Making the Grade, Becoming at Home: The Making of Home on a College Campus

Abstract

Home is often understood as a place of residence or an emotional attachment, yet comparatively little attention has been devoted to the interactional processes through which places become home. Drawing on Becker's interactionist perspective of becoming, this article conceptualizes home as an interactional accomplishment that emerges through everyday participation rather than as an automatic consequence of residence. Using qualitative data from 55 undergraduate students attending a small liberal arts college in the rural Midwestern United States, the study examines how students learn to define college as home while navigating a major life transition. Analysis identifies four interconnected processes of becoming: learning whether college can become home, creating home through everyday practice, living between multiple homes, and imagining future homes. Together, these processes demonstrate that becoming at home is an ongoing social accomplishment through which students learn to interpret relationships, routines, spaces, and experiences as meaningful parts of everyday life. Rather than treating belonging as a fixed outcome, the findings show that home is continually negotiated, maintained, and revised through interaction. The article extends the interactionist perspective of becoming beyond occupations and deviant careers by demonstrating that individuals also become at home, offering a symbolic interactionist framework for understanding how places acquire personal and social meaning.