What does it mean to ‘feel at home’? A pluralistic qualitative study of the experience of ‘feeling at home’

This paper presents the results of a qualitative collaborative pluralist study of the experience of ‘feeling at home’. The aim of the research was to gain a better understanding of how the experience of ‘feeling at home’ comes into being, under what conditions it arises and how it manifests experientially and discursively. Inspired by Collective Memory Work, we used analytic pluralism to analyse our own experiences of ‘feeling at home’. This enabled us to pay attention to a variety of dimensions of the experience including its phenomenological, discursive, material, and social aspects. We were able to identify some essential experiential qualities that characterised our experiences of ‘feeling at home. These include: a positive tone and valence; in-the moment fleetingness; a sense of calmness and relaxation; feelings of closeness, connection and belonging; a sense of fittingness and contentment. We were also able to identify some key conditions which needed to be in place for the experience to arise. These include: familiarity; a sense of safety; a certain amount of agency; connection to self and others; freedom from tension; available discursive resources to construct a version of ‘feeling at home’. We conclude the paper with reflections on our findings by considering what they might tell us about the (experiential and discursive) structure and conditionality of the experience of ‘feeling at home’. We also discuss some of the wider social and theoretical implications of our findings.