Making, Unmaking and Remaking Home: Foster Carers' Home Practices Within Australia's Child Protection System

This paper draws from interviews with 16 foster carers to explore their efforts to make and remake a sense of home for young people in out-of-home care. Our findings highlight home as an important idea and a challenge for carers. Home was a deliberate achievement, created through practices that responded to each young person as an individual. Home was also often unstable, unmade through young people's responses to seemingly mundane elements of their lives and the household's porosity to external forces, notably government and foster care organisations and contact with biological families. These disruptions in turn required new strategies and resistance to remake home. Making, unmaking and remaking home were each implicated in the others—the reasons for home's importance highlighted through the forces by which it was eroded.