The management of personal space in the home

This research seeks to attend to the management of personal space in the home. In foregrounding a perspective of personal space as a performative process and experience that incorporates the social, the material, the political, and the psychological, this research seeks to advance existing interdisciplinary studies that reduce personal space to a static product of the brain. The purpose is to underline the agency of the self, and the role of society, in the personalisation of space. To understand how and why individuals work to personalise their surrounding space, this research takes interest in the discourses and practices that shape spatial experience in the home. This entails an exploration of broader societal trends that have acquired a hyper-individualist form within the typically communal space of the home: the retreat into domestic working practices; the re-emergence of self-care narratives; and the rise of sociality through screens. In doing so, the theoretical position of this research places emphasis on the connection to power, reflexivity, and social constructionism, as this provides a pragmatic foundation for understanding agency.