Home: socio-legal interventions

Using the example of the smoke alarm, this chapter demonstrates how socio-legal studies can offer insights into the ways in which we research and think about the home. It is argued that socio-legal ways of thinking have been sidelined in the rich literature on home, whereas they can offer considerable insights and should form part of our interdisciplinary ways of thinking. Socio-legal studies is a broad, undefined field of study, but it is here framed by three different strands: law in context, gap studies, and materiality and legality. The reason for separating out these strands is solely for analytical purposes because each offers different points of departure and different insights about home. The smoke alarm—that mostly unseen life-saving device—is used to demonstrate how discursive narratives about home ownership are co-constituted by legal structures, is subject to an implementation deficit, and is one of the technologies of the defended home, albeit one that is out of sight in plain view. And, like resort to formal law, it comes into its own in crisis moments.