A few years ago I received a grant (with co-I Frank Tester) to explore more closely the connections between housing and home in two locations with marked housing crises: Vancouver, BC and Arviat in Nunavut.  And so the Making Housing Home project was born. The basic starting point for the work was that housing was an important component of home, but did not, in and of itself, constitute home.  Instead home could be found in our routines and connections to a wide variety of people, places, and things.  So we set out to document everyday routines and their relationship to housing.  Mostly we worked through in-depth interviews and collaborative calendar and map construction projects.  But we tried as many different ways to get at home as we could think of.  One sub-project involved working intensively with youth in both Arviat and Vancouver to get cameras and some basic photography training into their hands and let them document what “at home” looked like for them.

One member of my research team, Karina Czyzewski, took an especially critical lead role in this sub-project.  Working with the youth in Vancouver, and with other team members, she put together an exhibit at the Roundhouse Community Centre.  Then she brought photos and descriptions of home together into this wonderful booklet, which we printed off and gave to all youth participants and several other community partners in both Arviat and Vancouver. I’m now providing an electronic copy of the booklet here to get as wide exposure for it as possible.

So here’s the booklet!  (Or click on the image below!  Note: 19MB size file)

While our research is still on-going, and I’ve got a whole lot of data analysis ahead of me, I think this is a good time to get some of the voices of our participants out there, speaking in their own words about their experiences of home.  I think the results speak for themselves.  So… at least for the moment… I’ll stop talking about them.  Enjoy, and feel free to share widely!