Over the past decade, Tiny Housing has become something of a viral sensation in the US. From Instagrammable enclaves for young professionals to vast municipality-supported schemes seeking to address homelessness, tiny house sites are proliferating across the country.



This book takes a look at life inside the ‘Tiny House Nation’, shining an intimate light on a phenomenon widely celebrated in the mainstream media. The book presents textured narrative accounts from and striking images of Tiny Home residents, their homes and communities, while analysing the broader socio-economic structures shaping their lives. In so doing, it paints a compelling and complex picture of a trend at the crossroads of several key social, cultural and economic shifts, at a pivotal moment for America’s housing future.

Fundamentally, this is a book about paradoxes. The paradox of tiny housing offering freedom from the constraints of capitalism, whilst at the same time remaining embedded within capitalist systems. The paradox of those who ‘go tiny’ both choosing an alternative lifestyle, and those who are pushed into tiny housing as a consequence of limited choice. The paradox of Austin, Texas, as both a countercultural enclave and hyper-capitalist tech haven. And the paradox of tiny house ethoses in Austin, as both centring community and shared assets, and individualist libertarianism. These paradoxes do not necessarily sit in opposition to one another, but are all bound up in the complexity of what tiny housing has to offer as an alternative way of living.

Despite its unattainability for all but the most privileged, the American Dream - the home-owning society, the suburban bliss, the white picket fence - remains emblematic of the residential Good Life. But in the decades since the turn of the millennium the dream has been shrunk down, expectations of a decent home literally reduced. Whilst for some this has led to forms of freedom and fulfilment, it has also contributed to the normalisation of cities so outrageously expensive that all people can afford are miniature homes on the urban periphery. As this book shows, both impacts of tiny housing are equally true, and one does not cancel out the other. Tiny housing embodies an important societal crossroads. In some respects, it offers an alternative to the prevailing housing status quo. In others, it demonstrates what options have already been taken away from us.

from the Introduction



‘In the rest of this book, we’ll lead you through our exploration of tiny housing in Texas. We’ll start, in the next chapter, by introducing some of the places and people we encountered on our travels to set the scene. Then, the ‘pathways’ chapter examines the various conditions and journeys through which people end up living tiny. As you’ll see, our attempt to produce a diagram of pathways to tiny living escalated into the production of a fully blown board game. We describe this diagrammatic board game to show the complex and nuanced personal and structural circumstances that lead people into tiny housing. From there, we go into three empirical chapters, focusing on economies of tiny living, the materiality of tiny housing as domestic spaces, and community culture. We then draw the book to a close, and speculate about what tiny housing means for the future of domestic life, especially in relation to the American Dream.



‘Throughout the book our descriptions are accompanied by photographs taken by Cian Oba-Smith, who accompanied us on our first trip to Texas in 2022. The hype around tiny housing is undoubtedly driven, in large part, by the aesthetic cultures surrounding it. Tiny homes are the picturesque, boutique, upmarket cousin of mobile homes and trailers. They are distinguished from these other types of small housing, as we’ll argue in this book, specifically by their aesthetics. Anyone who ventures into the world of tiny housing for more than five minutes will see how thick this aesthetic culture is. From beautifully curated Instagram pages, to countless coffee table books, to Etsy shops dedicated to crafted tiny house merchandise, a key part of living tiny is enjoying and embracing its aesthetics. By working with Cian we were able to focus (literally) on these aesthetic dimensions of tiny housing. However, we were also able to capture some of what’s not presented in promotional tiny house materials; the constraints, the challenges and the complexities that come along with the joy and the freedom. We’re positioning this book as something of a disrupted coffee table book. On an initial flick through it might not look too different to the photography books that valorise tiny living, but you’ll already know, if you’ve read this far, that our approach is more nuanced. Our attempt has been to expose the ‘real’ Tiny House Nation. Not to attack it, not to deny its beneficial impacts for a huge number of people, but to inject some nuance into the debate so that we can take forward the positives of tiny living without normalising the negatives.’

Describes the transformations we have witnessed due to the development of nuclear science and technology, accelerating policies interdependent on energy, and military procedures that have led us to make a provocative claim that, in many respects, planet Earth is getting closer to the embodiment of the project we call Nuclear Gaia.

The book examines media archives and online platforms that recover data and memory and shape community knowledge of nuclear events from the distant and nearer past. These are the pieces of evidence that we are on the eve of creating new forms of social justice, carried out by open-source investigations (OSINT) groups, independent researchers, artists, media makers, activists, local communities, and civic groups.



Thus, analysing nuclear processes and their social and environmental consequences is no longer the exclusive domain of experts, scientists, politicians, and the military. The authors hope that such communities’ practices and decolonial discourses, combined with the critiques within our methodology as post-nuclear media studies, can also change the fate of nuclear industry victims by creating media space to discuss and regain justice as socially sanctioned and shared rules for understanding and using nuclear energy both in past and the future.

Architectural expressions resonant with Islamic traditions appear in diverse modes across the Americas, from Andalusian-inspired colonial patios in Peru to the modern and contemporary patronage of immigrant communities in the United States and Canada. This volume examines the multiple manifestations of Islamic architecture that permeate the region’s built environment to invite an expanded framing of this architectural legacy via a hemispheric consideration of aesthetics, narrative, and patronage.

Chapters consider a broad range of topics from the migration of aesthetic traditions and construction techniques tied to the architectural forms of the Islamic world in the colonial “New World,” to the direct contributions of modern and contemporary migrants in shaping a collective identity and the built environment.

By placing in productive dialogue sites that represent Islamic and Islamicate architecture across North and South America – two areas outside of the traditional conceptions of the Islamic world– this volume bridges transregional and transcultural gaps in the current literature.

The Social Object uses the methods of design history, material culture studies and the social construction of technology to analyse the domestic spaces and objects in the homes of the middle class in India. The book describes how people make meaning of the objects they buy, own, and gift.

This is a book about the biography of projects and objects. The projects in the book serve as book ends to a detailed and affectionate account of the biographies of objects within the homes of the not so rich.



The aim of the author has been to silence the voice of the designer to allow the accounts of objects to emerge as periodic irruptions that reveal a hidden maelstrom of passion, ideas and failed projects. The book opens with the biography of a project dealing with waste, leading the reader to a very particular kind of object, the bads. This object is illicit, handled by criminals and in the writing by the author serves to invert the dominant discourse of objects as commodities. This book makes the case that the program of design is better seen as a democratic community, where the householders, the zietgiest, technology and all manner of hidden agents collide to allow unforseen periodic objects to emerge.

Varadarajan argues against a simplistic universal account off the way we think about how objects are designed. As an enterprise, the book was a journey to assemble the evidence - of places and objects - and observe the enactment of practices with the objects. It was also a project of speculation upon the possible ways in which objects come to be, as local collaborations of action.

When high-skilled professionals become high-skilled migrants, they often relocate with families. Drawing on a larger study of 52 professionals who moved to Denmark to take up a high-skilled employment positions, we focus in this article on a sub-sample of fifteen families. To examine the specific factors influencing decisions around potential re-migration in these constellations, we introduce Elias’s figuration framework, to more carefully consider the interaction and interdependency between the ‘I’ of the interviewee and ‘We’ of their family. The analysis identifies three main dimensions that determine future mobility plans: professional identity/aspirations, family needs and experiences of social incorporation. We show that various configurations of these three dimensions are possible, usually with one dimension being more dominant in shaping re-migration decision-making. Our findings highlight how the various needs and desires of the ‘I’ and ‘We’ within the family are negotiated and how these processes are shaped by macro-, meso- and micro-structures. Our contribution is situated within the framework of multinational migrations, offering scholars an approach for more closely considering how figurations of mobility are negotiated within the relational dynamics of the ‘I’ and ‘We’ that constitute families on the move.

Fullmetal Alchemist is a Japanese shōnen manga that is written as well as illustrated by Hiromu Arakawa. The story follows the journey of Edward Elric and Alphonse Elric as they try to regain their original physical bodies, which were altered due to a fatal alchemical procedure to revive their deceased mother. Existing critical studies on Fullmetal Alchemist primarily focus on structural elements, gender, trauma and war. However, no study has been done on the monomyth aspect of the story, and the present study aims to bridge that research gap. Joseph Campbell originally conceived the hero’s journey or ‘Monomyth’ template. However, the present article utilizes Christopher Vogler’s twelve-stage revised version of the Campbellian monomyth as the primary theoretical framework to analyse Edward Elric’s journey in the story. Moreover, critical comments from critics like Angela Drummond-Mathews, Vladimir Propp, Stuart Voytilla and others have been incorporated. Shōnen manga typically follow the hero’s journey structure, but there are exceptions as well. The present study attempts to decode whether Fullmetal Alchemist follows the hero monomyth or negates it.