Home Beyond the House by Wei Zhao, Paperback, 9781032280172 | Buy online at The Nile
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Home Beyond the House

Transformation of Life, Place, and Tradition in Rural China

Author: Wei Zhao   Series: Explorations in Housing Studies

Home Beyond the House
Paperback

This book links the concepts of place, home, and tradition into an overarching argument: the meaning of home rests on the ideas of tradition, including identity, consanguinity, collectivity, social relations, land ownership, and rural lifestyle.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

This book links the concepts of place, home, and tradition into an overarching argument: the meaning of home rests on the ideas of tradition, including identity, consanguinity, collectivity, social relations, land ownership, and rural lifestyle.

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Description

Based on extended fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2019, this book aims to answer a simple question: What is the meaning of home for people living in vernacular settlements in rural China? This question is particularly potent since rural China has experienced rapid and fundamental changes in the twenty-first century under the influences of national policies such as "Building a New Socialist Countryside" enacted in 2006 and "Rural Revitalization" announced in 2018. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, building surveys, archival research, and over 600 photographs taken by residents along with their life stories, this book uncovers the meanings of home from rural residents’ perspectives, who belong to a social group that is underrepresented in scholarship and underserved in modern China. In other words, this study empowers rural residents by giving them voice. This book links the concepts of place, home, and tradition into an overarching argument: The meaning of home rests on the ideas of tradition, including identity, consanguinity, collectivity, social relations, land ownership, and rural lifestyle.

The Introduction and Chapter 4 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

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Critic Reviews

“The participatory and empowering method of asking residents to photograph their surroundings is exciting. This innovative method not only provides a visual and personal record of the environment and its significance to locals but also engages them actively in the process of documenting and reflecting on their own sense of place and identity. It is an approach that enriches the research with first-hand perspectives and also validates the residents’ experiences and connections to their habitat.”

Geng Li, The China Quarterly (2024), 1–2.

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About the Author

Wei (Windy) Zhao is an Assistant Professor in the School of Design at Louisiana Tech University. Zhao received a PhD in architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her research focuses on issues of social equity and sustainability, cultural identity and diversity, and the built environment of marginalized social groups in the context of globalization and climate change.

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Product Details

Publisher
Taylor & Francis Ltd | Routledge
Published
27th May 2024
Pages
328
ISBN
9781032280172

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