Young Black people's geographies of comfort: Home, daily living and becoming un/comfortable

This thesis explores young Black people in the UK’s everyday experiences of dis/comfort within the context of home and its various spatial and scaled manifestations. While accounts of Black discomfort amidst spaces primed by anti-Blackness are daily, and depictions of Black suffering and death persist, this thesis is alternatively rooted in the premise of Black aliveness and the possibility of Black comfort. The thesis draws inspiration from, connects and advances the scholarly areas of Black Geographies, geographies of comfort and geographies of home to consider how young Black people procure domestic comfort. Seeking to tap into the experiential goldmine of the everyday, micro scalar dimensions of Black life and taking the often-assumed comfort of home seriously, it asks how does dis/comfort emerge for young Black people in the material home? What roles do other people and non-human entities play in the emergence of dis/comfort? And how are sites at the interface of home and beyond involved in Black youths’ process of becoming un/comfortable at home?

To explore young Black people’s domestic geographies of comfort, the thesis draws upon interviews with 27 young Black individuals and eight auto-photographic portfolios, with their accompanying narratives, as part of a qualitative methodological approach. This approach is informed by multidisciplinary contemplations of Black being and a ‘more-than-representational’ style of thinking. Analysis of my young Black peers’ narratives will unveil comfort as a form of freedom and discomfort as inhibition, with home presented as an indispensable spatiality of comfort in and for young Black lives relative to other stifling spaces in this anti-Black world. Framed by thought on Black vitality and interiority, this thesis will develop our grasp of comfort, domestic comfort especially, as a process of becoming. It will argue that comfort for young Black individuals is a proactive and reactive process, an individual yet shared endeavour; an interpersonal operation that is also more than human and not bound by residential borders. Throughout and to conclude, the thesis will uphold the micro, the un/comfortable everyday and at-home, as an invaluable optic through which we can behold the wonderful fact that we, young Black people, are alive.