We were sitting in the living room, warming up and drying out with some hot tea, when suddenly a hatch opened and a Somali man popped his head out. He beckoned us onto the balcony and, gesturing towards the council estate around us, described his beautiful garden in Somalia and all the things that grew there. He was the first of five characters we would meet over the next hour as we explored three empty flats in Shelmerdine Close, Bow, that had been transformed into the homes of Polish, Kurdish, Somali and Vietnamese migrants to London, in London Bubble's performances of 'My Home'. Through these spaces and the verbatim re-telling of stories gathered in interviews, we learned what home meant to different people. From his leather armchair in a richly red room, a Polish man and two friends talked about home as invoking a feeling of comfort. Over tea and biscuits, and amidst piles of boxes, a Polish woman shared memories of the orange carpet in her childhood home. The Somali man then came back to take us into his living room, where we watched and listened as he fixed the curtains and spoke about his encounters with the National Front. Blaring music from next door drew us into a Kurdish girl's bedroom and for a while we were her teenage confidantes, staying up too late listening to stories about not being Turkish. Delicious smells lured us finally into a kitchen, where a Vietnamese man was making dinner for his mother and talking about the differences between their ideas of home. We spent only a few minutes with each character but in every scene and during the carefully choreographed movements between them we were encouraged to feel welcomed into a real home. There were no curtain calls providing closure on this immersive theatrical experience and many of us came away with heightened senses of the people and spaces around us, wondering what stories they carried with them.

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This article examines people's responses to the material objects they inherit or discover in their homes. Reflecting on interviews with inhabitants of a variety of English domestic interiors, the author explores the meanings, values and beliefs involved in choices to retrieve, retain, reposition or replace material residues from the home's recent or distant past. Participants' responses reveal how beliefs about the past and its objects become imbricated in homemaking practices, locating home as shared, both spatially and temporally, and enhancing or challenging senses of belonging. In particular, objects left by previous inhabitants are endowed with degrees of agency as part of the identity of home. Responses reflect a belief in the continuing presence of the past. Many objects require a form of negotiation-including rituals of appeasement or containmentexpressing an entangled relationship between the heimlich and unheimlich in everyday homemaking practices.

N ever has the study of emotions appeared so, well, emotive. At least, that was my response to reading the introduction to a new volume of essays, Emotional geographies, in which geographers are condemned for having 'trouble expressing feelings', their discipline perhaps an 'emotionally barren terrain, a world devoid of passion, spaces ordered solely by rational principles and demarcated according to political, economic or technical logics'. 1 This condemnation may seem rather extreme Á not all geographers will recognise their own work as falling into such a category. Nonetheless, such a state of affairs is being corrected, it seems, by geography's current emotional 'turn'. This move to focus on emotion appears to be an outgrowth of a number of well-established ideas and practices: humanism, phenomenology, performativity, feminism, psychoanalysis, non-representational theory, to name some obvious signposts. It is interesting to note that these geographers are not alone. Outside the discipline an agenda has been set through, for example, interest in exploring emotional language in public life or models of personal development. This might in part explain why two important cultural theorists Á Teresa Brennan and Sara Ahmed Á have also recently waded into the emotion fray, and their fascinating works are reviewed here. These different interventions on emotion, for me, beg these questions in particular: How best do we conceptualize the self in cultural work? And are emotional selves always 'socially' configured: will this work herald the final end to interest in 'interior' or private experience?The first challenge in putting emotions centre stage is how they are to be described. A problem for readers is delineating 'emotion' from 'affect', given that Brennan uses the

This article explores how people consider their relationships to the previous inhabitants of their homes. While homes are conventionally imagined in terms of an ideal of exclusive ownership and residence, privacy and familial intimacy, the sense of home as shared with strangers who once lived there often has to be negotiated in the everyday senses of home. Drawing on qualitative case studies undertaken in England with those whose interest in the past of their home ranged from active research to more everyday reflections, this article explores the varied ways in which people reflect on and experience pre-inhabitation in terms of senses of dwelling, selfhood and relatedness to those who once lived in their homes. Our engagement with the practices of making relations with distant and recent residents, imaginatively and through more direct social interactions, is framed by a combined focus on domestic dwelling and geographies of relatedness. We argue that understandings of home and home making can be enriched through a focus on the genealogical imaginaries and idioms that are mobilised and negotiated in how people define themselves and make home relationally.