Understanding Home Renovation as a Material Future-Making Practice

Abstract

This article considers whether home renovation can be understood as a material future-making practice. By drawing together studies of memory and domestic spaces and material futures it considers how each field can be expanded by focusing on the specific ways in which domestic futures are anticipated and formed. Data from a 2018 interview and photovoice-based study of Australian young adults’ pathways into and experiences of homeownership are presented in order to demonstrate how the participants’ depictions, understandings and experiences of renovation were intertwined with anticipatory practices and imaginings. The findings are used to demonstrate that the participants’ generation of material futures was both purposive and relationally based, challenging existing depictions of material futures as incidentally and individually formed. The article ultimately advocates for research on private, domestic futures as a key, and yet underexplored means of contending with the ‘wicked problems’ that occupy sociological research on futures.