Other people’s homes as sites of uncertainty: ways of knowing and being safe

Abstract

The home visit—when professionals work in service users' homes—is a growing phenomenon. It changes the configuration of home—both for home living and for those who go to work in other people's homes. In this paper we advance recent discussions of the emotional and political geographies of home through a focus on the home visit worker and her or his experience of other people's homes as sites of uncertainty. For such workers the home visit is played out as an interface between the private and intimate and the regulatory occupational safety and health frameworks of policy and corporate interests. It disrupts existing academic definitions of home and defines the regulatory interests of institutions. An examination of the home visit, we propose, has implications for theories of home and the search for certainties that is embedded in regulatory guidelines.