Title: An architectural study of home in diaspora in contemporary Britain with particular reference to the lives of Iranian women

Author: Shima Rezaei Rashnoodi

Year: 2018

Abstract: This research explores the ways in which Iranian women make their diasporic home in the context of Great Britain. The transient nature of diasporic homes provides a unique situation to be examined in relation to the notions of gender, identity, culture and homemaking. To address these complex notions within a spatial context, home is described as a place that embodies dialectic notions of real/ideal, one/other and tangible and intangible. Meanwhile, the thesis points out the lack of architectural discussions in the current home literature, urging for investigations that situate homemaking, memory, identity and gender within the spatial dimensions of home. Therefore, this research aims to fill the gap between the studies of home in architecture and humanities by developing a theoretical interdisciplinary framework that provides the required flexibility to study intangible and emotional aspects of home and homemaking as well as facilitating the methodological strategies. For that purpose, feminist and phenomenological theories were incorporated into mixed qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, focus groups and visual analysis. Ultimately, a replicable and scalable architectural methodology for the study of home and homemaking was proposed that resulted in contributing to both the topic of inquiry and to the existing methodological approaches of the study of home.