Living Together in the Topological Home

Abstract

The article discusses the mundane politics of familial life from children’s perspectives and portrays the home as a relational space of subject formation and a context of everyday politics. The approach is based on an Arendt-inspired understanding of politics and a topological conception of spatiality that appreciates the intensity, frequency, and significance of social relations as being constitutive of political life. The article views the home as spatially finite yet open-ended in scale, resting upon and shifting by intersubjectively established and subjectively experienced spatial attachments. It therefore appears as a multifaceted context of development and practice that consists of people, places, ideas and things near and far, of kith and kin. The empirical analysis, based on an ethnographic research project, explores the plurality of children’s familial spatial attachments, the particularity of their familial subjectivities, and their active and developing political agencies in the “topological home.”