More than just ‘working from home’: domestic space, economies and living infrastructures during and beyond pandemic times

ABSTRACT

This article draws on an ethnographic study of employees working from home in 13 Australian households in Sydney, New South Wales and Melbourne, Victoria during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Conducting interviews and household walk throughs via video conferencing software, supplemented by diaries and pictures from householders, we were initially interested in how people managed working from home via digital technology. As the project evolved however, we were struck by the reconfigured role of home life more broadly. During this time, many people found themselves not only restricted to their homes but having to experiment with new modes of living as households became hubs for economic, social, and infrastructural flows and the circulation of goods and services. The households in our study engaged in an array of practices related to self-managing employment from home. What we might think of as the ‘work of working from home’ practices included everything from managing workspaces, utilities and energy use, to the emotional atmosphere of the home. This reconfiguration of the home as a central hub of social, cultural, and economic life can be productively understood via two complementary approaches: what feminist planners Gilroy and Booth ([1999]. Building an infrastructure for everyday lives. European planning studies, 7 (3), 307–324) have termed ‘the infrastructure of everyday life’, and Gibson and Graham's ([2008] Diverse economies: performative practices for ‘other worlds’. Progress in human geography, 32 (5), 613–632) work on alternative economies. While the practices we studied could be seen as representing a privileged (in terms of class and race) pandemic response, following Gibson-Graham we frame our findings in terms of (re)imagining future social realities. We identify 3 categories: new domesticities; the ‘living infrastructures’ of work–home life; and everyday economies. In doing so we highlight the hidden and often feminized elements of civic and domestic life – the ‘foundational economy’ (Barbera, F., Negri, N., and Salento, A., 2018. From individual choice to collective voice. Foundational economy, local commons and citizenship. Rassegna Italiana di sociologia, 2, 371–398.) of care and service provision and beyond – to emphasize just how central this foundational economy has become to our post-vaccination futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Remote work
• new domesticities
• digital ethnography
• care economies
• domestic infrastructure
• future imaginaries
• digital futures
• life experiments

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our huge gratitude to the households who kindly took part in this study and allowed us to share part of their lives during what has been a particularly challenging period. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their generous critical feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This research was reviewed and approved by the RMIT University ethics committee (Project 22957). All participants have been pseudonymised.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tania Lewis

Tania Lewis is Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and a Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Her current research focuses on low carbon lifestyles, equitable food cultures, and the shifting nature and location of work.

Indigo Holcombe-James

Indigo Holcombe-James is a Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society at RMIT University. Indigo's research examines digital inequalities and transformation with a focus on creative and cultural industries and institutions.

Andrew Glover

Andrew Glover is a Senior Scientist (Social Research) at the New South Wales Government Department of Planning & Environment, and an Adjunct Principal Research Fellow at the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University. Andrew has research interests in remote work, e-change, air travel, energy, and sustainability.