In 2020 we published our second book “People, Care and Work in the Home”. It would be hard to find a more important time for its publication. Covid19 brought to the forefront of all our lives the importance of the home and the people, work and care that happens within them.

We launched the book worldwide via Zoom on Thursday, January 21 in collaboration with Nottingham Trent University. The editors and some of the authors participated and the whole event is now available on our youtube chanel. Click here. 

The book, published with Routledge, brings together academic and professional expertise in these fields, first gathered at the 2017 4th International HRF Conference: “A Home, a place of growth, care and wellbeing.”

What was clear at the conference was that these vital things – growth and wellbeing – do not just “happen.” For strong, healthy individuals, families, and communities there needs to be attention paid and support given to the frontline of where these patterns begin – at home.

Professor Mohamed Gamal Abdelmonem, Professor and Chair in Architecture at Nottingham Trent University, and Professor Antonio Argandoña, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Business Ethics at IESE Business School, editors of People, Care and Work in the Home worked with contributors to bring to wider attention this multidisciplinary approach to society’s key building blocks.

Lord Best, co-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Housing and Care for Older People, stresses the need for “right-sizing” in homes for later life. Baroness Hollins, Emeritus Professor of the Psychiatry and Disability,  speaks from the personal and professional experience of the value of homes for those with intellectual disabilities: My home, my life.

This recent pandemic, the lockdown and enforced time at home together have given new energy to those determined to champion the unique and priceless role it plays in our lives and the work involved in making it happen. In the words of Professor Argandoña:

“The home grows with solidarity, sharing everything. And the most complete way of sharing is love, that is, to take care of others. That is what we learn at home throughout our lives, although in a different way at each stage of that life. In this period of confinement, we have learned to live together, ignoring the deficiencies of others; to share, that is, to give and give ourselves.”

People, Care and Work in the Home is a very important articulation of that insight to inform both research and policy in how we value what is given and what is received at home.