In social research, the household tends to be conceived in three ways: as a scale at the centre of a hierarchy of nested scales, as a node in an extensive network of relations, or as a place imbued with the emotionalities and materialities of lived experience (Harker & Montgomerie, 2021). There are extensive critiques levelled at these kinds of spatial conceptualisations, 1 including how each can re-produce problematic assumptions pertaining to the distribution of agency. For example, the public–private dichotomy can inform gendered interpretations of the household as primarily the site of menial domesticity, and the global as the site of power and ‘real work’(Bondi, 1992; 1998).

In this chapter, and in response to such critiques, we take a critical look at the notion of the ‘household’. Focusing on spatial conceptualisations allows us to re-imagine households as less bounded and static than inferred by the ideas of scale and node; they are, in fact, more open and dynamic. In other words, rather than seeing the household as a discrete entity that remains more or less the same amidst an otherwise changing world, we consider the household as essentially relational, highly variable through both time and space, and constituted through distributed agency.