Over the past year, our relationship to the home has been profoundly transformed. For those of us who could retreat into our homes for safety, homemaking and worldmaking were elided, lives reduced to fit the space of a screen. The home became a place of survival and regeneration, of care and community, as well as one of fear and decay, of anxiety and isolation. No house is a fortress, and not every house is a “home.” Nor is every “home” a house. All year long we missed our homes away from home: “What makes a house a home? Unfortunately: revolution alone” (Sophie Lewis). 

The home gives but it also takes away. Viewing the pandemic from a place of privilege reminds us that capitalism offers security in a private house to some at the expense of collaborative homemaking in the world we all share. Coming face to face with both the advantages and inadequacies of the home, might we be ready to imagine new possibilities of homemaking? Of worldmaking? Might we be ready to “dwell on ‘this earth of mankind’ not as a stranger or a trespasser… but as home” (Silvia Federici)?