Writing Home: The Lived Experience of Constructing Home in Older Age

Abstract

This thesis charts a quest to learn more about older age, about self and about how older people make sense of and construct what is home for them at their time of life. Home is a central theme which transcends binaries: it is a central concept to the way people live their lives as social beings. It affects the person's sense of belonging and connection, identity and selfhood. Looking back on the period when I began this project, I can distinguish that it was a time of upheaval and transitions in my own life; a search for home, a time of endings and beginnings, of brushes with mortality and flights on eagles' wings. Thus, working reflexively, my story became an integral part of this project. Critiquing the constraints of the reductionist traditional methodologies of research, this study uses emergent, feminist post-structural and arts-based approaches to tell the stories of home of eighteen people aged 80-97 and to explore their experience of home not-home in their present 'place of living'. The approach is eclectic and draws on data from in-depth interviews, observation, casual conversations, photographs, participant and researcher art work and researcher reflexive journal-writing to describe multiple narratives of the lived experience and meaning of constructing 'home' in older age.