Re-imagining the household through insurance

In social research, the household tends to be conceived in three ways—as a scale within a hierarchy of nested scales, as a node in a relational network, or as a place constituted through lived experience. In this chapter, we take a critical look at the notion of the ‘household’ focusing on a problematic public-private spatiality that informs some interpretations of scales and nodes—one in which the domestic locale of the household is assumed less significant and less powerful than the public realm of, for example, the global. To help us re-imagine the household, we consider what insurance can tell us about space and spatiality. To do this, we describe insurance in everyday life in Australia, drawing on publicly available data on the different types of insurance purchased by householders, and held by governments and other service providers. This includes insurance directly associated with the home, for example house, contents, health, life, pet, and car insurance, and a broader insurance landscape—government bodies and the private sector that provide essential services and infrastructure for homes also have public liability insurance, professional indemnity insurance, and property insurance for assets. In understanding insurance in fluid and/or fiery spatial terms, we conclude by imagining the emergence of a novel conceptualisation of the household beyond the ideas of scale and node, one that is more dynamic, less bounded, and explicitly powerful.