CONCEPT
Boundary Work
Nippert-Eng's foundational concept: the ongoing, active, effortful practice through which individuals construct and maintain the line between work and home — not a psychological fact but a material one, built daily from objects and routines.
Boundary work names the continuous, material practice through which people sort their lives into domains. It is not a wall but an activity — performed through key rings, calendars, photographs, clothing, commutes, and the thousand small acts that declare which domain a person is currently inhabiting. Nippert-Eng's 1996 Home and Work established that this work is invisible precisely because it is embedded in ordinary objects and routines. Remove the objects, dissolve the routines, and the boundary does not weaken gradually — it disappears. The framework becomes urgent in the AI age because every material support for boundary work has been systematically dismantled: the office, the commute, the tools that stayed behind. What remains is a person alone with a device that demands boundary construction from willpower alone.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept emerged from ethnographic patience. Nippert-Eng watched people sort mail at kitchen tables, change shoes at thresholds, decide which photographs went on which desk. She