Home, with Michaela Benson

Rosie Hancock: 0:06

Hi there, and welcome to Uncommon Sense, the podcast that sees the taken-for-granted afresh, through the eyes of sociologists. I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 0:17

And I'm Alexis Hieu Tuong in Ottawa, Canada.

Rosie Hancock: 0:20

And were part of the team at The Sociological Review, a place for critical thinking, for questioning simplistic ideas about society, and imagining better alternative futures as well.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 0:31

Yeah. And we believe sociology should be for everyone, not hidden away in the universities, buried in jargon or trapped behind paywalls. And it's for all of us, because it's about all of us. So, Uncommon Sense gets away from the college campus and looks at stuff that affects us all.

Rosie Hancock: 0:54

So, today, we're talking about Home. It's a word that promises so much and conjures up heaps of images, from those annoying DIY ads with implausible couples and dungarees – you know the ones I'm talking about – to huge migration patterns that shaped global history. And it's at the heart of so much of our pop culture: films like "The Wizard of Oz" and, well, "Home Alone"; novels like Yaa Gyasi's"Homegoing"; TV shows on tiny houses and finding "A Place in the Sun" ... It's behind every news bulletin, in tales of inequality, borders, and more. In fact, the word "home" brings with it ideas of security and insecurity, inclusion and exclusion, the private, the public, taste, design, and so much more. Alexis, I guess to me, home makes me think of two

places: 1:43

New Zealand, where I was born and where I grew up, and Australia, where I live now. But is it kind of cheating? Or do you think it's kind of common to have more than one home, Alexis? What does it, what does it mean to you?

Alexis Hieu Truong: 1:56

No, I definitely identify with what you're saying. Like as a, as a person born in Canada from a Quebec mother and a Vietnamese father, but never having been in Vietnam, home is kind of just like the smells of getting back into the house, and smelling Vietnamese soup and Quebec pudding type of thing.

Rosie Hancock: 2:18

Yeah. I mean, something that we both have in common, Alexis, is that we're both based in places where we're living and working on unceded indigenous land. So I'm on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. And Alexis, you're on Algonquin land, where you are in the Ottawa region right now.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 2:38

Yeah, that's correct. So, on Algonquin unceded land, and actually, that's something you can read more about in the Episode Notes for this show. Today, we're talking to someone whose work speaks to pretty much all of those themes we mentioned earlier. She's Michaela Benson, Professor of Public Sociology at Lancaster in the UK. So Michaela, it's really nice to have you with us.

Michaela Benson: 3:02

Hi, Alexis. Hi, Rosie. It's great to be here with you today.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 3:06

Home is at the heart of so much of your work, whether it's in your research on the London skyline, or on people building their own homes, or moving across borders. Why does the concept grab you?

Michaela Benson: 3:17

Yeah, just listening to you in that opening... yeah, it was just like mentally ticking things off in my head. Because, all of those themes around migration, around those kind of lifestyle shows that you were talking about, around our own feelings of where we feel at home are really central to my work, but also to my experience as well. So, I don't think it's that surprising. But I have focused on home quite extensively throughout my research: whether it's looking at how British citizens who live in the EU experience home in the context of Brexit and the changing of their rights, whether it's the work I did earlier on in the 2010s with people who were building their own homes, whether it's the research I did very, very early on in my academic career, where again, I was working with British citizens who'd moved to France to kind of live the "real dream". It's really been right at the heart of things. And I think for me, it's really the entry point into thinking about home and migration that really drew me in. My experience is similar to Alexis's. I come from a mixed family. My mother was born and brought up in Hong Kong, a place which has changed beyond recognition since she was born there in the 1950s. We also moved a lot when I was a child. So, for me, it had a quite important resonance to think about where home could be in a context where actually, until the age of 11, I moved every 18 months. So, thinking about home beyond place was really important to me.

Rosie Hancock: 4:52

Your work on Brexit is, I think, super interesting to, to reference here because I think it shows how shaky this idea of home can be. Because Brexit has affected people in all sorts of ways, and it's changed their relationship to where they live. Sort of like, I think, there are lots of sort of political upheavals or climate change related events, thinking about floods in Europe or, or fire in Australia. Any kind of event like that really shakes up our idea of home. Can you speak to that a little bit, about being unsettled?

Michaela Benson: 5:32

Yes, I think that's really important. Because I think sometimes we take for granted, particularly when we're talking about people who we might understand as relatively privileged. So, what I mean by that is, when I'm looking at the case of Brexit, British citizens who were able to move and settle in other EU member states, because they were British, because they were European, and actually feeling, you know, the justification for that always a rationalisation was: "well, we're here because we can be here, we're allowed to be here"; because legally they were allowed to be here. And yet, this massive political transformation, whatever you think of Brexit, you know, a situation where a state decides to exit a big union of multiple states, and the transformation of rights that that brings for all of us who are British citizens, but particularly for people who have used their EU citizenship, to go and settle somewhere, shows how kind of tentative those understandings of your place in the world can be. And I think what really struck me when it came to Brexit, and speaking with British citizens who settled across Europe, was not only how that moment where Britain voted to leave the European Union affected their relationship with the places they'd settled, but also how it transformed their understandings of what Britain was to them.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 7:02

So, you mentioned people's sense of what it means to be British. I know there's so much on TV about home, both in the UK but also around the world. I know where I am, there are a lot of shows about celebrities making their own renovations, selling houses for profit.

Rosie Hancock: 7:18

Yeah, we've got those in Australia as well, and I have to say, I'm currently obsessed with a home renovation show on YouTube actually. I'm watching it every night. I'm embarrassed to admit.

Michaela Benson: 7:31

I think that's really common, Rosie. I mean, this is how I started out in my research, really, when I was in the early stages of my PhD, noticing how prolific those television programmes have become. And this is in the early 2000s. And asking myself, well, what, what's going on here? I mean, now they've just become so commonplace, there are millions of them.

Rosie Hancock: 7:54

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Do you think maybe it's appealing to some kind of anxiety that we share about place and belonging?

Michaela Benson: 8:02

For me, I think that actually, yes, there is that kind of kind of voyeuristic side of things, isn't there, where we kind of want to have a look and see what other possibilities are out there. You know, those shows are absolutely rife with kind of dreams of an ideal life. I mean, it kind of, in a way, it goes back to those conversations about the "ideal home" that were happening in the 1990s, which were to do with, you know, making a particular type of domestic space. But I think that the other thing about it, the proliferation of these shows, really speaks to me about how over the course of the last 20-30 years or so, properties become really fetishized. It's no longer just about, you know, having a place to live and to settle, which, you know, we all, we all need that. It's something about the kind of aesthetics, the kind of lifestyle that you can cultivate in and through your home.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 9:00

What you mention here about dreaming an ideal life and kind of like this fetishization, like really focusing on, on home as, as this element of lifestyle is quite interesting. In a bit we'll hear from activists trying to give a whole new meaning to home in one of the world's most expensive cities, London. But first time for a word from our producer, Alice.

Alice Bloch: 9:28

Hi there, you're listening to Uncommon Sense from The Sociological Review, where we take a sideways look at the taken-for-granted norms and ideas that shape our world through a sharp sociological lens. We're all about challenging everyday thinking and intervening in our current crises to imagine and perhaps even to create a better world. If you like what you're hearing, just take five seconds to press pause now in whatever app you're using, and hit Subscribe. It takes just a few seconds and it really does help us to make more episodes for you. And why not share the show with the student or the season critic in your life? Remember, you really don't have to be a sociologist to think like one. Just head to thesociologicalreview.org, where you'll also find recommended reading from journal articles to films, novels and music too, for every single episode. Thanks for listening.

Rosie Hancock: 10:22

Okay, back to home. Michaela, one group you've met through your work is RUSS. That's the Rural Urban Synthesis Society. Based in London, they're working to make sustainable community-led and truly affordable neighbourhoods that will stay that way for the long term. In short, they're what's called a Community Land Trust.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 10:42

Yeah, so, as CLT, RUSS's founding chair was Kareem Dayes who grew up on a street called Walters Way, where his family was one of a group who built their own timber frame homes in the 80s. It was part of a radical council-backed self-build project, using the methods of architect Walter Segal.

Rosie Hancock: 10:59

And right now, RUSS is working to provide 36 truly affordable new homes at a site called Church Grove in Lewisham, a part of South London where average house prices are around half a million pounds. So let's hear from two people who've been part of the RUSS story.

Kwame Lowe: 11:19

So, yeah, my name is Kwame, I was the co-chair of RUSS. I'm born and bred in Lewisham. I'm like a real local boy. I went away to university and studied, and I came back. And I was wanting to find a way to get involved with the community I was from and the area I was from, and I've seen a lot of changes happening. And I actually had my first kind of full time job on a council estate of the Old Kent Road. So, I was working for the City of London, and I did it for a year and I just became quite disillusioned. But it was about, I guess, the system and the way that the system didn't really speak to a lot of their needs. And then, I did another job that was unrelated, but I also joined RUSS. So, my parents are friends with Kareem's parents, and I went to Walters Way a lot as a child. And I didn't really know it was self-built, I didn't know it was community-led housing. I just thought it was amazing. They just had its own vibe, it just felt very different to the kind of other streets in the area. And I think that just stayed with me. And I think when that RUSS kind of opportunity came back up, and when I kind of got involved with RUSS, that was somewhere in the back of my mind, was that there were alternative ways to live in London.

Alice Grahame: 12:33

My name is Alice. I also used to be a trustee of RUSS. I live in Walters Way, and one of my neighbours was Kareem Dayes and his parents. And through that connection, I heard about RUSS and that Kareem was setting up a new housing project inspired by Walters Way. And I just thought that sounded like a brilliant idea because, living in Walters Way, I knew that it was possible to form housing development that had a really good strong community and it could be affordable. The way that Kareem designed it was setting it up as a Community Land Trust, which means that the land is owned by a trust, rather than by individual homeowners, which means that there's a chance for the homes to stay affordable, rather than be sold and then end up on the housing market. I actually remember in the 1990s – that's when I first heard about people of my age buying a home – and I do remember a friend who had a salary of 15,000 buying a home in one of the outer suburbs of London. And she got a mortgage, which was three times her salary, which was 45,000 pounds. So, it was perfectly within the imagination of me and my peers to, to own a home. A few years later, I then also bought a home. So, because of having that opportunity, with house prices being so much lower in relation to an annual salary, I was able to get on that property ladder. And I think the problem is, today, that the prices are so high compared to salaries that, unless you already own a property, the chances of buying a property seem to be very remote.

Kwame Lowe: 14:19

I think it's really strange to hear that there was ever a time when people could afford to buy a home. And it's like almost unthinkable, I think, for a lot of people my age in London to ever aspire to that. And I think that's really really difficult as a young person, and, I think, to not ever kind of foresee yourself having that security and, like, a place in the city you're from, I think, is like a really strange thing to sort of grow into. And that's definitely a big reason why I got on board with RUSS. And I think the other thing I'd say as well is just that once I think it is a generational problem, I think it's also to do with the kind of way land prices and the prices of homes in London is just so massively inflated. Because the economy in this country is just so imbalanced. And it's also to do with the global ... The global nature of investment in London as well, I think, is a big reason why people might can't afford to live in places they're from. And I just think London as a city is almost losing, very quickly – I think every city changes – but I think London is just losing the people that made the city what it was. And that's, I just think the massive thing for policymakers to think about. I don't think I'd blame an older generation necessarily, I just blame people who have that kind of power to change the bigger structures. I don't know what you think about that, Alice? I don't know if you kind of feel any guilt, or if you feel any responsibility, or you think it's a bigger problem?

Alice Grahame: 15:47

I don't really feel guilt, because at the time, in the 1990s, it was possible for someone, you know, at a regular job to buy a property. I guess we, we didn't know that prices were going to shoot up so hugely and that houses would then become completely unaffordable. I suppose, looking at the factors that cause those prices to inflate, I think that's something that was really out of my hands. And is to do, more to do with sort of international finance rather than sort of regular people who were really just buying a place to live. I know there is also the question of gentrification. And by moving into areas that were relatively cheap, and buying a property that does push the price up. So in that sense, then I am guilty. In that sense, because Walters Way was initially a social housing project. It was for people who were in housing need. What happened was with Right to Buy and Leasehold Reform, the people who built their own houses – the self-builders, they owned their houses – the majority sold their houses privately on the on the private housing market. I remember when I first looked around Walters Way, it was definitely marketed as being cheaper than other houses, and Walter Segal and his houses were not known about at all. Those houses now exchange hands at a very high price. Something that was initially affordable social housing no longer is. And I think that's why, with RUSS, it was set up as a Community Land Trust to ensure that that wouldn't happen in the future.

Kwame Lowe: 17:30

So much of what made London great, and what still makes London great, is just its diversity, and that's like in so many forms. It's, like, in terms of, like, places and the kind of character of places, London's like a city of kind of towns almost. And um, I just think the way that we're developing in terms of, like, the kinds of, like, houses we're building, the kind of affordability of them and the kind of the limitations and the kinds of people that can live in them, that's just making London not as vibrant or as interesting and as creative as well. And so much has come out of London, I think, because of that, and so much may not come out of it because of that. And so, for me, I felt like, whilst I could always live in London, it might not always provide me with what I feel like it has up until this point. And I think I could say the same for, for a lot of my peers who grew up in the kind of area that I grew up in. So, yeah, that's kind of how I see it going. And I hope that, yeah, that organisations like RUSS can, can make a difference in in kind of halting that or reversing it at least.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 18:38

Kwame Lowe and Alice Grahame discussing housing in London.

Rosie Hancock: 18:42

Michaela, you've studied self-build in the UK. That's people who take DIY to the next level and build their own place. That is, I think, how you came to know RUSS? I know that when I was in my 20s I never even stopped to think that I might be able to buy my own home, let alone actually build it. So, if I wanted to pull off building my own home, what kind of resources would I need? And to be honest, why would someone even want to?

Michaela Benson: 19:12

I think that's a really important question, Rosie. Building your own house, particularly through a kind of community-led scheme is a possibly affordable way of getting your own home. Now, I've got big quotation marks around everything that I've said it because, you know, in introducing this, you also talked about how London is one of the most unaffordable places in the world. And where we see something like self-build really working for people who can't afford to get into housing is actually in parts of the Global South. I mean, it's been a very, very long tradition of where people are struggling with housing that they've gone away and they've built their own. Now, in the UK, we've got a really long running series about people building their own homes– Grand Designs – and I used to love this show.

Rosie Hancock: 20:07

So do I.

Michaela Benson: 20:10

I mean, I think they've got like Grand Designs Australia as well.

Rosie Hancock: 20:13

Yeah.

Michaela Benson: 20:13

It's about, like, these kind of seemingly completely impossible projects that people take on. And you, you know, towards the end, it all comes good. But you see the struggle. What I think we're seeing when we see that struggle in those programmes is actually how housing markets in a lot of places – the UK is one of them – are really not set up for people to build their own homes. So there are lots of impediments. First of all, in the UK, its land that's really expensive, that's prohibitive to most people in terms of building their own homes. And then it goes down into things like, you

know: 20:51

how do you even find the people who would do the work on those houses? There's a lot of time and energy that would need to go into building your own home, if you were going to do it as an individual. If you're going to try and do it as a community, this could provide support, it can provide a way of championing a kind of community-led programme, which, you know, as in the case of Lewisham, can result in some backing from kind of local government. But again, it's time and energy, and a certain degree of what we could call cultural

capital, you know: 21:25

how are you going to network with the people that you need to network with to make something like this happen?

Rosie Hancock: 21:30

I think that's really interesting, Michaela. Particularly this idea that you need some kind of cultural or social capital – I think that's really true. I, I research grassroots activism in my own work, and I find that a lot of my own activists, the more successful groups are groups that come with that kind of capital. So, in my case, that's people that have particular levels of education, they don't have the wealth in order to dedicate time to projects. Is this the kind of thing you're talking about in this context as well?

Michaela Benson: 22:05

I think that that's definitely important. And certainly when you start to work with, well, the work that I did with those community groups, so RUSS was one of them – actually, they were only just starting out when I was doing that research, but I've been working with other community groups as well. Actually, some of the early work they had to do was to actually kind of pool those kind of networks, pool that kind of, you know, the kind of skills and knowledge base that they had, and kind of think about who could be best positioned in order to navigate what is a very complicated environment to build those things up. But I think that the other thing is, you know, we can't really talk about this in London without talking about money. Money is really, really important, because as I said, land is incredibly expensive. And the final thing I would say is time, these things take a really really long time. So, I did that research in the early ... well, I finished that research in 2015, and RUSS are still building.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 23:08

That's interesting. So, those TV shows kind of, they make you feel that anyone can do it, and that maybe everyone should do it. I know that working around the house here, I've received a lot of help from my partner's father, and in the recording, Alice and Kwame are candid about the differences between generations. What do you make of Alice's comments on this whole issue of responsibility and blame?

Michaela Benson: 23:32

I think that when we, you know ... So, I'm in my 40s, and I think about what my parents were able to afford to do. And then I think about what I'm able to afford to do. And then I think about what my sisters are able to afford to do. And there are notable differences. But I think what's really important about this, is that rather than thinking okay, well, you know, that this is caused by some kind of selfish previous generation, actually, we have to ask ourselves the

question of: 24:01

what was available to those, to the people in that generation? What was the kind of normative expectations about what they should do? And what were the opportunities that they had? They took those opportunities, because the markets enabled them to do it. The market has changed. We're in this kind of a very different political economy of housing, where the costs of everything have gone on. But these are not necessarily caused by individuals. They're caused by a whole variety of factors coming into play. From what the government decides to do, about facilitating people into homeownership. So, you heard Alice there talking about how the Thatcher government in the 1980s in the UK introduced this scheme called Right to Buy, which meant that this stock that had been set aside to provide affordable rent for people who couldn't afford to rent through the private sector, actually meant that a lot of that housing stock moved into private ownership. And that's not something that an individual could have necessarily any control over. It's something else. There's those bigger structures, as we'd refer to them in sociology, that really shaped what opportunities are available to us.

Rosie Hancock: 25:22

So, Michaela, I mean, you've just said, you know, individuals versus the social structure, right? We shouldn't be focusing on individuals. What kinds of questions should we be asking, as sociologists? Do we even do blame?

Michaela Benson: 25:38

I think it's probably worthwhile going back to that idea of DIY. And we've mentioned that a few times while we've been talking about housing– Doing It Yourself – and we need to ask ourselves a question about why, in the current housing market, people are expected to do it themselves? What does that mean in terms of what is otherwise available to them? The kind of social support, the state support that we might have seen in previous generations ... So, we kind of have to look at it from that perspective, I think. I mean, I realise that I've just avoided the question about blame. But I think it's, I think it really is, it's like a question of like saying "okay, well ..." If we focus too much on individuals and their actions, I think we can miss the broader absence of those structures, which might support people to do something otherwise. You know, markets don't function on their own. They're not autonomous. They are curated and constructed by governments and other types of stakeholders to make money for some people. And actually, yes, the individual person who owns a house might have made money in that particular way. But I actually think we have to ask about who the big winners are in that situation.

Rosie Hancock: 26:58

Right. Okay. So, not the individual, the social structure, but then also, who wins and who loses.

Michaela Benson: 27:06

Exactly.

Rosie Hancock: 27:07

So, one of the reasons that we wanted to start this podcast is that there are so many ideas out there that we and the media take for granted. They've become so ingrained in how we live and how we're told to live, how we think about what's right and what's wrong. And we don't stop to question them. So, in each episode, we're pausing to cast a sideways eye, something that seems to be common sense, to see if we can think about it differently. So, today, we're talking about the idea that where you live affects your life chances. That's the idea that living in a more deprived neighbourhood could have a negative impact on people's prospects; things like life expectancy, for example, but also people's behaviour.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 27:53

It's known in some policy in academic circles as neighbourhood effects. Michaela, how do you understand it and how can we shake it up a bit?

Michaela Benson: 28:00

I think that this idea of neighbourhood effect is one that attributes kind of negative characteristics to a particular place. And I think what this does is that it actually fails to consider what the other issues are, that might be making that place in a particular way, that might be introducing deprivation into an area.

Rosie Hancock: 28:25

So, is it kind of, like, that places that have certain problems become labelled as "problem places", yeah? And then, because the places get demonised, the people who live there do as well. So, like, a young person growing up in a place that's been labelled as"problem", that kind of negatively affects their progress through life, in a way, they get tarred that same brush.

Michaela Benson: 28:52

That's absolutely the case. The place becomes demonised and the people who live within it becomes stigmatised. And I think that that's a really good way of kind of drawing attention to what the issues really are here. Because what it does is it stops us from having a look at, you know, what type of disinvestment has happened in those areas. Quite simply, how have central governments or local governments stopped putting money and resource into a place. Basically, it's a very, very simplistic understanding; it's a simplistic understanding, which stops us from looking at the kind of root causes of poverty and inequality.

Rosie Hancock: 29:34

I'm curious, is there, like, a relationship here to gentrification in the sense that the government doesn't invest in a place, it becomes a"problem place", but then there's a certain cultural cachet, let's say, for people to move to that place? It's also probably cheap, right? So, you get these people moving in; maybe artists, queer people – I say this as a queer person who's moved to a kind of a cheaper suburb in my own city, so I'm, in a way, I'm talking about myself here – and that then leads to gentrification. Does that gentrification process end up reaching the people that live there, though? Like, I'm just curious about what the relationship is between "problem paces" and gentrification?

Michaela Benson: 30:19

I think that there's quite a lot wrapped up in what you've just said, Rosie. I mean, I think that we can also think that there are other ways of devaluing a place. And you're kind of right to point to the kind of processes by which there might be a purposeful devaluation of a place in order to, for example, run it down, make it so uncomfortable for people to live in, so that other people could kind of – and I'm not talking about people really, I'm talking about kind of corporations, development companies – can move in, can buy up at a low cost, and then it can raise the value through building on that land, or through developing those particular places in particular ways. So yes, there is a story about, you know ... In a context like London, for example, I've done work in Peckham with my colleague Emma Jackson, another one of the editors at The Sociological Review, and we've watched how, over a long period of time, there have been various efforts and kind of contestations over what's valued in that place. And yes, there are people who move in because the costs of living there are low. And yes, you know, there is that tendency towards kind of displacing those populations who are already living there. And that's kind of what's at the heart of that narrative around gentrification.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 31:44

You mentioned being careful not to have oversimplistic understanding. And if you're thinking sociologically, there are certain things you might do to avoid the risk of being too simplistic about how you understand a place, not least, actually, talking to people there properly over a long period of time. People are more than statistics, right?

Michaela Benson: 32:05

Absolutely. And I think that when we're thinking about gentrification, the work of Kirsteen Paton really does come to mind in this. So, she's written this fantastic book

called "Gentrification: 32:14

A Working-Class Perspective", where she works with working class communities in Glasgow and talks to them about how they experienced that process of gentrification. And yes, you know, the landscape is transforming, the property market is transforming. But she presents this really nuanced understanding, where, you know,

they're asking: 32:36

"Well, why, why can't we have this as well?" You

know: 32:39

"Yes, I want to be able to go in and buy a nice coffee from that coffee shop." In fact, that's the opening example in her book. So, people's relationships to those places that are gentrifying are also quite complicated. And I think it's really important that we don't oversimplify that.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 32:55

So, it's about not simplifying things too much, but also not making assumptions about what people want based on who they are on the page. Anyway, almost time to go. But before that, we want to ask, Michaela, one book or film or music or artwork you'd recommend on this topic of home? It could be Nomadland, or Neighbours?

Michaela Benson: 33:19

Yeah, I mean, Neighbours are an earlier part of my life and I just watched Nomadland last weekend, but, actually, what I wanted to talk to you about today is a book that I read recently, by a first-time novelist, Catherine Menon, and the book is called"Fragile Monsters". It's a book about a young woman who has been working in Canada and, because of a crisis in her life, she decides to return to Malaysia, which is where she was born. And it's about her relationship with her ageing grandmother. And in this story, we see that the health of her grandmother deteriorate over time, and alongside it, the kind of connections to a family home that has been a site of a lot of memories, good and bad, are at the centre of the narrative. What's interesting is that this house is in a swamp, and as floods and floods and floods come in – Malaysia is a very wet country – the house basically starts to crumble into its surroundings. Now, I think this book speaks to the themes we've talked about today, because it's about the relationship between the generations. It travels through the history of this Malaysian family from the 1920s onwards, but it's also about the"myth of return". The "myth of return" is a kind of central theme in a lot of work around

migration: 34:45

the idea that if you go back to the place that you originate in, it's a kind of dream that lots of migrants hold on to. But what we get from Catherine Menon's book is actually that being at home is not quite all it cracked up to do. The house and actually the place are not the same, the relationship isn't the same. So, it ties in quite well to that question that you presented to me at the beginning, about this process of unsettling.

Rosie Hancock: 35:17

Just picking up on this idea of the "myth of return"; is that something that you've ever experienced?

Michaela Benson: 35:22

I think that I haven't had that "myth of return". And actually, I think, in my family, I've been reflecting on this a lot in respect to my family's history with Hong Kong, because the Hong Kong that they knew about wasn't there to return to. So, they left a place that had been on borrowed time in the 1990s, as it was kind of leading up to Britain transferring sovereignty of the region to China. And once they left – my grandparents that is, my mother had left years before – I don't think they ever imagined going back because there was nowhere to go back to, in their mind. Because the place that they had left, the colonial Hong Kong, had been surpassed by Chinese Hong Kong. But what's, what's interesting about this is, I think, that there was a moment of hope. My mum went back in around 2010 to visit my sister who was living there at the time, and she was really surprised to find that that Hong Kong was still there, or parts of it were still familiar to

her: 36:24

the sights, the smells, even some of the street scenes. But watching her kind of mourn through this now – what's happening to Hong Kong, what's happened to her beautiful city – has, I think, brought once again, the sense that her home is no longer there.

Rosie Hancock: 36:41

Yeah, that's ... The "myth of return" really speaks to me, I think, because, when I go back to New Zealand, my parents sold – well, they didn't sell – my parents moved from the house that I grew up in, and live somewhere entirely different. So, going back is not going back to the same place. It's, it's going home, but it's not going home to the home that I knew growing up. It's a very bizarre kind of thing. So, my recommendation, if I can jump in with my own recommendation here, is also a novel as well. So, mine is "Unsheltered" by Barbara Kingsolver. It's about a middle aged woman and her family, and they have ... Their supposedly secure life with their good middle class jobs and the home that they own crumbles down around them. And it's a really good reminder, I think, that home isn't always a place of security that we think it might be. Alexis, what about you?

Alexis Hieu Truong: 37:39

I'm quite into science fiction, and maybe it's like, hmm ... the"Foundation" would be my recommendation, because, even though the theme of home might not be, like, a central one, I do remember this part about one of the protagonists kind of coming with a spaceship and landing on a planet and coming out of the spaceship and just like really taking in the smells of the planet. And that kind of really connects to my own understanding of home, like going into the house and just, like, smelling food, type of thing, like these nostalgic or comforting smells, I guess.

Rosie Hancock: 38:16

Yeah. I love that you, I love that talking about home you jumped to outer space science fiction.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 38:24

Outer space pudding.

Rosie Hancock: 38:28

Well, thanks so much Michaela, it's been really great to have you with us.

Michaela Benson: 38:31

Thank you very much. Lovely to speak with you both.

Rosie Hancock: 38:37

And that's it from us for now, if you want to see what the team here at The Sociological Review has recommended on Home, from the recent farming film "Minari" to art on global migration, you'll find it all in our show notes and over at thesociologicalreview.org. Alexis, today has been so interesting for me, particularly hearing Michaela talk about self-builds. I'm trying to buy a house in Sydney with my partner and, tell you what, buying property in Sydney is so expensive, so, if I could just build my own place with my hands, I think that would be much, much easier.

Alexis Hieu Truong: 39:11

Yeah. So, me and my partner, we're really privileged to be able to buy our own place, but we had to do a lot of work around the house. So, I can definitely let you know about some of the things that went wrong with our DIY.

Rosie Hancock: 39:26

Oh, no. Okay, well, maybe that's, maybe that's a reminder that perhaps just find something a bit easier. If you've enjoyed listening today, please subscribe and give us a rating in whatever app you're using. It takes a couple of seconds, but it will make our day. And if you've got longer, why not leave us a nice review. We'll be back soon with more Uncommon Sense. Our producer was Alice Bloch. Thanks for listening. Bye!