This project investigates the experience of the home as both personal and socio/cultural phenomenon through creative-critical inquiry into the lives and homes of three generations of women in my family. Using a method I developed called “sensory interviewing” – an auto/ethnographical and reflexive form of video interviewing, I focus on capturing the intimate, lived experience of place and how material and everyday encounters shape our individual sense of “home.” By exploring the relationships between bodies, space, and time, I center the three unique stories of my sister, mother, and grandmother to gain insight into their embodied and sensory experiences of the home in how they come to ‘make’ a home, form a sense of place, and actively construct memory through engagement with the materiality of their daily lives. Building on scholarship in feminist theory, memory studies, phenomenology, multimodality, and cultural rhetorics, I theorize “rhetorics of the small” as an embodied practice of attunement to the everyday objects, stories, and practices that create meaning and memory across generations, most especially in sites not traditionally studied as rhetorical (e.g., the domestic/private sphere). The home, while not public, is rhetorical in how it serves as a starting point, as a place from which we go out from, in how we begin to make sense of our lived worlds. I argue that this entanglement of the senses, of memory, and the impressions we leave and are left on us by others serve as a necessary framework for understanding the reverberative e/affects of the small, everyday practices and actions as starting points for change.
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