‘It’s Coming from the Heart’: Exploring a Student’s Experiences of ‘Home’ Using Participatory Visual Methodologies

This introductory study explores the meanings and images of ‘home’ for a student living in student accommodation within the United Kingdom. It makes a case for the use of visual methodologies, as well as outlining their contribution to theorising the geographies of space, gender, and the home. In addition to furthering debates about the meanings of ‘home’, it establishes the visual as a valid form of sociological knowledge, ethnography, and representation, and adds to critiques of visual methodologies more broadly. Employing a combination of auto-photography and photo-elicitation methods, this study forms a collaborative effort between research participant and researcher, to create and interpret the visual images of 'home'. The setting of the ‘home’ – regarded as one of the most familiar places for its occupants – is defamiliarised and made strange and interesting again through the medium of photography. This study positions itself within this research gap and dilemma by building on existing work which has sought to 'make the familiar strange' through creative methodologies.