‘It Was the Right Time To Do It’: Moving House, the Life‐Course and Kairos

Abstract

While much has been written on the two issues of home and of residential mobility, little has been written on the experience of moving house. This paper aims to fill this gap. While work on residential mobility has tended to conceptualise it in terms of transitions in the life‐course as triggering moves, this paper explores how these moves are experienced and narrated by those moving house. In doing so, it develops the concept of kairos, an ancient Greek notion of time meaning the ‘right time’ to act. I argue that people who move house narrate their moving experiences in such terms: they saw an opportunity to move home, an opportunity that arose at just the right time and their timely actions meant that they seized the moment. It is through such narratives of kairos that homes are created and (re‐)constituted.