places of work, rest and play?

This chapter explores the spatial complexities of working from home in a crisis and how we can learn from this to better enable people to work from home in the future. Using stories from UK and European workers, we reflect on how the COVID-19 emergency forced many of us to set up home working spaces overnight, and how this has fundamentally changed how we understand and use our homes for work. Some of these stories have been gathered from workers – colleagues, networks and friends – all of whom have shared photographs and narratives of their experiences with us over the past nine weeks. Others come from our recent visual analysis of images posted on social media platforms, such as Instagram, during the crisis.

Visibility/vulnerability

The domestic environment is more visible now and these spaces are typically private, often places of care for ourselves and others close to us (see Chapters Three and Four). During COVID-19, our homes have been opened as public spaces to be shared with others – particularly in relation to video calls and the explosive use of Zoom and other communication tools. This makes the home a contested space with multiple meanings and in which competing interests play out.