Home is what you make it, home is where the heart is, and there is no place like it. But what do people mean when they say "home"? In my own experiences, my home was the house that I grew up in and that my family lived in until I was eighteen. Though it was not in a suburb, surrounded by identical boxes made of ticky tacky, as the song goes, it was more or less a paradigm of the American Dream, a private world, comfortable and safe, where the four members of my family dictated all of the goings on. But, though I could construct with loving detail every inch of that house in my mind, it is not my home any more, except for in the realms of memory. Now when I return to my hometown, which is infrequently, I reside in my mother's new house, a place that is her home, but not mine. In the past three years I have occupied seven different bedrooms, and as an entity, none of those have been home. The cultural ideal of "home" is a stable, safe place that the inhabitants control. But that definition does not fit me, and I am not unique in this.

Almost all of my peers are in a very transitory time of their lives. What happens to this idealized concept of home with a population, college students, entirely uprooted from the home that constituted their childhood, and placed in a new town with a host of peers? Basically, what does home look like to a college student, and what cultural influences inform this? Moreover, how do people picture "home" both when literally asked to photograph it and in their construction of it?

These were the questions that I had when I asked three peers to submit fifteen to twenty photographs of the place or places they identified as home. I had considered photographing peoples' living spaces, for instance bedrooms, and constructing an analysis of these places. Through this I would come up with a theory on how my peers presented their identity through their living spaces. However, I felt that photo-elicitation would suit the project better. As Croghan writes, photo-elicitation, “thus produces a particular kind of account, one that deals with and accommodates the uncompromising fixity and seeming authenticity of the photographic images as a representation of self” (Croghan 351). Elicitation allows for more direct access to someone's opinions, providing a text that the participant and researcher share.

Photo-elicitation, though not an impartial study by any means, does give the participants the unique opportunity to express themselves, and gives me the opportunity to work with them from the shared platform of the photographs that they have produced. As John Berger writes, "In itself the photograph cannot lie, but, by the same token, it cannot tell the truth; or rather, the truth it does tell, the truth it can by itself defend, is a limited one" (Berger 97). The point is that a photograph is a story, so it is my hope that these photographs will share the participants’ stories of home. By allowing the participants to choose the places they identified as home, I opened the project to the idea of home as multiple places, as well as unconventional places. Between the photographs submitted and the explanations given during the interview process, I now have a multi-dimensional text to analyze. I could analyze the photographs on a large scale, looking at the places people chose, as well as on a small scale, of how people formed those places into spaces. What I found was that all three subjects found themselves in a place of migrancy, a "nonhome." They each navigated this feeling in very different ways, from control over possessions to identification with universal aspects, to an emphasis on roles performed. What all had in common was control exerted, in some way, over the environment, as well as repression of less-than-ideal aspects of the location. Through this they achieved comfort and familiarity.

a class taught by Bob Bednar in the Communication Studies Department at Southwestern University