The more-than-human home

In the Western imagination, home is a human place. Increasingly, however, these human-centred understandings of home are being upended, not only by the more-than-human turn in the social sciences, but by the growing incidence of extreme weather and other environmental stressors, as the effects of climate change are felt across the globe. How home is imagined and made in this context is a growing concern. This chapter sets out the key ways that more-than-human thinking informs understandings of home. It focuses on the house-as-home, but also recognises home as a place and set of feelings that exist in diverse places and across scale, including from the neighbourhood to the nation. The chapter starts by overviewing the nature-culture dualisms that have long defined research on home, before establishing that home is connected to and dependent on 'natural' processes such as water cycles and energy production. It then considers the place of nonhuman animals within the home, before drawing from STS and ideas of the 'building event' to consider the active agency of housing itself. The chapter closes with the growing climate emergency, addressing how more-than-human thinking on home might be productive in shaping new domestic futures.