Invisible Connections: Transdomesticity of Households in Global Comparison

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Daniel Bultmann; Dr. Florian Stoll
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 572498610

This research project investigates the diverse forms of households in urban contexts of the Global South—Nairobi (Kenya), Karachi (Pakistan), and Phnom Penh (Cambodia)—as well as in Berlin, serving as a decolonial counterpoint. At its core, the project challenges conventional definitions of households as spatially bounded units of cohabitation and shared economy that are limited to the nuclear family. Instead, it conceptualizes households as transdomestic collectives: multilocal, fluid entities shaped by both visible and invisible contributions to social reproduction. These include care work, financial support, spiritual practices, and digitally mediated services. Urban centers are focal points of social transformation, where well-paid employment, emerging lifestyles, and entrenched sociocultural patterns intersect. Nevertheless, the selected research sites differ so significantly that distinctly divergent household forms are to be expected. The concept of transdomesticity brings into focus the types of connections that contribute to household formation outside formal structures and beyond Western family models—from economic relations with kin and cohabitation with neighbors to the significance of domestic workers, spirits, animals, and objects. Through qualitative methods such as diaries, narrative interviews, and ethnographic observation, the project reconstructs the composition and dynamics of households. The research is informed by intersectional and postcolonial perspectives, addressing gender relations, racialization, and class dynamics. It also reflects on researchers’ own epistemic positionality through the principle of reversing the gaze, which includes active contributions from scholars embedded in the research contexts. The aim is to develop a context-sensitive typology and theorization of household forms that challenges and expands dominant, Western-centric models. By engaging in global comparison, the study seeks to “provincialize” household theory and establish a decentralized, situated framework. In doing so, it offers an innovative contribution to global sociology, social structure analysis, and the study of social inequalities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants