migration and the search for home: mapping domestic space in migrantsâ€™ everyday lives

MIGRATION AND THE SEARCH FOR HOME

Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’

Everyday Lives

Paolo Boccagni

MOBILITY & POLITICSSeries Editors: Martin Geiger,

Parvati Raghuram and William Walters

Mobility & Politics

Series EditorsMartin Geiger

Carleton University,Ottawa, Canada

Parvati RaghuramOpen University,

Milton Keynes, UK

William WaltersCarleton University,Ottawa, Canada

Mobility & Politics

Series Editors: Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada;Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK; William Walters,Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Global Advisory Board: Michael Collyer, University of Sussex; Susan B.Coutin, University of California; Raúl DelgadoWise, Universidad Autónomade Zacatecas; Nicholas De Genova, King’s College London; EleonoreKofman, Middlesex University; Rey Koslowski, University at Albany;Loren B. Landau, University of the Witwatersrand; Sandro Mezzadra,Università di Bologna; Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University; BrettNeilson, University of Western Sydney; Antoine Pécoud, Université Paris13; Ranabir Samaddar, Mahanirban Research Group Calcutta; NanditaSharma, University of Hawai’i at Manoa; Tesfaye Tafesse, Addis AbabaUniversity; Thanh-Dam Truong, Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Human mobility, whatever its scale, is often controversial. Hence it carrieswith it the potential for politics. A core feature of mobility politics is thetension between the desire to maximise the social and economic benefitsof migration and pressures to restrict movement. Transnational commu-nities, global instability, advances in transportation and communication,and concepts of ‘smart borders’ and ‘migration management’ are just afew of the phenomena transforming the landscape of migration today.The tension between openness and restriction raises important questionsabout how different types of policy and politics come to life and influencemobility.

Mobility & Politics invites original, theoretically and empirically informedstudies for academic and policy-oriented debates. Authors examine issuessuch as refugees and displacement, migration and citizenship, security andcross-border movements, (post-)colonialism andmobility, and transnationalmovements and cosmopolitics.

More information about this series athttp://www.springer.com/series/14800

Paolo Boccagni

Migrationand the Search

for HomeMapping Domestic Space in Migrants’

Everyday Lives

Paolo BoccagniUniversity of TrentoTrento, Italy

Mobility & PoliticsISBN 978-1-137-58801-2 ISBN 978-1-137-58802-9 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58802-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016949748

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by thePublisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights oftranslation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction onmicrofilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage andretrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodologynow known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in thispublication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names areexempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informationin this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither thepublisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect tothe material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

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a mi home

SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

The ‘migration-home nexus’ is an emerging field within the wider study ofmigration, highlighting the significant intersections between one’s con-ceptualization of home and one’s mobility across borders. Migration andthe search for home intervenes into this conversation by raising criticalquestions surrounding the social and environmental factors that shapeand influence a migrant’s own understanding of home. In doing this,Paolo Boccagni reveals the ways in which migration facilitates and con-tributes to the construction of familiarity, fostering ambiguous and oftenfictitious experiences of home for migrants.Accentuating the importance of home, particularly for transnational

migrants, the volume explores how naturalized yet idealized notions ofhome are affected by divisions such as class, gender, age and ethno-cultural background, also underlining the unique experiences of thosewho are ‘systematically away’ or mobile. Boccagni narrows in on thosewho are mobile, comparing their need to re-establish a sense of home withthat of those who have been long-settled within society.Rather than establishing a clear divide between ‘here’ and “there”,

Migration and the search for home argues that migration fosters blurredboundaries, perpetuating a process of homing based on relational andemotional attributions. For this reason, we are challenged to re-think theways in which migration and home harmonize with each other and theimplications of their interrelatedness. Boccagni’s theoretical and metho-dological analysis engages with the process of homing through a social-science lens, emphasizing that cultural and social aspects are both vital inunderstanding the home experiences of migrants. Following this analytical

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inquiry, research gaps within the study of homing and within the broaderstudy of the migration-home nexus are identified, and the relevant impli-cations for researchers and policy-makers within public and academicspheres outlined.Paolo Boccagni contributes to the Mobility & Politics series as he

accentuates the crucial linkages between migration and home, identifyinghoming as a unique social and political process within the lives of migrants.His investigation exhibits the ways in which both migrants and ‘non-migrants’ experience homing, underscoring how homing is a materialprocess. Migration and the search for home opens the door to newpotential research areas within the migration-home nexus, allowing scho-lars and policy-makers to further explore the role that homing plays in theeveryday lives of migrants.

The Series Editors:Martin Geiger, Carleton UniversityParvati Raghuram, Open UniversityWilliam Walters, Carleton University

and

Celeste Alcena, Mobility & Politics Research Collectivewww.mobpoli.info / www.mobilitypoliticsseries.com

viii SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

http://www.mobpoli.info

http://www.mobilitypoliticsseries.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The migration-home nexus has been, for me, a constant topic of conversa-tion with friends and colleagues over the last few years. Several times Itried to use their reactions to the statement “I’m working on home” as abarometer of the potential of such an (apparently) obvious research topic.As it happens, this exercise had mixed results, and the number of personsI’ve bored with my home-fixation is hard to count. Much of it occurred intransnational, ephemeral but very stimulating “homes” such as the meet-ings of the Research Network IMISCOE (International Migration,Integration and Social Cohesion) and of the International SociologicalAssociation (ISA), as well as in my own Department in Trento. I amparticularly indebted to those who read and commented previous draftsof the chapters of this book: Loretta Baldassar, Andrea Brighenti, AdrianoCancellieri, Francesca Decimo, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Ester Gallo, PeterKivisto, Maggie Kusenbach, Giuseppe Sciortino.Much of this writing has been simultaneous with the preparation, and

then the fortunate award, of a European Research Council Starting Grantwhich aims to address several of the questions raised in this book. Its title isHOMInG – The home-migration nexus: Home as a window on migrantbelonging, integration and circulation (ERC StG 678456 – HOMInG[2016–2021], with myself as principal investigator). This is an indicator,among others, of the increasing research interest for migrants’ home(s),on a global scale; and hopefully, of the need for conceptual, methodolo-gical and empirical maps such as the one provided by this book.

ix

On a more personal note, my gratitude is to my parents, for theirunremitting support over the last forty-one years. And most notably, toMiqui, Martino, Miriam and Viola for making me feel at home, a casa, dayafter day.

x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PRAISE FOR MIGRATION AND THE SEARCH

FOR HOME

“This book is a must read. It helps us better understand what migration means bylooking at migrants’ feelings of home, or their lack of . . .But the book deserves awider readership than migration studies since it provides so many new insights inwhat ‘home’ is about, productively using the angle of migration. Boccagni is notclaiming that we have all become migrants or nomads, but the times of stablehomes are over for all of us.”–Jan Willem Duyvendak, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

“Paolo Boccagni joins a group of immigration scholars who are intent on devel-oping the prosaic word ‘home’ and the somewhat less prosaic ‘homing’ intoserviceable concepts to help us to better understand the complex processes atplay for people who are at once emigrants and immigrants as they come to termswith place in multi-scalar terms. The volume constitutes a major contribution tothat effort, offering as it does a comprehensive and analytically crisp theoreticalargument. This is essential reading.”–Peter Kivisto, Augustana College, USA

“Boccagni has given us a much needed sociological compass to draw our attentiondirectly to a topic of such import it is usually hidden from view. In his characteristicwriting style – philosophical, poetic, reflective, insightful and always engaging, hecharts a theoretical and methodological course that promises to permanentlylocate analyses of home on the migration studies map.”–Loretta Baldassar, University of Western Australia, Australia

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paolo Boccagni is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Trento. Hismain research areas are transnational migration, social welfare, care, diver-sity, and home – all of them approached in ways that try to illuminate thesocial actors’ viewpoints, stances, and practices, without losing sight of thestructural factors which affect them. His publication record includes arti-cles in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Global Networks, Journal of Ethnic andMigration Studies, Housing, Theory and Society. He is principal investiga-tor of the European Research Council project HOMInG – The home-migration nexus (2016–2021).

Previous books by the author:

Tracce transnazionali: vite in Italia e proiezioni verso casa tra i migrantiecuadoriani [“Transnational tracks: lives in Italy and homeward projec-tions among Ecuadorian migrants”] (2009)

Cercando il benessere nelle migrazioni [“Searching for wellbeing inmigration”] (with M. Ambrosini, 2012)

L’integrazione nello studio delle migrazioni [“Integration in migrationstudies”] (with G. Pollini, 2012)

xiii

CONTENTS

Introduction xxi

1 A New Lens on the Migration-home Nexus 1

2 Researching Migrants’ Home 29

3 Migration and Home over Space 49

4 Migration and Home over Time 65

5 Migrants’ Home as a Political Issue 87

6 Conclusion 105

References 115

Index 129

xv

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1.1 Homing at an individual level in the here-and-now 24Fig. 1.2 Homing as a way of managing the distance between real and

aspired homes in the biographical field 25

xvii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1 Meaning of home and ways of using the term in Migrationand the Search for Home 9

Table 1.2 A case for the migration-home nexus: mutualanalytical contributions from migration and home studies 21

Table 2.1 Doing social research on home: levels of analysis,conceptual dimensions, empirical fields 35

xix

INTRODUCTION

Abstract Home, as a place and a special relationship with it, lies at theroots of everyday life. However, only conditions such as those engenderedby international migration bring it to the fore as a unique source ofattachments, desires, needs and dilemmas. Much has been written, bynow, on the housing and domestic space(s) of people on the move.Even so, a new research agenda can be advanced by exploring, biographi-cally, the influence of an extended distanciation from what used to behome, and the need to reconstitute it abroad; societally, the consequencesof large-scale mobility and diversification on the home experience ofmovers and stayers. A conceptual map for the study of migrants’ “searchfor home” is sketched out, and the argument across the book is presented,pointing to migrants’ homing as an emergent field for social theory andresearch.

Keywords Home � International Migration � Homing � Map � Search forhome

One winter day, on a bus in central Trento, I came across Rosa. We hadrarely been in touch since the end of my PhD fieldwork on Ecuadorianmigration, a few years before. Each time, even in the most coincidental ofencounters, our conversation tended to be spontaneously projectedtowards her homeland. While Rosa was talking about a niece I had metyears before, who was now back to the El Oro district, she reminded me,quite incidentally: Mi casa está en Portobelo. No more than a cursory

xxi

remark, among a variety of topics and gossips. Yet, it took me somehowaback. Rosa was referring at the present tense to a place where she hadn’tbeen for at least ten years, which had little to do with her current dwellingplace, and nonetheless kept being framed as casa, the real home, contraryto the flat where she was living now. Some years later – in fact: a fewmonths ago, as I was sluggishly writing this book – I happened to beeventually back to Ecuador. While in Cuenca, I had an appointment withHamlet, an old friend from Pasaje, the only one still in Ecuador out of fivesiblings. He was living alone in the old family house – not a flaminglyrefurbished one, compared with the standard (or the stereotype) of themigrant house, but still a repository of his family life, of its memories, of itslong-trodden everyday life spaces, and of a variety of belongings of hisparents, brothers and grandparents. Just the morning before our expectedreunion, while Hamlet was at a meeting in Machala, some thieves hadstepped in and robbed some money, dresses, and valuable goods.Unsurprisingly, he looked still quite shocked as we were strolling aroundCuenca and so were, I guess, all of his kin in Italy. As usual, while chattingwith him I was struggling to understand why, in a mixed scenario ofincreasing urban insecurity (in Ecuador) and of relative ease for him toleave (for Italy) if he had wished to, Hamlet was still clinging to hishometown. Who would be looking after the home?, was his trenchantresponse to my creeping doubts. Although there was more to his “seden-tary” option than bricks and mortar, one thing was clear: maintaining thefamily home was a sort of job in itself – one for which Hamlet had beeninvested with some moral, and perhaps financial responsibility by his“Italian” counterparts. All of his kin had moved away over the previousfifteen years, but the home was still immobile – and so was Hamlet, for thetime being at least.

Vignettes such as those of Rosa and Hamlet were quite common in myfieldwork and, I’m sure, in a variety of similar studies of transnationalmigration. Yet, as I’ve realized over time, they are less appreciated thanthey would deserve, revealing as they are of something that most peopleencounter in their everyday life (but don’t need to reflect upon): homematters, is invested with particular attachments and expectations, andexerts a degree of tyranny over its inhabitants, as Agnes Heller wouldput it. What home means to migrants in particular, why it matters, andhow extended mobility affects the social experience of it (both amongmovers and stayers), are the core issues for analysis in this book.

xxii INTRODUCTION

Home is a perfect instance of those vernacular words that are as self-evident and naturalized, as slippery and problematic in their meanings andimplications. Besides being hardly replaceable as an ordinary languagecategory, home is subject to myriad understandings and utilizations inhumanities and arts, as much as in architecture, planning, and across socialsciences – sociology and anthropology, but also geography, psychology,history, urban and cultural studies. A fil rouge which I traced across them,and which I develop in this book, is a view of home as both one (or more)place or social setting and a special social relationship with it.Despite its semantic ambiguities and its prescriptive subtext, the notion of

home is unique as a heuristic bridge between social actors’ representationsand categorizations of external reality, their ways of acting upon it, and theattendant material arrangements. What is felt, understood, and enacted ashome is affected by variables such as social class, gender, age and ethno-cultural background. Likewise, it is typically shaped by strong normativerepresentations on what a “good home” should be like. However, there isanother major source of variation in the individual ways of experiencinghome: being sedentary (ultimately residing in a space that tends to be framedas home), vs beingmobile or systematically away, for a number of reasons orconstraints, from what used to be framed as home.International labour migrants are a case in point, as they face the need to

(re)establish a sense of home on the move, under often disadvantaged lifecircumstances. How is it that home is understood, felt, and at leasttentatively enacted against a migration background? What accounts formigrants’ changing ways of “homing”, as to their forms, contexts, physicalsettings, and relative success? And what does a focus on home indicateabout migrants’ integration, their ways of belonging and negotiatingethnic boundaries, or their transnational engagement?

Based on a critical inquiry into the theoretical, methodological andempirical literature available, this book revisits home as an experientialdimension of migrants’ everyday life. This will lead me to elaborate on themigration-home nexus as an emerging and distinctive research field.Migration in itself is a source of de-naturalization of the home, as it revealshow its familiarity and obviousness has been culturally constructed and isultimately fictitious. In a commonsensical understanding, migration cansimply be framed as a way of leaving home behind, and possibly re-establishing it elsewhere – although the “here” and “there” need not bein opposition with each other, as I will argue in the book.

INTRODUCTION xxiii

Since the category of migrationmay be just as fuzzy and all-comprehensiveas that of home, one thing should be specified here: I will mainly refer to so-called low-skilled migrants from labour-exporting countries and, to a lesserextent, to forcedmigrants and asylum seekers. As a discursive category and anassemblage of settings and relationships, home is a unique source of insighton migrants’ self-representations and social identifications; on the reproduc-tion and intergenerational transmission of their life values and styles (and ofthe underlying patterns of inequality); on the scope – if any – for them toachieve a sense of security, familiarity and control over their life environments;on their alignment vis-à-vis sending and receiving society; on their relativeexclusion from the latter as “home” to the natives. At all of these levels,migrants’ search for home emerges as a typically unaccomplished and ulti-mately political experience.

Home is then understood, here, as both a material environment and aset of meaningful relationships, re-collections and aspirations to beemplaced, successfully or not, over space and time. In practice, and despiteits emotionally “warm” connotations, home may host and stand for allsorts of social experiences – including those marked by segregation,oppression, violence or deep-rooted inequalities along lines of gender,ethnicity, legal status, age and so forth. As a research optic and setting,moreover, home can be fruitfully appreciated both within, on migrants’life experience, and between, regarding the interactions with their nativeand non-migrant counterparts.

Following these conceptual remarks, Migration and the Search forHome draws an original map of migrants’ views, feelings and practices ofhome. Their extended detachment from the past home(land) and theparallel attempt to gain access to new home contexts and cultures arerevealing of what home means, of the material basis (or lack thereof) onwhich it relies, and of the memories and aspirations it is associated with.Home is revisited as a matter of search, hence as an open-ended andpossibly unaccomplished process, rather than as a fixed and predeterminedstate of things. There is an interesting parallel between the analytical needto unpack the bundle of meanings, functions and agendas associated withwhatever we frame as home; and the practical need, for individuals such asmigrants, to re-negotiate a sense of home in their new life circumstances,with a variable retention of the previous home patterns, and againsttypically underprivileged life conditions.Of course, some peripheral concern with all of these issues can be traced

across much research on transnational migration, as well as in

xxiv INTRODUCTION

ethnographies of immigrant communities, networks and families.However, home tends to lie there as a tacit background, exactly as itdoes in people’s everyday life. The point is that there is much to gainfrom bringing it to the fore. And in doing so, a map, as the subtitle of thisbook reads, may be more of help than an ordinary review. This is not onlybecause much of what follows, while relying on specific instances and casestudies (and mirroring my background as a European sociologist of migra-tion), cuts across a variety of migration systems and research. A map, in myunderstanding, is less a state of the art than a reflexive elaboration of it, ora theoretical and methodological toolkit to advance research in, andbetween, different material terrains of home and migration. A map standsfor a consistent set of coordinates to be traced within a disperse and multi-situated field, in order to highlight its internal interdependencies andsuggest meaningful connections between its different elements.A map should also be portable in the field, although it cannot be fully

predictive of the journey – that is, the empirical research – one will doacross it, nor of what he or she will find out. This need not affect itsutility and purpose as a source of orientation and curiosity into theparadoxically unfamiliar, un-homely territory of migrants’ home experi-ence. In this sense, each of the chapters that follow aims less to saturatethe topic, than to lay the bases for investigating it more systematically. Indoing so, a parallel will always be maintained between what is specific ofthe migrant condition, at least idealtypically, and what seems to belongto the social experience of home at large. For sure, binaries such as nativevs immigrant, long-settled vs newcomer, sedentary vs mobile and soforth cannot tell the whole story, and should rather be combined withother axes of diversity. After all, the experience of home resonates withthe everyday life circumstances of each of us. Yet it does so in differentways, I contend, under circumstances of extended mobility and interna-tional migration. The influence of a significant space and time distancia-tion from what used to be home, and the need to constitute a new(possibly multi-located) one from a subaltern social position, are enoughto warrant a focus on the migrant experience, having said of its hugeinternal differentiation.Summing up, this book stems from my fascination with a theme that has

been subtly creeping in much of my previous research, and has helped meto make better sense of it. Something similar, I suspect, might occur tothose migration scholars who wish to adopt a home lens more system-atically, and invest in home-related views and practices as a topic in itself;

INTRODUCTION xxv

without forgetting, of course, that the connection is mutual – migrationand ethnic studies being also a source of novel insight for the study ofhousing, domesticity, material cultures, ways of homing, and of feeling athome. It is to a readership across these areas, and to all those who arecurious to research into (their or others’) homes, that Migration and thesearch for home is ideally addressed.In practice, this book foregrounds migrants’ ways of homing, by explor-

ing how they are conceptualized; how research on them can be done; howthey evolve over (and are affected by) space and time; what their aggregateand political implications are. More specifically, Chap. 1 revisits the socialscience literature on home, and then on the migration-home nexus, up totracing an analytical framework on migrants’ elusive processes of homing. Iuse this notion as a synthesis of their evolving ways of viewing homeaccording to certain cultural and social standards; of cultivating it as anemotional and relational experience (feeling-at-home); of orienting theirsocial practices accordingly (home-making). In all of these respects,migrants’ home experience is critically influenced by the structure oflegal, social and material opportunities accessible in their receiving andsending countries.Chapter 2 discusses the promises and pitfalls of social research on

migration and home. It also provides an overview of the methodologicaloptions developed so far in the empirical study of migrants’ ways ofhoming, and of their dwelling spaces more broadly. Last, it makes a casefor further elaboration of this emerging research field.Based on these theoretical and methodological underpinnings, Chaps. 3

and 4 trace an original map of migrants’ cognitions, emotions, and prac-tices about home. This is to be re-constructed over space, following thematerial and immaterial tracks of their homing processes in receivingcountries, in the sending ones and in-between; and over time, as theirevolving forms of homing – while typically constrained in the here-and-now – are affected by past memories and recollections of home, and bytheir future aspirations, hopes and expectations on the “best” places andconditions for them to feel at home. Admittedly, the distinction betweenthe two chapters is a merely heuristic one. The spatial and temporaldimensions of homing, in practice, are interdependent and mutually con-stitutive. A spatial and a temporal optic are both necessary to make sense ofthe home experience under conditions of extended mobility and diversity.By intersecting them, social researchers can appreciate the shifting materialbases of home and the influence of spatial distance on its enactment, while

xxvi INTRODUCTION

also taking different time horizons into account: the short one of indivi-duals’ home-related memories and aspirations (and of their biographiesoverall), and the long one of migration-driven change in the ways ofseeing, feeling and enacting home.Chapter 5, then, dissects the functions of the concept of home in the

public debate on immigration and in the policy-making and politicalmobilization associated with it. Home, as a discursive and symbolicresource, is potentially instrumental to all sorts of political agendas. Last,the Conclusion takes stock of the current intersection between home andmigration studies, highlights the relevance of migrants’ homing for“sedentary” people, and paves the way towards an innovative researchagenda on the topic.

INTRODUCTION xxvii

CHAPTER 1

A New Lens on the Migration-home Nexus

Abstract Home is an everyday, vernacular notion which potentially holdsvery significant conceptual implications.Migration and the search for homedefines it as a special kind of relationship with place – a culturally andnormatively oriented experience, based on the tentative attribution of asense of security, familiarity and control to particular settings over allothers. Irreducible to either house or dwelling, home is an emplacedinterpersonal process with irremediably prescriptive bases. It is also avaluable lens, and a research venue and subject, for migration studies.The migrant condition is unique in casting light on home by default, orfrom afar, and on the opportunities and dilemmas related to its achieve-ment. Transnational migration need not entail a simple loss of home;rather, the complex interaction between home and migration should becritically and contextually explored. The concepts of migration-homenexus and of homing point to a way ahead to do so.

Keywords Home � House � Dwelling Place � Home-Making �International Migration � Transnationalism � Migration-home nexus �Homing

This chapter provides a preliminary account of what home stands foracross social sciences, keeping in mind that this is a contested, emotiona-lized and context-dependent notion. A conceptual overview is necessary toshow its significance as a window on migrants’ potential to appropriate

© The Author(s) 2017P. Boccagni, Migration and the Search for Home, Mobility & Politics,DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58802-9_1

1

their everyday life milieus, and/or to project a sense of domesticitytowards other points of reference in time and space.

Home – a broader and more complex notion than the home as a dwell-ing place – is slippery and elusive, despite its apparent familiarity. Itsambiguity lies not only in being both an everyday life category and ananalytical tool, which is nothing new for social sciences. More problematicis the difficulty to elaborate etic definitions as rich and agreed upon as theemic ones. There is a tendency across the literature to use this notion as anever-enlarging umbrella category, up to trading off evocative power foranalytical clarity. Who would ever deny that some variant of the idea ofhome is relevant for, and variably experienced and negotiated by, all socialactors? In an unfortunate spiral of discursive inflation, home tends to beoverburdened with meanings, as well as emotions and expectations. Onceproperly dissected, though, this notion has still an underestimated heur-istic power, which I apply to the field of migration studies under the rubricof migration-home nexus.

In my understanding, home can be reframed as a meaningful relation-ship with place, hence as a situated and interactive endeavour, rather thanas a physical structure out there – without neglecting the significance ofthe latter as a potential repository of distinctive meanings, emotions andfunctions. My aim here, then, is not to assert what home is – a dubious andunnecessarily “essentialistic” effort, given the variety of stances on thequestion. Rather, it is to dynamically trace out the prevalent meanings ofhome, the ways in which it works out as a social experience and its societalconsequences, in practice.

Home, in the eyes of recently settled migrants and asylum seekers, isoften conspicuous by its absence. International migration is tantamount toan extended detachment from what used to be home. In practice, it de-naturalizes it, as it reveals that the sense of obviousness and familiarityattached to the previous domestic place was ultimately artificial and rever-sible. Migrants’ everyday life, therefore, is a privileged terrain to makesense of home by default. It brings to the fore a range of emotions,practices and living arrangements that mirror the need to recreate homeanew, dynamically, rather than a static and a full-fledged identificationwith one particular dwelling place. This is a still more critical and ambig-uous effort for asylum seekers and refugees. At the same time, migrants’life experience can be investigated to assess how far the home experiencerelies on a specific place, is potentially transferrable elsewhere, and drawson interpersonal relationships as much as material settings. In short: how

2 MIGRATION AND THE SEARCH FOR HOME

(far) is home perceived, negotiated and enacted, under conditions of dis-placement and extended mobility? Not surprisingly, home may turn out tobe more of a partial and unaccomplished achievement, or of a future-elsewhere oriented idea(l), than an orderly and natural state of things outthere.

Revisiting home as an evolving and open-ended experience, in thebiographic trajectories of both mobile and (relatively) immobile indivi-duals, will lead me to elaborate on homing as a process through whichpeople negotiate a sense of home vis-à-vis their external circumstances. Itsdevelopment over space and time, parallel to the course of migration, willbe systematically mapped in the rest of the book.

HOME AS A QUESTION FOR SOCIAL THEORY AND RESEARCH

This section sketches out a preliminary conceptual map of home, as asubject of social research. Three analytical coordinates are discussed, cor-responding to the definitional, relational and ideological underpinnings ofhome. Common to them is a sociological understanding of this notion as aspatially and normatively oriented experience that makes some settingsmore meaningful and affectively charged than all others. Why homematters, and is not reducible to the material boundaries of a dwellingplace, is a major question to be discussed, before using it as a lens onmigration studies.

Conceptual and Definitional Issues: What is Specific of Home?

Home is primarily a “folk” or “vernacular” notion to which a variety ofmeanings and emotional connotations is attached, across groups. Such isits centrality to our everyday experience, that its conceptual value andcontribution for social research has long been contentious (Rapoport,1995). Once conceptually unpacked, though, home is a source of inno-vative insight. Its increasing visibility across social sciences as an issue initself, rather than a backdrop to different concerns, may well point tosomething more complex and intriguing than an academic fad.

By way of definition, home should first of all be distinguished fromdwelling and house (Dovey, 1985; Lawrence, 1987; Mallett, 2004).While the latter notions, as “physical structures used by people for living”(Coolen & Meesters, 2012: 2), are self-evident, home is not. In order toargue for its relevance as a category of analysis, here, I advance a systematic

1 A NEW LENS ON THE MIGRATION-HOME NEXUS 3

revisit of home as a special kind of relationship with place. This is just apreliminary and succinct view on which I elaborate throughout thechapter. It should however be noticed that, unlike other definitions ofhome (e.g. Easthope, 2004), it attaches the “specialty” less to a place initself, than to the relationship with it; and that the emphasis on relation-ships, rather than on terms such as bond, tie or attachment (e.g. Fox,2002; Windsong, 2010), conveys a far more performative and interactivemeaning.

Home-as-a-relationship is something actively pursued and oriented todistinctive material and social settings, which affect it in turn. The sig-nificant others to which home implicitly points – partners, family mem-bers, kin, friends, neighbours – may be as or more significant than itsmaterial location. As an open-ended social relationship, home requires tobe purposively negotiated and reproduced – it is not simply out there –

and can be emplaced, understood and experienced in different ways andlocations over the life course.

In my argument, home has its own practical and analytical value added.At the same time, it should not be completely separated from the notionsof house or dwelling. Assuming houses (or dwelling places) as synonymswith the material world, and home as quintessence of the symbolic andemotional world, would be an oversimplification. Far more promising is arevisit of the “home/housing binary” as a matter of mutual constitutionbetween “the formal features of actual dwellings and the social life thatinhabits them” (Jacobs & Smith, 2008: 515ff.). Several scholars in archi-tecture, urban studies and environmental psychology have underlined thesignificance of long-inhabited dwellings as a biographical, even interge-nerational “warehouse” of memories, routines and symbols to its inhabi-tants. The “home environment” itself is “a sociocultural artifact”, whose“meaning and use can be understood only with respect to its socio-geographical context” (Lawrence, 1985: 117; cf. Bourdieu, 1977;Birdwell-Pheasant & Lawrence-Zúñiga, 1999b; Miller, 2001b; Lu,2012).

It is only with the notion of home, nonetheless, that the focus shiftsfrom the built environment per se to individuals’ privileged emotionalrelationship with it. If a house may be “a piece of property”, home isfundamentally “appropriation” – of that place or, potentially at least,of any other (Dovey, 1985). Home as a concept embraces a muchmore diverse environment, on a variety of (sometimes simultaneous)scales, from a room to a dwelling place, to broader spaces, all of them


being defined as “home” in opposition to other external entities; withdifferent bases, that is, territorial as much as familial or cultural,political, linguistic ones; potentially covering a large spectrum of socialactors – individuals as much as households, groups, communities andso forth.

While any built environment has a socio-cultural basis and life of itsown, the notion of home holds deeper evocative connotations, has richersubjective meaning, and opens up to a broader variety of issues than itsapparent synonyms (Moore, 2000). Home can hardly be applied as asimple marker of a place, without entailing some judgement or emotionalreaction to it. And, contrary to house or dwelling, it does not necessarilyevoke rootedness. Rather, it refers to a set of social practices, values andsymbols that, while setting-specific, can be transferred and reproducedinto different settings over time – or even out of any specifically boundedplace, as a transnational approach to migration might suggest.

In a nutshell, a house is static by definition; a home, instead, need not.In the memorable words of Mary Douglas (1991: 289),

Home is located in space, but it is not necessarily a fixed space . . . it need notbe a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing somespace under control. [ . . . ] A home is not only a space, it also has somestructure in time; and because it is for people who are living in that time andspace, it has aesthetic and moral dimensions.

There is not room enough, here, for an analysis of the historical evolutionof the notion of home and its equivalents across languages, as markers of“the positive, affectionate association of humans to a domestic residencelocation” (Benjamin, 1995b: 293; see, for in-depth accounts, Rybczynski,1986; Rykwert, 1991; Somerville, 1997). What anyway matters is that asimilar association with particularly meaningful and emotionalized set-tings, domestic or otherwise, can be found across human cultures and,indeed, across history (Birdwell-Pheasant & Lawrence-Zúñiga, 1999a).While the terms that parallel home in other languages may be culturallyspecific, the underlying social experience seems to cut across the boundariesbetween them (Jacobson, 2009). As Heller (1985: 1–2) famously put it,home – “perhaps the oldest tradition of the homo sapiens, privileging one,or certain, places against all the others” – is “one of the few constants ofthe human condition”.


If the fundamental social significance of home is hard to deny, its statusas a scientific concept is less clear. Although it cannot be simply inferredfrom its discursive prevalence, the interdisciplinary proliferation of writ-ings on home as an issue per se should not go unnoticed. At least in somecountries, “home studies” is almost institutionalized as a research areawhich intersects literature in sociology, anthropology, psychology, historyand geography, as much as in architecture, planning and urban studies.1

The same analytical focus is shared across as diverse realms as local welfare,health and social care, housing, material culture, everyday life, emotionsand belonging, to make the most obvious examples.

Nonetheless, achieving a widely agreed definition of home remainsdifficult, unless in the basic terms of “a house + x” (Fox, 2002). Evensuch a pragmatic definition may prove inadequate: while the emotionaland relational dimensions of home do presuppose some material basis,such a basis does not necessarily overlap with a housing structure of sort.As suggested by the life experience of highly mobile people, includinginternational migrants, a sense of home can be attached to specific “typesof settlements” (Rapoport, 1995: 35), to other (and more ephemeral)social settings, or to “generic places” that assume similar, home-like con-tours across locales (Ley-Cervantes & Duyvendak, 2015). Furthermore,the x that should complement with the built environment is as elusive forresearchers as for dwellers themselves – even more so for those who lefttheir homes behind, and have been looking for new ones.

Among the discontents with this emerging approach to home as aresearch field in itself, Rapoport (1995) stands out for his sophisticated“critical look”. In this view, the analytical and conceptual value of home isirremediably constrained by the cognitive and emotional stances thatoverburden it as a vernacular notion:

Its popular usage [of home] seems to involve its being used in lieu of house ordwelling, possibly because it is “warmer”. This creates one of the majorproblems with its usage, since it is also used to describe certain mental states.There is thus conflation between its use to refer to a product (the thing) anda process (a mental state or positive evaluation). These need to be distin-guished clearly, and the current confusion is another major general problem.The mental states seem to involve an affective core, feelings of security,control, being at ease and relaxed, are related to ownership and to family,kinship, comfort, friendship, laughter, and other positive attributes; it involvespersonalization, owned objects, and taking possession. It can apply to larger


entities and involves positive evaluations of attributes of environmentsmatching certain schemata or ideals. (Rapoport, 1995: 29; italics in original)

There is much merit in the range of “mental states” – or rather, ofintersubjective meanings and expectations – that Rapoport associateswith the notion of home. Admittedly, empirical research on the personalconstructions of home is still relatively undeveloped. Moreover, it is notenough attentive to the influence of variables such as gender, age, class,cultural background or territorial context, as well as one’s family role andposition in the life course (Allen, 2008). Nothing like a systematic andinstitutionalized social theory of home emerges from the literature(Somerville, 1997), while a recurring temptation can be traced to overloadthis concept with meanings and functions.

Nonetheless, some basic consensus exists around three constellations offactors as ideally distinctive of the home experience. None of them entailsnecessarily the others, and the resultant home experience can be far fromcomplete or well-achieved. There is often a gap between the “real” and the“aspired” home, in this sense, on which I expand below. However, thecumulative sequence of these factors, from (1) to (3), mirrors increasinglyambitious and demanding forms of home-making.

In my view, the most basic attribute of the home experience is that of(1) Security: a sense of personal protection and integrity which isattached to a place of one’s own, where outsiders should not have freeaccess and one’s identity – whatever that means – is not in question.Next comes (2) Familiarity: both in an emotional sense, pointing tointimacy and comfort, and in a cognitive one, standing for orientation inspace, stability, routine, continuity or even permanence – all implicitexpectations that are not easy to reconcile with increasingly mobile lifecourses. The frequent connections between home and notions such ashousehold, kinship, or neighbourhood are telling of the centrality of thisfactor. Last, (3) Control: as autonomy in using a certain place accordingto one’s needs and tastes, in predicting the development of events in it,and in expressing oneself, inside it, out of the public gaze and judge-ment. Although this factor may be less obvious than the others, itproves crucial to negotiating home in the public sphere and to itsmixed political significance, as I will show in the book.

Several more extended taxonomies of home-related meanings, dimen-sions and functions have been developed across social sciences (e.g.Hayward, 1977; Lawrence, 1987; Després, 1991; Hage, 1997;


Somerville, 1997; Allen, 2008; Mee & Vaughan, 2012). However, theydo not seem to add much to these basic remarks. What should be ratherkept in mind is that all of these classifications concern home-related needs,desires and aspirations, as well as socio-culturally shared representations.None of these attributes comes necessarily together with the others; mostimportant, none of them overlaps fully with the actual home experience inpeople’s everyday life. The paucity or the absence of these attributes are assignificant, for the study of home, as their complete realization: “home isas much about exclusion as inclusion” (Moore, 2000: 212). This alsomeans that the concept of home holds a normative dimension – a perva-sive, but far from uniform or uncontentious one – which is much too oftenneglected or “naturalized”.

Rapoport’s quote is also a helpful reminder of the multi-scalarity of theconcept of home: domestic space is the most obvious, but by no means theonly relevant level. Having said this, the author’s argument on the littlevalue added of home compared with its synonyms, or about the immaterialand substantive dimensions of home as necessarily at odds with each other,requires more elaboration.

Several authors, myself included, would counter that understanding homeas a spatially selective relationship – one which can endow all sorts of placeswith distinctive meanings and functions, thus making them domestic – doesprovide a way ahead. In this sense home is, of course, both a process and aproduct. Or perhaps, it is neither – it is, rather, the situated and evolvingcombination between a distinctive spatial attachment and thematerial achieve-ments in which it results.

Both processes of home-making and homes as material or environmentalobjects, in their mutual interaction, are amenable to empirical research. Thepoint is to do so within a broader societal framework: the home experienceshould be embedded into the “patterns of historical, geographical and socialdifferentiation” that it “reflect[s] and reproduce[s]” (Dowling &Fitzpatrick, 2012: xx). Social inequality has clearly an influence on homingpathways, in terms of both material and relational arrangements.Individuals’ socio-demographics, the assets (or forms of capital) accessibleto them and the external structure of opportunities do affect the meaningsattached to home, and the chances to achieve a satisfactory home experi-ence. In other words, homing pathways mirror pre-existing social inequal-ities, and may enhance them further. Having said this, it is the emotionaland relational signification that social actors attach to place – not its inherentcharacteristics – what qualifies it as home.


It follows that there is much to be gained from an actor-orientedunderstanding of the ways of perceiving, constructing and enactinghome, as variable across space, time and socio-cultural background; mostnotably, as affected by an extended and potentially disruptive experienceof international migration. This makes the realm of everyday and familylife fundamental to the empirical study of home in a phenomenologicallyinformed perspective.

Summing up, this notion will be used in three fundamental ways allacross this book (Table 1.1):

• First, home is assumed as a conceptual lens on migrants’ everydaylives. This mirrors the emic significance of the word itself, to beappreciated as a window into their everyday interactions with therelevant social milieus and significant others;

• Second, this concept is referred to all sorts of social environmentsthat are subject to distinctive emotional and cognitive attributions,whereby they embody a sense of home;

• Third, and most important, home is used here as shorthand for home-making: the ordinary interactions through which individuals try toappropriate and make meaningful, personal and secure a variety ofplaces – primary among them, the domestic ones and those of theirfamily life. As a process, home is all but natural or predetermined. Itrequires significant emotional and practical efforts, even more sowhenever people leave behind their ordinary domestic circum-stances. Migrants’ life experience is a case in point.

Table 1.1 Meaning of home and ways of using the term in Migration and theSearch for Home

Meaning of home Uses of home

A special social relationship, basedon an emplaced (tentative)attribution of• Security• Familiarity• Control

to one’s living circumstances

1. A conceptual lens on migrants’ everyday lives2. All social environments (places and settings)

that are subject to processes of appropriation ashome-like

3. Short-hand for home-making


Through Materiality, and Beyond: Home as a Special Relationshipwith Place

It is hard to deny that home has material foundations of some sort,whatever the scale of reference. Postmodern-styles accounts that suggestotherwise – emphasizing the “unprecedented” immaterial, virtual or de-territorialized bases of the home experience – do not resonate much withempirical findings; not in migration studies, at least, as I show in thechapters that follow. At the same time, the bricks and mortar of a houseneed not be the exclusive materialization of home-related feelings andpractices. An emphasis on the cognitive, emotional and relational bases ofhome, instead, is necessary to understand its “making” in everyday life.

In the first place, the subjective experience of home points – ideallyat least – to a condition of ontological centredness (Berger, 1984) andinsidedness (Cuba & Hummon, 1993; Meijering & Lager, 2014).Phenomenologically, we can appreciate home as that “underlying exis-tential structure that gives us our first orientation to the world”(Jacobson, 2012: 181). Beyond the surface of what is ordinarilytaken for granted, home acts as a cognitive anchor through whichindividuals order external social reality in terms of space, as well as oftime (Dovey, 1985; Allen, 2008). It is of no surprise that the house,once subjectively experienced as home, is often described as an exten-sion of the body, or a parallel marker of the distinction between theself and the others (Carsten & Hugh-Jones, 1995; Wardhaugh, 1999;Jacobson, 2009).

Through the home experience people connect their present with thepast, draw an elementary boundary between the inside and the outsideand, likewise, between all sorts of opposites: orderly vs disorderly, cleanvs dirty, predictable vs unpredictable, proximate vs faraway, but also us vsthem, or natives vs aliens (Van der Horst, 2004; Boccagni & Brighenti,2015). As all of these binaries suggest, home holds powerful moralconnotations, besides working out as a tool to categorize and differenti-ate reality. This is manifest, for instance, whenever one’s native back-ground is reframed as home, opposite to the “alien lands” and itsinhabitants (even more so as the latter get closer, possibly bearing some-thing of their own home). In fact, home can be mobilized as a discursiveresource for all sorts of public and political agendas – from nativist andexclusionary ones, to those driven by progressive and redistributivestances (see Chap. 5).


In the second place, home holds a pervasive, if elusive emotionaldimension. This potentially includes a large spectrum of emotionalstates – not just selectively good ones, as the usual aphorisms wouldsuggest (“home is where the heart is”, “home sweet home” etc.). Thekey point, here, is that the material and relational circumstances asso-ciated with home elicit particularly strong and meaningful emotions,and are in turn deeply emotionalized. Home itself, argues Gurney(1997: 393), is “predominantly portrayed as an emotional spherewithin which personal biographies [are] framed”. Much has beenwritten, for instance, on the emotional value of domestic objects –

and importantly so, since they contribute to the physicality of thehome experience, no less than the bricks and mortar of a house(Miller, 2001a; Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Walsh, 2006). In more gen-eral terms, emotion plays a pivotal role in the gendered everydayexperience of home, and in the ways of “commodifying” the desireof it (Dovey, 1985). Feeling at home should itself be revisited as adistinctive emotional experience, rather than as an ancillary notion toother forms of place attachment such as belonging, identification andso forth. Indeed, it requires more specific research as such, despite itscomplexity – or rather, because of it (Duyvendak, 2011; Kusenbach &Paulsen, 2013; Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015).

At one level, then, home can be appreciated as a research window intothe ways in which people perceive and understand their closer socialenvironment, and interact with it accordingly:

Because people inscribe it with meaning, possess and occupy it, derive socialstatus and identity from it, space is understood as having symbolic value,hence is turned into an emotionally meaningful place. (Reinders & Van derLand, 2008: 6)

At another level, though, the relational underpinnings of home – theways of “inscribing”, “possessing”, “occupying” space, in the quote –

are worth studying in themselves. Sociologically speaking, home is lessone (or more) physical place, than the peculiar relationship that peopleenact with it over time (Hayward, 1977; Dovey, 1985; Jacobson,2009; Coolen & Meesters, 2012; Kusenbach & Paulsen, 2013). Ofcourse, the home as dwelling place, or as “a socio-spatial system”

irreducible to either a house or a household, is a major topic andsetting of research in its own right (Saunders & Williams, 1988).


However, the study of home as an embedded and meaningful socialrelationship has broader remit and a more interactive focus. It buildson “locales” of some sort, but does not necessarily overlap with them.The material circumstances which are attributed home-like meaningsand emotions evolve over time and may result in different locations,parallel to individuals’ and families’ life course. Family ties and affectiverelationships are central to the ongoing emplacement of home (Allen,2008). They are also critical to the “portability” of home itself, asmigrant’s life experience shows.

In a nutshell, then, home is a matter of home-making (Blunt &Dowling, 2006), or of setting specific social relationships that arenegotiated and reproduced over time, more or less successfully, againsta variety of material backgrounds. In this sense, home-making is asignificant instance of place-making – an overall category for the rela-tional processes whereby a “place” is “formed out of the particular setof social relations which interact at a particular location” (Massey,1992: 12). That the home experience is still embedded in materialcircumstances, however varied and mutable, is a strong point againstall criticisms of home as an inescapably loose and vague concept.Furthermore, its processual dimension means that the “real” homemay well be distant from the “ideal” one. I return to this point below.

At still another level, home is a unique research terrain on theinteraction between people’s everyday life and the structural con-straints that affect it. In Giddens’ terms, the home experience – parti-cularly whenever it overlaps with a domestic place and its routines –

plays a fundamental function of societal structuration. It is a privileged“setting through which basic forms of social relations and social insti-tutions are constituted and reproduced” (Saunders & Williams, 1998:82). Home, in other words, is an implicit “building block of society”(Chapman, 2001: 136): a fundamental breeding ground, whose aggre-gate influence on macro-social structures in far less studied than theinfluence of socio-cultural, economic and political factors on thedomestic experience itself. As key interface between the individual (orhis/her primary groups) and the broader society, home is equallycentral to the mutual constitution of long-debated boundaries suchas the one between the private, or the personal, and the public(Massey, 1992, Blunt & Dowling, 2006, Baxter & Brickell, 2014).The function of mediating between individual and societal stances ismost obviously embedded in the physical space of the home:


Dwellings reflect the degree to which cultures and their members deal withthe oppositions of individual needs, desires and motives versus the demandsand requirements of society at large. (Gauvain & Altman, 1982: 28)

To recap: home can be reframed as a relational, processual and context-specific social experience. As such, it is a “flexible and conservative” notion(Dovey, 1985). On the flexibility of home, conceptually and in people’sordinary life experience, much has been written already. The “conserva-tive” refers, less obviously, to the fact that home is experientially repro-duced and re-enacted over time, while being far from immutable, in turn.

How flexible and conservative the home experience is in practice, andhow much of the past home is retained or reproduced under changing lifebackgrounds, are empirical questions; migrants’ life trajectories have muchto suggest about them. Before that, some remarks are necessary on thenormative contours of home.

On the Irremediably Prescriptive Bases of Home

Both in common sense and in the academic discourse, home tends to beframed as a naturally positive and inclusive state of things: “somethingdesirable and necessary for individual fulfilment” (Van der Horst, 2004:38; cf. Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Coolen &Mesters, 2012). That home is avalue-laden notion is not just a result of its centrality to the individual andcollective imagination of people – their present home experience beingtypically compared with the personal memories of past homes, and withthe aspirations for future ones (Chapman, 2001). Home is a subjectivelymeaningful concept also because it is imbued with societally wide positivestandards and desires, however mutable over time and space. As such, itcan be defined, experienced and used in ways that mirror all sorts ofcultural scripts and social expectations, as well as distinct political andideological stances. It is necessary to unpack this bundle of deep-rootedrepresentations, without forgetting that, whatever the socio-cultural andindividual ideals about the “good home”, their achievement is highlyvariable and context-dependent.

The warm and inclusive connotation of home is not without problemsfor social researchers – not only for the underlying lack of conceptualrigour, up to the extreme that sometimes “what one likes . . . is home,what one does not, is not” (Rapoport, 1995: 41). While issues of con-ceptual clarity are relatively easy to address, two more subtle cognitive


traps are inherent in the ordinary usage of the word home: first, the risk ofneglecting the abusive and exploitative experiences, or at least the unequalrelations of power, that do occur in “real” homes (whether as domesticspaces or as larger ethnic, religious or national communities); second, theirremediable discrepancy between the ideal(ized) and socio-culturallyshaped contours of home, and the material fabric of any particular dwell-ing place. Let us address the two traps, separate from each other.

Much has been written, across feminist and critical studies, on thepuzzling disjuncture between the warm connotation of home and theall-but warm, invisibilized social practices that any domestic space mayhost, and that a naive conceptualization of home may legitimize (e.g.Wardhaugh, 1999; Young, 1997; Mallett, 2004). After all, the notionsof home and domesticity, and the underlying household practices, havealways been subject to gendered scripts and behaviours, in historicallyand culturally variable ways (Gurney, 1997; Hollows, 2012). And theeveryday social reproduction in the home is exposed to exploitativerelations, or to forms of domestic violence and segregation, that aresomehow facilitated by the “right to privacy” associated with domesticlife. This is the ironically obverse side of the “atmosphere of sanctity”that is attributed to “the family home . . . [as] a place where certainthings are kept secret through behavioural and spatial rules” (Saile,1985: 93). In other words, “the ideological scripting of home asintimate and safe makes violence against women difficult to see”(Price, 2002: 40). This is an obvious instance of how blurred, andultimately ideological, the private/public boundary embodied by thehome is; and of how far a political dimension is inherent even in themost mundane form of domestic life (see Chap. 5).

In the second place, the normative subtext of home stems from the gapbetween the abstract desires and socio-cultural representations and schemataabout home, and the real characteristics of any particular dwelling. All con-structions of home – both symbolical and material ones – reflect predominantexpectations about what feeling at home entails, and what a proper homeshould look like. Even the material side of a house as bricks and mortar issignificantly shaped by cultural traditions, values and styles, as to the appro-priate and socially stratified ways of building, furnishing, decorating and usingit (Gauvain & Altman, 1982; Lawrence, 1987). At the same time, the actualexperience of home as a situated social process need not overlap with anyprescriptive standard. More often than not, it is rather distant from it; thehome experience of forced migrants and displaced persons is a case in point.


Whether home is an object of experience or study, then, the issue atstake is not only what normative and culturally embedded models affect it.Equally significant are the social processes associated with its day-to-daymaking, including the material cultures on which home relies, and whichit contributes to (re)produce; the socially stratified scope for people toachieve their expected home standards; the ways in which the standardsthemselves are negotiated by dwellers and change over time.

Unveiling the normative subtext of home, therefore, enables a dualresearch focus: on the socio-cultural determinants of any definition ofhome, and on the gap between home-related expectations or aspirationsand their accomplishment. In both respects, the nexus between home andinternational migration has much to suggest.

HOME AS A LENS AND A RESEARCH SUBJECT

FOR MIGRATION STUDIES

That migration entails leaving home behind, apparently at least, is notjust a tautology. And in a literal sense, of course, moving away fromhome is nothing specific to international labour migrants. While chan-ging home(s) over time is part and parcel of the life course, leavingone’s original home place often signals a salient biographic transition –

whenever a person leaves her ascribed household behind and starts anew one on her own, in a new dwelling place. However, the way ofleaving home that is inherent in long-term international migration is farmore radical. To start with, it need not entail an “immediate prospectof material improvement”, as is often the case with people’s “successiverelocations of home” (Cieraad, 2010: 86). In fact, it implies more thanthe ordinary transition from one dwelling, or household, into another.Or rather, it involves a major shift both in a biographic and socio-spatialsense:

[Migration entails] a splitting of home as place of origin and home as thesensory world of everyday experience. [ . . . ] Migration can hence be con-sidered as a process of estrangement, a process of becoming estranged fromthat which was inhabited as home. (Ahmed, 1999: 341)

While Ahmed’s remarks do touch a deep chord, they need to be theore-tically nuanced, empirically declined and, to some extent, revisited. This is


what I aim to do through in-depth discussion of what home means forinternational migrants, and of the contribution of a home lens to advancemigration studies.2 This will lead me to the notion of homing, as central tothe frame of this book.

On the Shifting Place(s) of Home in Migrant Life Trajectories

Revisited through the lens of home, migrants’ life experience is exemp-lary – often unwittingly so – of a major transition that has come alongwith modernity (Heller, 1995: 4): the shift from a “fixed spatiality(country, city, rank)” of “appointed destiny”, as a fundamentallyascribed life condition, towards a more open-ended, risky, and atleast apparently malleable biographic space ahead. In this emerginglife space, which opens up to the future and to the extra-domestic,the question “where is our appointed home” is simply ineludible. Theresponse on the location, and even on the kind of home is often hardto predict, but a fact remains: the resources available for individuals toappoint a place as home, and the mobility infrastructures accessible tothem, are distributed in deeply unequal ways along several axes. Infact, they are a major factor of social stratification at a global level.

In commonsense, and even semantically, terms such as home andmigration, and their respective synonyms, are mutually at odds.Whether at the scale of a dwelling place or of a nation, home refers towhat is static and lies inside; migration, instead, stands for what dynami-cally enters into it (i.e. in migrants’ countries of settlement) or exits it (intheir countries of origin). However, the two notions are also mutuallycomplementary and entangled – they can hardly be appreciated, andmade sense of, separate from each other. It is no coincidence, to makeone example, that “Migration and Home Affairs” co-exist in the name ofa dedicated Directorate-General (in short, HOME) within the EuropeanCommission.

Even in a temporal optic, if home is assumed as a biographical startingpoint (as T.S. Eliot famously put it,3 and as internet homepages moreprosaically remind), migration is whatever comes after, different, andpossibly opposite to it. In a similar guise, home is implicitly a synonymwith – indeed, the essence of – autochthony or rootedness in place(Dovey, 1985: 42). Within such a conceptual frame, mobility can hardlybe understood as anything else than the polar opposite of home – possiblyas exclusion from it. The more home is conceived in static and even rooted


terms, the more mobility is an anomaly – something that necessarilyundermines the foundations, or at least the location, of home as a setting,but also as a source of security, intimacy and predictability. In this sense, itis no surprise that migrants be perceived as out-of-home, or not-at-home,whatever the location.

The perceptual opposition between home and mobility does resonatewith the migrant day-to-day life experience. As much qualitative researchhas illustrated, the emotions, practices and living arrangements throughwhich international migrants articulate a sense of home tend to fall behindtheir own expectations and desires. They mirror a search for somethingresembling home, and possibly its displacement towards the countries oforigin (long perceived as the only “real home”), more than an identifica-tion with the present living circumstances as home-like. Such a fragmentedsense of home is most noticeable among first-generation newcomers, notto mention asylum seekers and refugees. And once home is perceived assomething missing from proximate life spaces, it is not unlikely to assumeidealized contours – whether shifted back into the past, or projectedforward into the future.

It is exactly the perceived absence or remoteness of home, however,what makes the migration experience unique in revealing the cognitions,emotions and practices associated with it, as a place and a set of biographicroutines. In short,

Our concept of home gains meaning through taking journeys away. Throughthe absence of home, home itself gains meaning. (Moore, 2000: 211)

It is by virtue of migrants’ outsider position, as a combination of (appar-ent) loss of the past home and marginality from the natives’ one, that theirlife experience stands out as a privileged setting for the social study ofhome. A similar argument, which is part of the reasons why the “migra-tion-home nexus” deserves more attention, has been advanced by severalauthors, from different disciplinary backgrounds (e.g. Massey, 1992;Markowitz, 2004; Staeheli & Nagel, 2006; Cieraad, 2010; Sirriyeh,2010).

On the surface of it, international migration could be seen as a proto-typical source of home un-making – a byword for any social “process bywhich material and/or imaginary components of home are unintentionallyor deliberately, temporarily or permanently, divested, damaged or evendestroyed” (Baxter & Brickell, 2014: 134). However, this neologism


points to something more complex and elusive than the loss of home. It isa reminder of the potential reversibility of any experience of home, as asocial process which involves both “uprootings” and “regroundings”,against different material and relational settings (Ahmed et al., 2003b).The exact balance between the ones and the others is the real issue at stake.

Following this argument, there is far more in migrants’ life trajectoriesthan a zero-sum game between being-at-home (in the past) and being-without-it (at present). The migrant condition is a matter of previoushome feelings, practices and placements being questioned or even dis-rupted, but also of a variable potential for retaining, reproducing, orrecreating the home experience anew. The separation from what used tobe home is paralleled by systematic attempts to establish new homearrangements, or to recover meaningful dimensions of the past ones.Displacement goes along with at least some replacement.

If an experiential core can be traced across migrants’ home conditions,this lies not in being necessarily homeless or uprooted, but in encounter-ing a particularly challenging gap between the real and the desired side ofhome; in other words, in the friction between mostly un-homely livingconditions, and the yearning, or the search, for new and more home-likecircumstances (Dovey, 1985). Migrants’ past home experience was rela-tively consistent and clearly localized – although far from ideal, as theemigration option alone indicates. The present one, instead, tends to beinconsistent, multi-faceted (or multi-sited) and somehow incomplete.This is particularly the case for first-generation, recently settled migrants.All of these tensions point to the irremediably dynamic and evolving basesof the home experience, which I re-conceptualize as homing in the follow-ing section.

For now, it should be noticed that the dialectic between being-away-from-home and searching-for-it-again has meaningful implications, as wellas relevant costs for those involved. In practice, it invites to investigate theevolving balance between the fixed and the mobile dimensions of thehome experience, its real and desired (or ideal) facets, as well as betweenits material and immaterial foundations. If a simple opposition betweenhome as “stasis” and mobility as “dynamic” does not suffice, given theirmutual co-constitution, the interaction between the two attributes needsto be interrogated further.

What of the static can be best (indeed, uniquely) appreciated fromthe viewpoint of the dynamic, and vice versa? And what if the bound-ary between the static and the dynamic gets blurred, and the two are


conflated into each other? Put differently: can home be revisited asboth a static phenomenon (one or more locations) and a dynamic one(a set of relationships) (Morley, 2000; Ralph & Staeheli, 2011)? Howdo these polarities interact with each other, and what of the ensuingtensions – in which respects, under what conditions and to the benefitof whom, judging from the migrant experience?

It is against these questions that an original map of migrants’ homeexperience will be traced in this book. Suffice it to repeat, here, thatmigration does undermine the naturalization of home as a rooted andimmobile state of things, thus questioning its one-sided sedentaristaccounts across social sciences (Malkki, 1992; Rapport & Dawson,1998b). At the same time, a radically mobile or de-territorialized under-standing would make little sense of, and little justice to, migrants’ searchfor home. Rather, international migrants’ need, desire and variable successin achieving some life fixity, as embedded and displayed by their “new”homes, should be appreciated and empirically explained.

As the following chapters will show, transnational connections withhome communities are also parts of the migrant condition. The sameholds for their potential to reproduce home-like traits abroad, or even torecreate them anew. The issue, then, is less ifmigrants remake some sort ofhome, than what resources they can mobilize in doing so, and how successful– if at all – they are in their new home-making endeavours. Home-relevantassets are then one more axis of inequality between native and immigrantpopulations, and within the latter.

A Case for the Migration-Home Nexus

Having said this, it is not self-evident that a home-sensitive lensadvances social research on migration, and that migrants’ experienceis a rich setting for the social study of home. For the migration-homenexus to stand as an innovative research field, it is necessary to showhow home matters to the study of migration (and vice versa), and whatinnovative insights stem from the intersection of these research areas.While there is a constant dialectic between home and migration, thehypothesis of a nexus entails, more ambitiously, a systematic interde-pendence between these fields of analysis and practice, as a mutualsource of analytical value added.

Much sparse literature has long been available on migrants’ housingexperience, whether regarding their ways and conditions of settlement in


receiving countries, or their “remittance houses” in the countries oforigin. Schutz’s (1945) seminal sociological reflection has focused pre-cisely on the immigrant returnee as an ideal-typicalHomecomer, hence as akey figure for the social study of home. Nonetheless, empirical research onmigrants’ home experience per se – in light of its emotional, cultural andrelational bases – is recent and little systematic. Most of it has resulted inlocalized case studies, with limited attempts towards comparative analysisor deeper conceptualization.4 Overall, home is so deeply ingrained ineveryday life routines to be little visible as a social question in itself –even when it is more a matter of adaptation to disadvantaged dwellingcircumstances, than a rewarding residential experience.

Interestingly, migrants’ housing conditions and their sense and prac-tices of home are so fundamental that all approaches to migrant incorpora-tion have something to say about them, at least indirectly. This can beappreciated under well-established research rubrics such as urban life,welfare and segregation, on the one hand; belonging, identification andinterethnic relations, on the other. It is not coincidental, though, that anincrease in empirical work on migrants’ home experience has occurredonly over the last two decades, parallel to the emergence of transnationalmigration studies (Glick-Schiller et al., 1994; Portes et al., 1999; Kivisto,2001; Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007; Vertovec, 2009; Waldinger, 2015). Theemphasis on migrants’ connectedness with home (societies), or on theirability to maintain one foot there while staying with the other foot here,resonates widely in transnational migration studies. There is broad agree-ment, in what is otherwise a quite fragmented research field, on migrants’potential to cultivate sustained and simultaneous relationships with morethan one home-place across national boundaries (Boccagni, 2012).Several transnational scholars argue for an unprecedented scope for culti-vating multiple belonging – that is, for attaching a sense of home to severalplaces simultaneously, with all of the underlying material infrastructures,life routines, relational and emotional attachments (e.g. Levitt & Waters,2002; Salih, 2002).

While similar claims are hard to be empirically assessed on a large scale,the very notion of home has been subject to relatively little elaborationfrom within the transnational approach.5 Once again, home is apparentlytoo obvious to deserve reflection in its own right. Even so, a transnationaloptic is unique, as I will show, in illuminating the non-material and non-proximate bases of the home experience.


As far as migration studies is concerned, the analytical contribution of ahome lens lies primarily in highlighting the privileged spatial bases ofmigrants’ relationships with their origins (roots), as well as with their evolvinglife milieus (routes). However, a focus on migrants’ views, feelings andpractices of home is not just instrumental to cast light on their transnationalconnections and on their patterns of local integration. While home-makingitself could be revisited as a way beyond the stalemate of assimilation vstransnationalism (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2015), there are also other substantiveissues that make the migration-home nexus worth investigating (Table 1.2).6

Researching home as an everyday relational social process illuminates,first of all, the most tangible and intimate bases of people’s belonging andidentification with place. Almost unique to the migrant condition,though, is that such “bases” can be widespread across different dwellingplaces, in different countries, and that home-related feelings and practicesmay be territorially dispersed, likewise. More broadly, a home lens helps toappreciate migrants’ potential to appropriate external space, or to bring itunder control, given both the resources they rely upon and their externalstructure of opportunities. Third, in terms of interethnic relations, a focuson home and its various articulations – discursive, emotional, material andterritorial ones – sheds light on the evolving boundary between insidersand newcomers, its relative permeability and the room available for nego-tiation between, and within, the ones and the others.

From the vantage point of home studies, a focus on migrant’s homeexperience provides rich insight on three questions of broader signifi-cance. The first involves the interface between the domestic and the

Table 1.2 A case for the migration-home nexus: mutual analytical contributionsfrom migration and home studies

A home lens on migration studies A migration- (mobility-) sensitive approachto the study of home

- Illuminates the bases of migrants’belonging and identification with place(possibly multi-sited)

- Provides insight into multi-scalarity ofhome and interface between its domesticand extra-domestic dimensions

- Helps to appreciate migrants’ potential toappropriate space

- Highlights the tension between materialand immaterial bases of home

- Foregrounds insider/outsider boundary asemplaced and negotiated in everyday life

- Advances the empirical study of circulationand diffusion of home views and cultures


extra-domestic dimensions of home, as well the ways in which themulti-scalarity of home as a concept (from a tiny space to a nation-state, and beyond) works out in practice. Whether (among whom, inwhat circumstances) a sense of home is confined to domestic spaces, oris distributed and negotiated across different settings, is a question thatcan be helpfully studied in terms of native/immigrant relations. In thesecond place, migrants’ experience of home is unique in casting lighton the tension between the material basis of home and its immaterialfacets – the emotional, relational and imaginative ones. How far thehome experience needs to rely on distinctive and place-bound materialfoundations, and “what” of it is portable across spatial and culturalbackgrounds, are questions of major interest for home studies. Thisleads to still another issue on which transnational migration is a valu-able source of insight: the ways in which home-related ideas, valuesand cultures circulate across different settings, having in migration one– among several other – channel of cultural diffusion. In this sense, theburgeoning literature on social remittances (Levitt & Lamba-Nieves,2011; Boccagni & Decimo, 2013) can be applied to the ideational andemotional bases of home, as well as to its material underpinnings.

Cutting across the two research areas, in-depth investigation of themigration-home nexus is unique for appreciating, at local and transna-tional level, the shifting emotional, relational and material boundariesbetween traditionally separate life domains such as the individual and thecollective sphere; the private and the public one; the space of majoritiesand the one of minorities (ethnic or not). In order to pave the way for aricher framework of analysis, however, the conceptual bases of the migra-tion-home nexus should be refined. This is what I aim to do now, bydeveloping the concept of homing.

HOMING: A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA ON MIGRANTS’

SEARCH FOR HOME

Summing up, migrants’ everyday life opens up a valuable research field onthe home experience from the margins, or on the ways in which it isnegotiated anew. The migrant condition unveils the processes throughwhich home is worked out in practice, tentatively at least, as a special socialrelationship with place. Home can then be appreciated both as a way ofappropriating place, and as a specific and meaningful setting; a process,


and a product. The latter, that is, home as a particular spatial setting, hasbeen extensively discussed, although it is not without ambiguities, evenwhen it overlaps with the dwelling place: in practice, a number of immi-grant newcomers may well find their dwelling circumstances un-homely,while attaching a sense of home to housing spaces where they do not dwellany more (see Chap. 3; cf. Boccagni, 2014a).

The meanings and implications of home as a process are more controversialand deserve elaboration here. What does “appropriating place” (i.e. make ithome-like) mean in practice? How does it work, and what accounts forindividuals’ success, or lack thereof, in achieving it? In order to moveahead in addressing these questions, I advance the concept of homing. Thisrefers to people’s evolving potential to attach a sense of home to their lifecircumstances, in light of their assets and of the external structure ofopportunities.

Three analytically distinct and inevitably value-laden dimensions are inter-woven in this process: a cognitive as well as normative one, regarding “what”home is expected to be like, given one’s social milieus, value orientations andcultural backgrounds; an emotional side, or, how it is that certain materialand social arrangements are perceived and sensed asmore or less “feeling likehome”; a practical dimension – how, under what conditions and why peoplestruggle to make their life milieus more home-like, and what are the materialand relational accomplishments of this effort (what is ordinarily framed ashome-making). Graphically speaking, and – for the sake of simplicity – at anindividual level,7 the concept of homing can be represented as an attempt totrace the boundary here-and-now between what is home-like and what is not,in the social actor’s own views and terms (Fig. 1.1).

As a process, homing holds a relational, appropriative and future-orientedsidewhich should not go unnoticed. Contrary to the static and irenic subtextof the notions of home and domesticity, homing is an open-ended matter ofevolving strivings, claims-making and conflicts; hence, an ultimately politicalmatter (see Chap. 5).

While homing is played out at an individual level, it also points to aquestion of broader societal relevance. As such, it is affected by threecritical variables: the evolving gap between the “real” and the “ideal”side of home, individuals’ latent but systematic tension to bridge it, andthe resources available for them to do so. Homing, then, amounts to theways of managing the variable distance between the real home conditionsand the aspired ones, in terms of emplaced familiarity, security and controlover one’s life circumstances.8 This tentative process of “gap-bridging” is


interactive and socially shaped, and assumes different contours over the lifecourse.

Graphically speaking, homing can be revisited as a relatively concen-trated or dispersed distribution of dots along three analytical continuums:home as a material, and/or immaterial entity; home as a proximity-basedcondition, and/or one cultivated and reproduced over a distance (forinstance, through migrants’ transnational ties with the countries of ori-gin); home as a private/domestic, and/or a public/extra-domestic experi-ence (Fig. 1.2). Inside the underlying biographic field, a shifting position(Home experience) can be traced, which stands for an individual’s everydayexperience as a situated way of managing the distance between real andideal home. This position signals the more or less effective attribution ofan evolving sense of home to one’s life circumstances. Of course, theposition is differentially affected by a number of external variables – herecursorily grouped as agency-related vs structure-related ones.

As a technical term, homing is nothing new. It is quite in use to describe“the process of determining the location of something, sometimes thesource of a transmission, and going to it”.10 This general meaning canhave more specific declinations in a variety of professional and disciplinaryrealms; most notably in biology, where homing refers to the trained ornatural ability of some animals, such as birds (e.g. homing pigeons), to findtheir ways back to an original location, moving across unfamiliar territoriesand over large distances. Not so dissimilar is, interestingly, “the desire forhome as a goal towards which people behave purposively” (Moore, 2000:

Assets

External Environment,Life Circumstances

Home

* HOMING as a value-laden combination of

− COGNITION (what home is like)

− PRACTICE (how home is made)− EMOTION (what home feels like)

HOMING*

Structure of opportunities

Assets

HOMING*

Structure of opportunities

Security ControlFamiliarity

Security ControlFamiliarity

Fig. 1.1 Homing at an individual level in the here-and-now9


212), which can be traced across literary, religious and epic traditions.Figures such as Moses, or Ulysses, are obvious cases in point. Wheneverhomewards mobility is revisited as a subject for social science, nonetheless,the location towards which people head is not necessarily fixed or immu-table. It need not even overlap with the home of origin.

Interestingly, even within social sciences the notion of homing hasalready been used with a variety of meanings. In cultural and diasporastudies, for instance, this concept seems to designate a future collectiveaspiration of return to an ancestral homeland (Brah, 2005). Elsewhere, forexample, in Fortier’s (2001: 409) account of Queers on the move, the samenotion entails an irremediably unaccomplished goal, or “an arrival that isalways deferred”. In still another sense, which resonates with the homepigeon metaphor, homing has been reframed as an “instinct” whereby allof us, as human beings, would be bound to a lifelong “quest to make a

Material H

H

H over a distance

Structure ofopportunitiesAssets

Private,domestic H

REALHOME

H in proximity

Immaterial H

life course

ASPIREDHOME

Public,extra-domestic H

Experience

Home

O M I N G

Fig. 1.2 Homing as a way of managing the distance between real and aspiredhomes in the biographical field


home for ourselves somewhere on earth” – whether an ascribed one, suchas “the womb, the cradle, the nursery, the parental home”, or any activelypursued home arrangement in the ensuing biographical developments(Ginsberg, 1999: 31). In this sense, phenomenologically speaking, “oursearch for home”, or “the need to make a home”, “is definitive of thehuman condition” (Jacobson, 2012: 178).

As fascinating as all of these metaphorical arguments are, they point tosomething other, and arguably less relevant to social research, than what Iam interested in, with particular respect to international migrants. Myconceptualization of homing has little of a future-oriented “ancestralreturn”, of a “deferred arrival” or, for that matter, of a simple “instinct”.What I propose to frame as homing, instead, is a range of spatialized socialpractices through which migrants – as exemplary of people who wentthrough extended detachment from their earlier homes – try to reproduce,reconstruct and possibly rebuild meaningful home-like settings, feelings andrelationships. Local and transnational aspects of the home experience, itsmaterial and emotional sides, as well as the practical and the imaginativeones, can all be comparatively revisited in this perspective. It is as if thebiographic fields depicted in Figs. 1.1 and 1.2, which are implicitly seden-tarized, were to be recast as biographically shifted, and diversified, by anextended experience of international migration.

In fact, the field of migrants’ homing is somehow to be traced anew.Building on the literature available, it is now time to chart their ways ofhoming as imagined, negotiated and enacted over space (Chap. 3) andtime (Chap. 4); eventually showing that, no matter how “individual” or“biographically embedded”, they also have major public and politicalimplications (Chap. 5). Prior to this, a methodological overview is neces-sary of the empirical research conducted so far (Chap. 2).

Being at home, phenomenologically, is a state of perceived insidednessand continuity. It may be more an ideal than a real condition, though, inthe life course of both sedentary and mobile people. What happens to thetension between the “real” and the “ideal”, in particular, once extendedmobility questions the ordinary spatial and temporal coordinates of home?And what do migrants’ life trajectories suggest about the possibility to re-construct home views, feelings and practices against new spatial andtemporal backgrounds? The promises and pitfalls of the transition fromhome (as a fixed place) to homing (as a life-long attempt at appropriatingnew ones) are worth more investigation. Migrants’ everyday life standsout, for better or worse, as an emerging research field to do so.


NOTES

1. The emergence of research centres, networks and journals with a specialfocus on home has been a remarkable development in the last decade.Content-wise, while an extended bibliography is out of the scope of thisbook, a reference can be made to at least some key studies of home “onscales ranging from the domestic to the diasporic” (Blunt, 2003: 72):Altman & Werner (1985); Benjamin & Stea (1995); Chapman & Hockey(1999); Morley (2000); Miller (2001a); Blunt & Dowling (2006);Duyvendak (2011); Smith (2012); Briganti & Mezei (2012); Kusenbach& Paulsen (2013). In terms of journal articles, major conceptual overviewsof home have been provided, from different disciplinary backgrounds, byDovey (1985); Lawrence (1987); Saunders & Williams (1988); Somerville(1997); Moore (2000); Chapman (2001); Fox (2002); Mallett (2004);Easthope (2004); and Jacobson (2009). Illuminating reflections can alsobe found in the works of major sociologists (most notably in Schutz’s[1945] Homecomer), philosophers (e.g. Heller, 1995) and anthropologists(e.g. Douglas [1991] on home as a socially organized Kind of space).

2. The category of migrant, here, broadly refers to people on the move fromhigh migration pressure countries. While highlighting home-related com-monalities and dilemmas across migration systems, my map includes onlysome preliminary notes on the home experience of specific categories such ashighly skilled migrants (cf. Nowicka, 2007; Butcher, 2010), migrant retur-nees (Markowitz & Stefansson, 2004; Ralph, 2009; Bivand, 2014), elderlymigrants (Meijering & Lager, 2014; Buffel, 2015; Walsh & Nare, 2016)and, in a longer-time perspective, migrant diasporas (Brah, 2005; Blunt &Bonnerjee, 2013). Most notably, my account cannot be exhaustive of thecomplex and emotionally laden home experience of asylum seekers andrefugees. Key contributions, in this case, include Black (2002); Korac(2009); Jansen & Lofvig (2009); Kabachnik et al. (2010); Brun (2012);H. Taylor (2015); Kissoon (2015); Donà (2015).

3. “Home is where one starts from”, from T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943).4. Exceptions include edited volumes such as Rapport & Dawson (1998a), Al-

Alì & Koser (2002a); and Ahmed et al. (2003a). See also, most recently, thecomparative study of Levin (2016).

5. See, however, Glick-Schiller & Fouron (2001); Espiritu (2003); Lam & Yeoh(2004); Brettell (2006); Wiles (2008); Ralph & Staeheli (2011); Liu (2014).

6. Besides this, a systematic analysis of the migration-home nexus has mean-ingful practical implications. Social cohesion, urban, welfare and integrationpolicies have much to gain from an in-depth understanding of migrants’ways of perceiving and experiencing home, compared with natives and non-migrants, in light of their respective assets and structures of opportunities.


7. Of course, the depiction of an isolated individual in Fig. 1.1 – whether a“sedentary” or a “mobile” one – is an oversimplification: individuals’ ways ofhoming are critically affected by, and interact with, those of their significantothers (primarily family members and friends), on a variety of scales.

8. At stake, then, is the gap between the real and the aspired shape of what anindividual or collective actor frames as home – in terms of a dwelling place(Clarke, 2001) and beyond. Of course, the gap may be irrelevant, orinexistent, whenever there is substantive overlap between the real and thedesired home.

9. I am indebted to my friend Mubi for the drawings in Figs. 1.1 and 1.2.10. From Wikipedia, last consulted on 10 October 2015.


CHAPTER 2

Researching Migrants’ Home

Abstract Home, as an object of research rather than just a backgroundto everyday life, raises interesting methodological challenges – even moreso for the experience of international migrants. This chapter providesan overview of the “what”, “why” and “how” of social research into it.A heuristic matrix for the study of home is advanced, by combining levelsof analysis (views, practices, settings) with conceptual dimensions (domes-ticity, materiality, spatiality, temporality). The promises and pitfalls of theprevalent methodological options are discussed, as well as the potential ofresearch via participatory and mixed methods, and in a comparative per-spective. While researching migrants’ home settings and relationshipsraises intricacies and dilemmas, it is critical to make sense of what homemeans to whom; to assess the prospects for achieving it; ultimately, tocounterbalance the prescriptive and ideological bases of the home dis-course with empirically grounded accounts.

Keywords Home � House � International migration � Homing � Socialresearch � Methodology � Biographical interviews � Ethnography

The semantic and emotional richness of the idea of home is a source offascination as much as of challenges. The latter include, along with con-ceptual over-inflation, the need to bring the dimensions of home down tothe field of empirical study. The conditions and options available to do


29

research on and into homes are not just a matter for methodologicalappendixes. Rather, they require extended elaboration, given the com-plexity of home as a social experience and the difficulties of gaining accessinto it. This is still more the case, whenever it overlaps with the home as aprivate setting; and, in the case of migrants, whenever home is dislocatedover multiple settings and assumes shifting bases in, and across, suchcontexts.

As a premise to investigate the nexus between migration and homefeelings, cultures and practices, this chapter takes stock of the relevantempirical research. Methodologically, some of this literature can beascribed to a quantitative realm, wherever feeling-at-home is operationa-lized and assessed through respondents’ self-reports, in the same vein asother subjective attributes such as sense of belonging or place attachment.Survey-based analyses have a clear merit in investigating the demographicsunderlying different attitudes and views of home. They enable hypotheseson the underlying social determinants, and comparison between migrantsand other groups of reference. Having said this, the bulk of research onhome in general, and on home and migration in particular, is made ofqualitative case studies. In-depth interviews and life stories on small num-bers of selected respondents are by far the most frequent solution. This issuitable to appreciate the core meanings and feelings associated with theidea of home, and their evolving construction across individual and familybiographies. An ethnographic option is often privileged, moreover, to getaccess to the material infrastructures underlying migrants’ homing pro-cesses, such as private domestic spaces. Importantly, these processes can bestudied on a local, a transnational and a multi-sited scale, and even on a“virtual” one.

Central to the concept of home, as argued in Chap. 1, is the interactionbetween the built environment and the subjective attribution of meaningsand emotions to it. In order to grasp this interaction, I will also discuss theprospects for alternative research tools on the subjective bases of migrants’domesticity. Less conventional approaches and techniques to be explored,and possibly combined within a participatory framework, include visualmethods, ethnographic go-alongs, home tours, as well as on-line ethno-graphies. More broadly, the current scope for triangulation and mixed-method research is to be critically assessed.

Migrants’ ways of thinking, feeling and making home, as embedded intheir everyday life experience, are ultimately a matter for empirical inves-tigation. Only on a case-by-case basis, with still unclear prospects for


generalization, can a researcher establish how far (if at all) a sense of homeis differentially achieved and emplaced by whom, and under what circum-stances. No necessary overlapping between emic and etic accounts abouthome should be expected; both “internal” and “external” views of homeand of its achievement should be appreciated, in light of the power (im)balances between the actors who articulate them. In any case, researchingmigrants’ homing raises additional challenges, primarily related to thediversity and the multi-sitedness of the home experience, which justifystronger research efforts than those made so far.

RESEARCHING INTO HOME: WHAT, WHY AND HOW

It is usual to remark, in the social science literature on home, that theprescriptive, principled, or just evocative accounts outweigh thosegrounded in fieldwork research. The latter, unlike the former, require asearch for original evidence on the actual ways of enacting a sense of homein everyday life. Of course, all sorts of views and feelings about home aresignificant, and make for a discursive and emotional field worth studyingin itself. However, social research on home – and on its interface withmigration – has a different purport. It fundamentally entails moving fromnaturalizing or unverified assumptions, “towards a context-sensitive focuson the experience and use of home” (Moore, 2000: 207). What qualifiessocial research is the focus on the experiential side of home, as an emplacedsocial relationship. In this sense, researching home is irreducible to adescription of its material backgrounds, or to a static and de-contextua-lized list of its (supposedly universal) meanings. Rather, it entails recon-structing, under specific spatial and temporal coordinates, what theindividual and socio-cultural meanings of home are; how they interactwith the built environment, and how far the latter shapes them; whataccounts for their variations within and between social categories andgroups. Through the accumulation of research findings, this can lead toa comparative framework of the determinants of temporal and spatialvariation in cognitions, emotions and practices of home across socialgroups.

So defined, the empirical study of home covers an extremely wide andheterogeneous research field. As a way of circumscribing it, three levels ofanalysis can be distinguished: home-related views, practices and settings. Tobegin with, social research into home involves the emotions, views, valuesand representations associated with it, on a micro- or a macro-scale, by a

2 RESEARCHING MIGRANTS’ HOME 31

variety of social actors. In the second place, at stake is the diverse set ofhome-making practices, or the attitudes and behaviours which mirrorindividuals’ and groups’ attempts to emplace a sense of home. Third,and intertwined with the previous domains, studying home entails study-ing the range of (built) environments and spatial settings on which a senseof home relies – from meaningful objects to dwellings and, potentially, allsorts of places, including those reproduced through virtual connections.

As argued above, the currency of home in the everyday discourse andexperience is ironically in contrast with the fragmented state of fieldwork-based knowledge about it. Nothing new (and little of an improvement) inthis sense, though. About thirty years ago, while outlining a new “researchagenda” on “the constitution of the home” out of the broader field ofhousing studies, Saunders and Williams (1988) made a similar point: ahuge gap exists between the wide discursive coverage of home in thepublic sphere, and the poor empirical knowledge of how the home experi-ence works out in practice, through dwellers’ everyday lives.

We know a lot about what different political and ideological interests say andbelieve about the home, but we know surprisingly little about how millionsof ordinary people . . . live the reality of the home . . . [and about] the rolethat the home now plays in people’s lives, and we have come to rely tooheavily on ideologically-charged theoretical assertions at the expense ofempirical evidence. (Saunders & Williams, 1998: 91)

A wealth of case studies on domesticity and home material cultures hasbeen done since (Miller, 2001a; Chapman, 2001; Briganti & Mezei,2012). However, not much progress has been made, in terms of a sys-tematic understanding of how home works at the intersection of views,practices and places. There is still a large gap between principled accountsand evidence-based analyses of the actual social life within the home, andof the home experience in general – even more so when it comes tomigrants and ethnic minorities. Moreover, domestic spaces need not bethe exclusive backdrop of the home experience. The study of homingpractices potentially involves a variety of contexts and settings, as long asone traces the attribution of a distinctive sense of security, familiarity andcontrol over them. Survey-style questions on people’s satisfaction withtheir residential circumstances, at a house or at a neighbourhood level, arepart of this “tracing” process, but do not suffice to accomplish it. Ofcourse, ethnographies of housing provide a step ahead in this sense


(Franklin, 2008; Ronald, 2011). The same holds for the long-standinganthropological tradition in ethnographies of the house (Bourdieu, 1970;Carsten & Hugh-Jones, 1995; Birdwell-Pheasant & Lawrence-Zúñiga,1999a). This may still be not enough, though, to understand home asan emplaced social experience.

After all, the gap between discursive centrality and scientific (relative)marginality has also to do with the real complexity of empirical research onhomes and home-making. Even if we were to limit this research field todwellings, we would have to face remarkable challenges. “The domesticsphere or the home”, as the inaugural Editorial of Home Cultures reads, is

[o]ne of the least understood and most methodologically challenging areasof human life, necessarily cut off from other spheres of interaction – who canreally know what goes one behind closed doors? (Buchli et al., 2004: 3)

While there are obvious issues of access and privacy to start with, thedifficulty of doing research on (the) home does not end there. Part ofthe problem is common to research on everyday social relationships andemotions, whenever they are investigated in phenomenological and situ-ated terms, rather than via self-reports. In the former sense, home “as anultimately experiential phenomenon . . . is difficult to prove” (Fox, 2002:21). One could even say that, in a strictly naturalistic sense, “data abouthome are not available: typically all one has is the house (or traces of it)”(Rapoport, 1995: 43). To put it still differently, the house can be easilyappreciated as a discrete research unit; (the) home, an “intangible con-cept”, far less so (Dovey, 1985: 34).

Nonetheless, the intricacy of such a specific and hard-to-access experi-ence is no reason to give up researching it, as long as a good case is madefor its social and societal significance. Why, ultimately, study home? Someresponses are called for, here, to prevent the “temptation” of studyinghome for its own sake. Such a stance, which creeps through the currentproliferation of literature on domesticity, does make sense in an intra-disciplinary optic. It does little, however, to enhance the connectionsbetween home and other research areas and traditions, including interna-tional migration.

Home matters, in my argument, not just because it is clearly out there(possibly: anywhere) as a discursive category, as a place, as an experience ofit. A case can also be made for social research on home to be critical tomajor debates across social sciences. Home, as observed in the previous


chapter, is a fundamental “building block of society” (Chapman, 2001:136): a mundane but invaluable venue to study, from the grassroots, thehousehold-based reproduction of power relationships and inequalities,and the attendant social representations along lines of gender, age, socialclass, ethnicity and so on. Home is also a unique site to study individuals’potential to appropriate social space (i.e. make it secure, familiar andcontrollable) and its variations within and between groups, as affected bymobility and societal diversification, among other factors.

Still more fundamentally, studying the home experience is necessary tounderstand the reliance of social relationships on distinctive material andphysical bases, as well as daily routines; and to empirically appreciate theagential, meso-level and structural drivers of the interaction between thephysical-material and the socio-emotional bases of human relationships.1

What makes research on home potentially of interest to a larger arena ofscholars, then, is the ongoing interdependence between the subjectiveviews and feelings associated with it, and its material and relational anchorsin everyday life. The intersection between relationality and materiality, theincrementality of home as an open-ended social process and the complex-ity of direct field involvement are what makes the social study of homeequally elusive and fascinating:

Home and its particular physical form are embodied with emotional, social,physical and symbolic significance through patterns of interaction overtime. . . . [this calls for] research on homes as integrated units of physical,psychological and temporal aspects. (Moore, 2000: 212 and ff.)

In order to pave the way for a systematic and emically sensitive study ofthese “integrated units”, and of the social relationships which constitutethem, a research matrix can be built around two axes (Table 2.1): first, theheuristic distinction between home views, practices and settings, to beappreciated in their mutual interactions; second, the variable configura-tions of domesticity, materiality, spatiality and temporality which emergein individuals’ homing – that is, in their evolving ways of constructing andemplacing a sense of home over the life course. Home, in this under-standing, is a matter of relative degrees, and an evolving balancing act,between the empirical manifestations of these variables.

In practice, home is enacted as (1) a process of domestication, hence ofdistinctive attribution of meanings to particular forms of domesticity, ininternal environments (e.g. dwellings) and/or external ones (e.g. [semi]


Table

2.1Doing

socialresearchon

home:levels

ofanalysis,conceptualdimensions,em

piricalfields

Conceptualdim

ensions:homeasa

shiftingbalance

between

...

Dom

esticityMateriality

SpatialityTem

porality

Externalto

builtenvironm

ent

Internaltobuiltenvironm

ent

Concrete

tangibleEmotional

relationalim

aginative

Inproxim

ityOver

distancePresent

Past/Future

Levels of analysisHomeviews=feelings

Feelingat

h.in

(semi)

publicspaces

Feelingat

h.in

dwellings

Explicit

identificationwith

aplace

orsettingas

h

Attribution

ofh.-likesense

oratm

osphereto

aplace

orsetting

View

ing/feeling

ash.

proximate

lifemilieus

View

ing/feeling

ash.

distantlife

milieus

(e.g.hom

eland)

View

ing/feeling

lifeconditionshere-and-now

ash.-like

Recollecting

views/feeling

ofh.tow

ardspast

Projectingthem

intothe

future

Homepractices

SharedsociabilityEthnic

orcivicengagem

ent

Family

lifeRoutines

ofsocialreproductionand

domestic

maintenance

Care

abouth.m

ilieus,em

otionalattachm

entto

kinand

significantothers

Everyday

lifein

domestic

andh.-like

spaces

Transnational

engagement

with

significantothers

leftbehind

Maintenance

ofdwellings

andother

h.-like

spaces

Maintenance

ofpast

homes

andcom

munities

Refurbishm

entor

housinginvestm

ent

Homesettings

Semi-

public,com

munal

andpublic

spacesconstructedas

h.-like

Dwellings

andhouses

constructedas

h.-like

Specificplaces

Objects,

picturesetc.

indom

esticspace

Everyday

lifespacesconstructed

ash.-like(routinization)

Far-away

spaces(from

micro

tomacro)

constructedas

h.-like

Placeswhere

onecurrently

feelsat

h.

Dwellings,places,

circumstances

towards

which

asense

ofh.isreconstructed,inthe

past,orprojected,in

thefuture


public spaces). Likewise, home is typically associated with some form of(2) materiality, ranging from bricks and mortar to minute and symboli-cally meaningful objects; however, it is qualified also – or even only – bydistinctive relational bases (e.g. caring and nurturing relationships withsignificant others), and by the emotional and imaginative energies elicitedby them. Furthermore, central to any home experience is the influence of(3) spatiality. This leads to investigate how home is experienced (only) as amatter of physical proximity, hence in co-present environments, or (also)through distant interactions, such as those between migrants and theirhomelands, depending also on the reach and accessibility of technologiesfor transnational communication (cf. Chap. 3). Last, the relevance of (4)temporality should also be appreciated: whether the primary focus of homeas a social experience is on the present (in practice, the current dwellingplace) or, rather, it is fundamentally oriented towards the past, and/or thefuture, which is not uncommon among migrants (cf. Chap. 4).

Peoples’ views, practices and settings about home can be fruitfullyanalysed and compared along these coordinates. For sure, how the cellsin Table. 2.1 are filled is an empirical matter – both regarding the specificresearch objects and the most viable methodological options. The issue isless with finding good instances (as for home-related discourses, practices,places etc.), than in assessing how effective the attendant home experienceis, in terms of emplaced security, familiarity and control, primarily to theeyes of those involved.

Against this background, the following sections aim to assess the state-of-the-art and the ways ahead of social research on home, drawing frommigration studies. What is specific of research on the home experienceunder conditions of mobility, diversity (of views, conceptions and prac-tices about it) and multi-sitedness (of its material and affective under-pinnings)? In order to address this question, my map shifts from theabstract rationales and social scientific grounds for researching home, tothe attendant methodological options and challenges.

RESEARCHING MIGRANTS’ HOME(S): THE ROLE OF PERSONAL

AND BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNTS

The prospects for social research on migrants’ home experience can behelpfully introduced in terms of spatiality and temporality – two keydimensions on which I elaborate in Chaps. 3 and 4. On the one hand,


the biographies of international migrants are paralleled with housing path-ways which straddle two (or more) countries, and with a sense of homethat is variably distributed between them. Given this premise, a multi-sitedapproach – in a material or at least in a metaphorical sense – is necessary tounderstand their homing practices, even when they result in an inability orimpossibility to attach a sense of home to any particular location. Aspatially sensitive lens, moreover, enables to appreciate the material waysof embodying home in particular contexts, so as to infer out of them howhome is experienced, rather than told about (Chapman, 2001).

On the other hand, temporally speaking, the research issue is, first, toinvestigate the simultaneity of migrants’ house and home experience,whatever their locations and their mutual tensions; second, to follow theshifting position and contents of home along their biographical andhousing trajectories. The lens of home, as I will show, is a powerfulnarrative elicitor for migrants to reconstruct their past life course andarticulate their aspirations, fears and concerns about the future.

From amethodological point of view, past research on themigration-homenexus falls into a continuum between a limited number of surveys – includingclose-ended questions on people’s views and practices of home – and amajority of qualitative case studies, based on some combination between in-depth interviews, life history collection and ethnography of everyday lifeenvironments and material cultures. Different research techniques are moreor less suitable and likely to be selected, depending on the specific aspects ofthe home experience under study. I will provide a brief overview of thepromises and pitfalls of these options, then discuss some alternatives andways ahead.

Single individuals, as well as families and larger social groups can all beappropriate units of analysis. At all of these levels there may be an issue ofcross-cultural relevance and variation in the meanings of home, dependingon its equivalents in different languages and on the underlying housingsystems and traditions (Ronald, 2011). This is to be kept in mind when-ever comparative research is done, although some exemplary reference tothe dwelling place – as a starting point for what is to be investigated –maysuffice to overcome this issue, particularly in qualitative research.

As long as “home” and “feeling at home” are considered amenable to somesort ofmeasurement, original surveys – distinct from the secondary data sets ofhousing research (Blunt &Dowling, 2006) – are an obvious solution to coverthem. After all, research on (reported) belonging, identification and placeattachment has extensively followed this line. A survey-style research option is


unique in retracing the demographics that are typically associated with differ-ent ways of conceiving, feeling and emplacing home, and possibly the relativeinfluence of gender, family status, age, social class, education, ethnicity and, ofcourse, (im)mobility. Besides these background data, specially devised ques-tionnaires can collect original information on respondents’ social networks, ontheir position in the life course, on their housing and (for migrants) integra-tion trajectories – all variables that also affect home-related views, emotions,cultures and practices.

Delving into the biographic circumstances underlying home views andfeelings is all the more urgent for international migrants, whose construc-tions of home can be assumed to be different – or anyway more mutable– compared with their sedentary counterparts. However, it is no coin-cidence that quantitative studies of the sense of home are particularly rareamong individuals with a migration background. Exceptions includestudies such as the one by Cuba and Hummon (1993) on place identityand the construction of a sense of home, based on a sample of internalmigrants in the US. By analysing the answers to questions such as “Doyou feel at home here?” and “Why do you feel at home here?”, theauthors provide an original framework of their respondents’ modes ofplace affiliation, affected by both their migration experience and lifecourse transitions.

Another instance, with a different migration target and national back-ground, is provided by Lam and Yeoh (2004). These authors explore theways of “negotiating ‘home’ and ‘national identity’” in a sample of highlyskilled Chinese-Malaysians in Singapore, through a multi-method studywhich includes a questionnaire survey. A question which was askedincludes, for instance, “Home is . . . ”, with the possible, mutually exclusiveanswers: “Social relations”, “Nostalgic memories”, “National identity”,“Practical issues”, “Others” (cit.: 150).

Similar research tools are invaluable in tracing the social, economic andcultural correlates of home views and feelings, and have a unique potentialfor comparison over space and time. They can even lead to understandindividuals’ home experience diachronically, possibly by connecting itwith their housing careers – whether in strict terms of longitudinal surveysor, more often, through retrospective questions.2 However, and unsur-prisingly, quantitative research tends to frame the notion of home innarrow and standardized ways. If we wish to appreciate what reasonspeople invoke for their ways of feeling at home, why they attach that


feeling to a setting rather than another and what they ultimately mean byhome, we need to move one step ahead.

The more straightforward way of doing so involves in-depth inter-views, with informants to be selected according to theoretically mean-ingful criteria, possibly combining the study of home with a broaderrange of topics. While one-shot interviews are the prevalent option,subsequent interview rounds over time, or follow-ups with the samerespondents, can increase the depth and reliability of this data source.Of course, even within this more flexible and open-ended format thereis nothing obvious in the prevalent meanings of home, in their corre-spondence with the everyday life of respondents, in the ways of phras-ing or exemplifying the idea of home. How should home-related viewsand emotions be addressed, or even elicited, through in-depthinterviews?

Instances of home-like episodes or settings may be of help. So is,potentially, the location of the interview in respondents’ dwelling places,or the use of particular objects as elicitors of emotions and recollections –even as props of home itself. Home maps, whether in a literal or ametaphorical sense, can also be helpful (e.g. Marte, 2007). As for theways of articulating questions, at its simplest it may be enough to ask“participants what place they called home and where they felt most athome” (Windsong, 2010: 211). More pragmatically, in spatially sensitivestudies, interviewees could be asked when they feel again at home, upontheir return to it from “far away” places. This may lead to grasp theperceived threshold between what is home and what is not. Likewise, inbiographically oriented research, questions can be made about “when they[interviewees] first referred to their lodgings as ‘home’” (Cieraad, 2010:90).

There is no paucity of case studies of migrants’ sense of home via semi-structured interviews. The most recent ones include Bivand (2014) on thenarrative ways of emplacing home among Poles and Pakistanis in Norway,in a broader study of their “return considerations”; Allen (2008) on theviews of home and the reported practices of home-making among internalmigrant households in the US; Gram-Hanssen and Bech-Danielsen(2012) on the meanings of home among immigrant families in a socialhousing environment in Denmark; Smith (2014) on the ways of concep-tualizing home of Polish newcomers to Ireland, and on their immigrationand housing pathways over time. All of these instances are telling aboutthe potential of home as a cognitive and emotional elicitor. Under suitable


circumstances, talking about home is also a way for interviewees to revisittheir past life trajectories, and somehow take stock of them.

Besides being relevant as a topic in itself, then, home can be an anchorfor reconstructing informants’ past biographies out of the sequence ofdwellings in which they took place. Likewise, references to the desiredhome(s) can orient the articulation of their aspirations, expectations andconcerns regarding the future. In short, in-depth narratives about homeare also meaningful ways of creating continuities “between memories ofpast home, present home situations and projections of future homes”(Cieraad, 2010).

In fact, once home is framed as “no longer a dwelling but the untoldstory of a life being lived” (Berger, 1984: 64), the centrality of a bio-graphic approach to its investigation becomes evident. Life histories areunrivalled in enabling the collection of data on migrants’ changing views,feelings and practices of home, in light of their past biographic andhousing trajectories (Gardner, 2002; Blunt, 2003; Blunt & Dowling,2006). A narrative-biographic approach is necessary to delve into themeanings attached to each of the places which make up residential careers.It is also critical to studying the temporality of the home experience: howshifting ideas of home evolve over the life course, and hence are amenableto be reconstructed via self-narratives. More specifically, for immigrants,the issue is how home-related views and emotions are linked to thetemporal engagement with migration and with their relocation in a dif-ferent context; how, moreover, the home experience changes between andacross generations.

Migrants’ biographic self-narratives, then, are essential to reconstructthe “temporal structuring” of their home experience. How far the (re)structuring can be effective, let alone rewarding, is a different question.Biographical studies of forced migrants, such as the one of Kabachnik et al.(2010) on Georgian internally displaced people, point to the widespreadperception of “home as a journey” over time, as the past “normal” homecondition – before war-driven displacement – is opposed to the present,provisional and ephemeral one.

To some extent, the distinction between in-depth interviews, bio-graphic narratives, life stories and histories is an academic one. It pointsto a continuum of degrees of biographical depth and reflexivity, ratherthan to clear-cut differences between them (Blunt & Dowling, 2006).Even so, there is something unique in the contribution of (auto)biogra-phical approaches (O’Neill et al., 2015) to the understanding of home


(Buitelaar & Stock, 2010). Whether at an individual level, at a family one,or potentially on larger scales, this approach is crucial to appreciate theinterdependence between the life (and migration) course and the residen-tial career; it enables to build a bridge between “housing and life courseevents” (Holland & Peace, 2012). At the same time, biographic interviewsenable people to “present themselves, connect past and future, self andother in relation to the environment” (Reinders & Van der Land, 2008:6). The environment itself can be illuminated through these biographicalaccounts. Drawing on the material and relational circumstances whichpeople associate with home, “autobiographies of place” can be written,which parallel “personal histories” (Moore, 2000: 212) – although theymay do so in fragmented and dispersed ways, for a number of internationalmigrants.

Given the significance of the material and environmental dimensions ofhome, in-depth interviews and life histories gain much from taking placein, or as close as possible to, the settings which research participants frameas home (Miller, 2001a); a particularly challenging requirement, though,in the case of international migrants. Furthermore, biographical interviewscan pave the way for more recurrent forms of “go-alongs” (Kusenbach,2003), or periodical follow-ups based on walks together in the everydaylife environments of research participants, such as domestic spaces andordinary “routes” between homes and shops, schools, job places and soon. This enriches the biographic information provided by the intervie-wees, as their accounts are matched with observation of their life routinesand of their attachment to material objects and built environments. Suchsettings are an invaluable source of situated and interactive data on homeas ordinary negotiation within meaningful spaces. And here, inevitably,enter ethnography.

RESEARCHING MIGRANTS’ HOME(S): DIRECT OBSERVATION

AND WAYS AHEAD

While migrants’ narratives about home are meaningful in themselves, theycan also be conducive to ethnographic engagement with the actual homecircumstances in which they are embedded. It is no coincidence thatethnography has been increasingly employed in housing studies, withseveral purposes, such as unpacking the domestic cultures underlying thebuilt environment, or exploring the spatial distribution and the social


boundaries of homes, as micro-expressions of broader social relationships(Ronald, 2011). At the very least, ethnography is unique in making senseof dwellers’ subjective experience (Franklin, 2008).

This necessarily leads to the study of home, which entails, ethno-graphically speaking, far more than an exploration of the overlap, ifany, between individuals’ reported actions and their effective practices(Atkinson, 2015). Central to participant observation are, rather, theprocesses whereby domestic and other meaningful settings are con-ceived, perceived and used as being “homely”. This is a particularlycomplex, elusive and crucial process for international migrants, asargued in the previous chapter. While special places are invariablycentral to this process, equally significant – and suitable to participantobservation – are the interpersonal relationships negotiated insidethem, as well as the routine, emotional and non-verbal dimensions ofhome-making practices.

Importantly, houses and the built environment are a significant objectof ethnography in itself (Gauvain & Altman, 1982; Saunders & Williams,1988; Levin & Finchner, 2010; Luken, 2012). Observing the externalside of migrants’ dwelling places, then, is not only a preliminary step forapproaching what may happen inside. More fundamentally, it is a way toappreciate the social functions and the forms of social organization embo-died by the architectural, stylistic and urbanistic features of a given house.Migrants’ “remittance houses” in the countries of origin are a case inpoint, on which several fascinating ethnographies have been done, asI show in Chap. 3.

However, the ethnographical study of homing does not entail only afocus on material environments, but also on the interpersonal relationshipsand emotions that make them home-like: that is, experienced as a source ofsecurity, familiarity and control for those who have ordinary access tothem. The research challenge lies in grasping, multi-sensorially, the grass-roots ways of appropriation of one or few places, opposite to all others. AsLawrence put it, with an apparently obvious reference to home interiors,

It is important not to ignore those personal, affective ties that each indivi-dual has with houses during his or her life. It is necessary, therefore, toexplore how specific spaces acquire differential values for members of thesame household and how these spaces are appropriated in diverse waysthrough the passage of time. To explore these themes, it is necessary . . . togo inside the dwelling (rather than discuss its external form), and consider


each resident’s viewpoint about the layout and use of interior spaces.(Lawrence, 1985: 118)

Of course, each home milieu should be appreciated in light of the patternsof resource distribution and inequality that make it more or less accessible,inclusive, or at least “decent”. Having said this, the significance of the waysof inhabiting should not go unnoticed. What is displayed in the home,where and why; how people differentiate functionally and symbolically itsinterior spaces (e.g. private vs semi-private and public areas, secular vsreligious ones etc.); how such spaces are differentially occupied, perceivedand experienced along gender and generational lines; what kind of mem-ories and emotions are displayed in public or private, and what specificrituals are performed at home or in public as a strategy of home-making –

on all these, and many other meaningful aspects of home as everyday socialpractice, little insight can be gained if not through ethnography (Gurney,1997; Miller, 2001a; Chevalier, 2012; Briganti & Mezei, 2012; Noble,2012; Van der Horst, 2012).

A “domestic ethnography”, therefore, involves a sensorial focus on theways of decorating home interiors (Lawrence, 1987), on the use ofdomestic objects and on the spatial organization of the home space.Domestic routines and practices of consumption are also worth investigat-ing. For international migrants, in particular, domestic interiors are poten-tially a venue for “materialization of belonging . . . in meaningful domesticobjects and practices” (Walsh, 2006); more generally, a unique setting tobe made familiar, protective and possibly reminiscent of past life experi-ences and homes (Gielis, 2011; Giorgi & Fasulo, 2013). Through domes-tic settings, meaningful traces can be charted about dwellers’ desires anddreams for future improvement – those “aspirational ‘ideal homes’”,expressed in the ways of decorating and using the present home environ-ment (Miller, 2001b: 7; cf. Clarke, 2001). Parallel forms of home-makingcan however take place, at least as purposeful attempts, even in moreprecarious and temporary settings, including provisional shelters andhomeless-like arrangements. Similar settings are critical to make sense ofthe home experience through its weakness or substantive absence(Klodawsky, 2012).

Having said this, home interiors are not the exclusive field forresearch on home-making – even less so for international migrants. Atleast “rudimentary forms” of it occur wherever “we put forth owner-ship claims, however minimal and temporary, over a sliver of place”


(Kusenbach & Paulsen, 2013: 12). It follows that participant observa-tion should also encompass public and semi-public spaces (Duyvendak,2011), as backgrounds for immigrants’ forms of gathering, leisure andjoint sociability, which may facilitate a shared and situated sense ofhome (e.g. Law, 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2015). A fine-grainedunderstanding of migrants’ homing, then, involves also their prospectsto use and appropriate urban environments such as squares, parks,markets, squatting areas (Giorgi & Fasulo, 2013), potentially makingthem a source of derived domesticity; a channel for recreating mean-ingful traces of the past home experience; possibly, a lever for claims-making and mobilization. Observing these informal urban spaces isparticularly critical to see how migrants’ home-making is perceivedand coped with by native inhabitants and local groups. This is a casein point of the potential for contention, and even intergroup conflicts,that is latent in migrants’ search for home (Chap. 5).

Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-based virtualspaces should also be explored as a channel for homing practices – aslong as their ethnographic study is embedded in the material living con-ditions of those involved and in the inequalities underlying their use.Personal communication technologies such as Skype, for instance, arepivotal to the reproduction of a shared sense of home between migrantsand left-behind kin (Madianou & Miller, 2012). Likewise, web commu-nities, social media and so on can be tools for recreating meaningfuldimensions of the (past) home experience. More generally, the study ofmigrants’ engagement with ICTs is crucial to assess the potential of theirhome-making as a transnational, at least in part de-materialized effort (see,for instance, on transnational family life and “distant co-presence”,Baldassar et al., 2016; Madianou, 2016). Migration-driven ways andchannels of circulating home ideas and practices – whether through virtualcommunication, material object circulation, or human mobility – arethemselves a major focus for research and methodological elaboration,hence a question ahead for refining the home-migration nexus (see, forinstance, Gallo, 2013).

The methodological options briefly presented so far are not exhaustiveof the field, and need not be mutually exclusive. Instead, they can becombined – depending on the research questions and on the resourcesavailable – in terms of mixed methods, stepwise research designs, colla-borative projects and so forth (for a theoretical overview in migrationstudies: Fitzgerald, 2006). More creative and interactive research tools


can also be used, and combined, to collect home-relevant narrative andobservational data.

In the first place, a variety of visual and participatory techniques can beapplied, with a view to providing a documental background or, moreambitiously, to elicit home-related information, meanings, memories,even “ways of seeing” (Ortega-Alcazár, 2012). The key point, here, isthat “representations and constructions of home” entail a multi-sensorialexperience which is not fully reducible to oral or written descriptions; andthat, for the same reasons, collecting respondents’ own constructions ofwhat is home-like or not calls for a significant degree of personal involve-ment from their side.3

The tools that have been fruitfully employed with immigrant partici-pants include home-related drawings (Levin & Fincher, 2010) and pic-tures (e.g. Sandu, 2013) concerning their current dwellings or those of thepast, or even to portray anything which makes them feel at home or not(Sirriyeh, 2010). Another ambitious option involves filming domesticroutines over time (Arnold et al., 2012; Ochs & Kremer-Sadlik, 2013).This makes for a domestic ethnography which, while micro in scale, wouldrely on remarkably long time-spans of observation. Of course, such anoption may raise major problems in terms of access into the home,extended permanence in it and rapport with dwellers. However, it wouldbe an ideal solution to practically appreciate migrants’ changing ways ofre-making home and cultivating it, in the broader frame of their trajec-tories of integration and transnational engagement. At another level, butstill in a participatory frame, “personal diaries and reports of daily house-hold life” (Lawrence, 1985: 129) are worth testing – possibly by combin-ing written and video-recorded reports (Saxbe & Repetti, 2010), or video-tours and audio-tours (Giorgi & Fasulo, 2013).

Whatever the methodological choice, there is still much need for more“ethnographic encounters that [take] place behind the closed doors ofdomestic home” (Miller, 2001b: 1), and in home-like spaces at large.Concerns about access, trust-building, intrusiveness and even legitimacy inthe first place are all well founded. From an artistic point of view, BenteHamer’s movie Kitchen Stories (2003) has provided a particularly vivid andprovocative account in the regard. However, this is no justification to giveup looking for appropriate ways of doing ethnography of, that is, in home.There is enough to be gained, out of it, to warrant further reflection andexperimentation. A range of research options can be mentioned and furtherrefined in this sense – from ethnographic visits in migrants’ homes (e.g.


Mack, 2004; Pechurina, 2014), to specially devised home tours (Tolia-Kelly, 2004; Saxbe & Repetti, 2010) and more extended live-in ethnogra-phies which so far have been remarkably rare. In fact, moving from one-shotforms of “video ethnography” (e.g. Pink, 2004) to more extended ethno-graphic stays is arguably the key methodological challenge ahead.4

Overall, as my overview suggests, the future research agenda onmigrants’ home experience should prioritize two concerns: on the onehand, the refinement of fine-grained, sensory ethnographies of homingrelationships as enacted in practice, through everyday social reproduction,rather than only talked, or dreamt, about; on the other hand, the develop-ment of international and comparative research on migrants’ housing andhome-related views and practices, ideally with mixed-method and long-itudinally oriented techniques. This dual transition is critical to movebeyond the logic of singular case studies, towards a systematic comparisonbetween different material forms of the home experience across spaces;diverging or converging homing trajectories over time; variable ways ofdiffusion of home ideas, values and practices, as related to internationalmigration. Across these research prospects, awareness should be enhanced,first, of the need for parallel and simultaneous research on migrants andtheir sedentary counterparts (be they natives/long residents, or left-behindsignificant others); second, of the ways in which the same person can attacha sense of home towards different spatial settings, and even different coun-tries – although more intermittently, perhaps, than the most celebratoryaccounts of transnationalism would suggest.

Having summed up the methodological challenges, prospects and dilem-mas in researching the migration-home nexus, it is time to discuss its sub-stantive bases. I will do so by developing a spatial understanding of migrants’home experience in Chap. 3, and a temporally oriented view of it in Chap. 4.

NOTES

1. This argument, which mirrors my own background as a sociologist, is by nomeans an exhaustive one. From other disciplinary angles, other questionscan be focused, which also speak to broader debates in social sciences (see,for instance, within environmental psychology, the recent contribution ofGraham et al., 2015). The point is to appreciate that the social study ofhome, while bearing also on the study of houses (itself a rich and fascinatingresearch field), is fundamentally autonomous, and reaches beyond the latter.


2. See, for instance, Murdie (2002) on Polish and Somali newcomers inToronto.

3. Action-research projects conducted along these lines include, in Londonalone, the Finding a way home study of youth’s constructions of (un)safeand refuge areas, based on their own photographs, videos, maps, as well as“audio diaries” and interviews (Back, 2007); and more recently, the colla-borative projectCreating Hackney as a home, aimed to investigate the “senseof home and belonging” of young people in an “emblematic” Londonborough, again building on participatory and visual methodologies(Butcher & Dickens, 2015).

4. For sure, this cursory methodological overview is far from exhaustive.Further options include content and semiotic analysis of the discoursesand visual representations produced around home (cf. Kusenbach &Paulsen, 2013), not to mention the abundant literature on (the) homeacross humanities, and beyond. Furthermore, the biographical andreflexive dimension which is activated by the notion of home can alsobe appreciated in life writings (Blunt & Dowling, 2006), includingauto-ethnographies (Alsop, 2002). See also Blunt (2008) for a particu-larly rich ethnographic approach to the multiple locations of home.


CHAPTER 3

Migration and Home over Space

Abstract Migrants’ ways of homing, in a spatial perspective, can primarilyrely on one physical location, on more than one, or on the evolving interac-tion between different settings and places. Such a perspective entails threeanalytical foci: the variable degrees of “portability” and “reproducibility” ofhome as a social relationship with place, and the factors that account for this;the persistentmateriality of home, embodied inmigrants’ dwelling places intheir countries of settlement and of origin, to be studied in light of theirmanifold functions and meanings; the micro/macro scale(s) of the homeexperience, together with the boundary-making processes associated with itslocation and spatial distribution in migrant everyday life.

Keywords Home � Space � Place �Homing � Portability �Migrant houses �Materiality � Private � Public

The reliance of the home experience on space and place – or rather, onthe transition from undifferentiated space to a specific and meaningfulplace – is a typical starting point for analysis (Douglas, 1991). Whetherthat place need correspond to one specific and fixed location, though, isincreasingly less clear. Following the argument in the previous chapters,home can be better understood as a processual and interactive experi-ence, which is shaped by the potential for social and affective appropria-tion of space. Migrant’s life circumstances are exemplary of such a


49

dynamic and multi-sited experience of home – and, as importantly, ofthe major constraints that stand in the way of its accomplishment.

This chapter analyses migrants’ ways of homing through a spatial lens,by classifying the different geographical locations, and the variety ofphysical infrastructures, which labour migrants construct as home(s) orproxies of it. Their present dwelling places, and those they tend to retain inthe countries of origin, are their primary but not exclusive sources ofdomesticity and of the attendant emotions, aspirations and dilemmas. Asthe debate on diasporas and transnationalism shows, the myriad forms ofconnectedness between sending and receiving countries can also be con-ducive to migrants’ homing processes. At the same time, several casestudies have highlighted migrants’ need to keep anchoring their sense ofhome to some fixed or at least material basis, rather than cultivating homeas an indefinitely fluid or de-territorialized postmodern entity.

Revisiting the spatial foundations of migrants’ home experience isnecessary to appreciate, first, their housing conditions in the broadereconomy of their processes of settlement; second, and symmetrically, the“remittance houses” in the countries of origin, as a mirror of their home-ward attachments and transnationally oriented life projects. In either con-text, their housing careers and pathways are also worth analysing. Havingpoor or no dwelling assets “here” or “there” is an important, if non-exhaustive indicator of broader processes of exclusion or marginality –

and/or of detachment, as far as home societies are concerned.Ultimately, migrants’ sense of home can be attached to different points of

reference and enacted on several scales – from themicro-level of the individualbody to the household and kinship groups and networks, to larger entitiessuch as neighbourhoods, cities, nations and beyond. Whether the focus is onthe dwelling place or on other forms and scales of attachment, what makes adifference to home is the specialty of a personal relationship with one ormore external environments. Such a special relationship has strong material,even territorial bases, to be empirically studied in all the relevant settings (andstages – see Chap. 4) of a migration flow.

IS HOME PORTABLE? DISPLACEMENT AND PLACE-MAKING

IN THE MIGRANT EXPERIENCE

If home is, “first and foremost, a special kind of place” (Easthope, 2004: 135),making sense of place is necessary to gain a better understanding of homeitself. Following the definition of Gieryn (2000: 464–465), the conceptual


domain of place includes all sorts of spatial overlaps between three variables:geographic location, material form and investment with meaning and value. Inthis sense, home is a particularly meaningful and intimate form of place; one,however, whose meaningfulness is analytically clearer (if empirically moreelusive) than the localization and the materiality. Once home is reframed asan evolving social experience, and particularly when it involves mobile ordisplaced people, it is exemplary of the lures and pitfalls of place-making.This notion, as described in Chap. 1, stands for all the processes throughwhich place is invested with specific and distinctive subjective connotations(Gieryn, 2000; Korac, 2009).

As a form of place-making, however, home does not necessarily apply toone and the same location over time. Rather, it can be more or lesssuccessfully reconstructed against different geographical and materialbackgrounds, parallel to the development of migration and to the lifecourse of migrants themselves. As such, migrants’ home experience is apromising research field on the social production of place as a materiallyanchored but multi-sited and open-ended process. Central to (migrants’)homing are the ways of attaching meaning to particular places, the scopeto “remove” such meanings and transfer them elsewhere, and the oppor-tunities available to re-enact forms of place-making in radically new lifecircumstances (Massey, 1992; Mallett, 2004).

The central questions for this chapter, and for the following one, canthen be articulated as follows: What of the home experience – “as opposedto the financial asset and physical structure of the house” (Fox, 2007: 216)– can be displaced and re-emplaced over space, as well as inherited andreproduced over time? How long and far can home be “spatiallyextended” (Ralph & Staeheli, 2011) or re-created anew, and how do itsretention and re-creation interact with each other in migrant everydaylives?

Historically, writes Agnes Heller,

[I]f the privileged place [i.e. the home] was destroyed by war or a naturalcatastrophe, or if necessity or curiosity compelled a group to abandon it forgood, the spirit of the ancient home was normally carried on the back of thecommunity. (Heller, 1995: 2–3)

Heller’s remark bears a fascinating resemblance with Marc Chagall’sRemembrance (Erinnerung, 1914), the gouache portray of an old manwho wanders away, bearing on the shoulders a tiny copy of his own house,

3 MIGRATION AND HOME OVER SPACE 51

with a woman waiting on the doorway. Under the present circumstances,following this dual metaphor, what of their home(s) can migrants carry ontheir back, symbolically or even literally? In order to address these ques-tions, some more academic remarks are in order on the portability and (re)producibility of home as a social experience.

Portability refers, first, to the potential to retain a meaningful sense ofhome, away from the physical milieus that used to underpin it, as a resultof extended mobility; second, to the ability to reattach it to one, or more,new life environments. Of course, different dimensions of the homeexperience – material or otherwise – are more or less portable for differentmobile people, depending also on the resources available to them. The keypoint, anyway, lies in the possibility to de-link the sense of home fromspecific and fixed places or, at least, to shift it between them.Reproducibility,in turn, points to the variable attitudes and abilities of mobile (or displaced)people to reproduce some traits of their past home experience, even whilethey face new life environments to which they are expected to adjust overtime. Both processes are critically affected by the possibility to retain therelational bases of the past home experience (Allen, 2008) – hence tocultivate thick transnational relationships with left-behinds, and/or to facil-itate family reunification, over time.

Importantly, migrants’ home reproduction does not entail only gainingaccess to a dwelling place. It also requires some cultural and emotionalretention of past, home and homeland, through everyday mundane prac-tices such as the use of the native language, the ways of eating or dressing,and sociability and consumption at large (Hage, 1997). The issue forempirical analysis, then, is what home-related feelings and practices areretained and reproduced through migrants’ transnational connections,and through everyday interactions in the receiving society; what theiropportunities and interests are to (re)attach a sense of home to the newsocial milieus and to the underlying built environment; what of migrants’home experience is perceived as missing or defective, compared with theirmemories (about the past) and aspirations (for the future); ultimately, howmigrants’ views and expectations about home are affected by their new lifecircumstances and affect, in turn, the prevailing home cultures in receivingsocieties and the pre-existing ones in the countries of origin.

However, the scope for migrants to re-create their past home experi-ence is not affected exclusively by the factors mentioned above, or by thedegree of openness of receiving societies. Besides this, it is shaped by theinteraction between the views and cultures of home which they inherit


from the communities of origin, and the predominant ones in the localesof settlement. At stake are their customary ways of doing things accordingto a certain model of home, and their predominant frames of homewardsidentification (or “mental geographies” of home [Reinders & van derLand, 2008]) – whether centred on households, ethnic, religious orlanguage groups, local communities, nation states and so on.

In other words, migrants’ reproduction of the past home experiencedepends also on the scope to retain the underlying cognitive schemata andexpected patterns of behaviour. Being able to reproduce them, as long asthey are willing to, means also being able to re-assert their collectiveidentities and cultural backgrounds. However, these implicit standardsneed not tally with those of the country of settlement. How distant theyare from each other, and how far migrants bridge the gap between the pastand present sense of home, are issues that critically affect their chances to“construct a sense of home” towards the new life circumstances (Cuba &Hummon, 1993: 551).

As the available research suggests, migrants’ past home cultures tend tobe relatively durable. No generalization can be made, though, on theirpropensity to reproduce them, on the space available to do so, on theireventual “acculturation” between old and new home traits (cf. Berry,1997). As Wiles (2008) remarks, building on her case study of NewZealander newcomers in London,

[H]ome and the idea of home structure the experience of migration. Whetherthey [immigrant newcomers] resist or embrace these representations, dis-cursive and material aspects of New Zealand as home form a framework foreveryday life as migrants living in London. They are a way of establishing theself and the group, of establishing a sense of belonging and of demarcatingwho belongs and who is excluded. (Wiles, 2008: 177)

Having said this, the prospects for migrants to reproduce their past homeexperience are also affected by the interaction between the material andthe immaterial bases of it. Following a sociological understanding ofglobalization as an unprecedented mode of “disembedding” social rela-tionships from physical proximity (Giddens, 1990), a case could be madefor home – as a particular kind of social relationship – to be stretchableover space and across state boundaries (Massey, 1992). This, however,need not entail that the home experience would be totally de-linked fromplace, up to the extreme that no single place can be called home, or that


mobility itself is a source of home feelings and attachments (as in theargument of Rapport & Dawson, 1998b, among others). The core issuedoes not seem to be a simple re-framing of home as a matter of routesrather than roots. Instead, the argument is that a meaningful sense of homecan be simultaneously re-attached to, and “re-materialized” (Jacobs &Smith, 2008) through, a variety of locations across space.

Several case studies have highlighted that mobile people do cultivatea sense of home with a degree of freedom from the location in whichthey are settled. This is most obviously the case, as long as their homeexperience relies on meaningful social relationships and living environ-ments, including material objects that reproduce their tastes and lifestyles (Tolia-Kelly, 2004; Nowicka, 2007; Noble, 2012). Some poten-tial for home-making through micro-practices of “objectification”, orof positive interaction with the material features of a dwelling space,can be appreciated even in un-homely environments such as receptioncentres for asylum seekers (Van der Horst, 2004; Brun, 2012), orurban squats (Giorgi & Fasulo, 2013). And even in similar circum-stances, the re-attachment of a basic sense of home to a place isinformed by the home cultures that people bring from the past – asfor the ways of using domestic space, the meanings and functions ofdomestic objects and the implicit views of what a “proper home”should look like.

Overall, though, the empirical evidence available recommends cautionon the possibility to successfully reproduce a sense of home withoutdistinctive geographical and material bases (Butcher, 2010). This parti-cularly holds for the bulk of “ordinary” labour migrants, with relativelylimited resources to pursue intensive mobility and transnational connect-edness. What research does suggest is a prevalence of fixed, even seden-tarist identifications with particular places, and an equally stubbornpersistence of materialized home experiences of all sorts. Broadly speak-ing, migrants’ homing is marked less by de-territorialization than by theextended attempt to re-attach a sense of home to very specific places,whatever the spatial location. Their home experience can be well appre-ciated as exemplary of “places . . . as particular nodal points within acomplex web of social interactions which stretch around the world”(Easthope, 2004: 21: 3). Nonetheless, there is nothing random in thedistribution of such nodal points. Their geographical localization andmaterial embodiments are part and parcel of their subjective and bio-graphic significance.


At the very least, then, the potential for home portability – or forgeographical “promiscuity” rather than “monogamy” (Heller, 1995) –

should be appreciated as an unequally distributed asset, which mirrors, inturn, broader geographies of power and unequal social and civic stratifica-tion. It is critical to examine on which resources migrants draw, and withwhat structure of opportunities they interact, as they “negotiate theextensibility and fixity of home” (Ralph & Staeheli, 2011: 520).Migrants’ homing pathways are shaped by several forms of inequality.These are also crystallized in their houses and dwelling places as anindicator, however imperfect, of their position and assets vis-à-vis sendingand receiving societies.

STILL IMMOBILE: MIGRANT HOUSES AS MARKERS

OF ACHIEVEMENT, OR LACK THEREOF

The patterns of civic and social stratification that emerge within immigrantpopulations, despite their predominantly “downward” distribution, canalso be appreciated from their housing conditions. If localization andmateriality are still critical to the home experience, there is hardly a topicmore central to the migration-home nexus than houses and dwellingplaces. Migrants’ housing arrangements in sending and receiving societiesare like two sides of the same “biographic coin”, although their interface iselusive and complex.

Much ethnographic research on migrants’ transnational family lifepoints to a large gap between their dwelling conditions in the countriesof settlement and those that their houses “at home” would afford.Generally speaking, an inverse relationship can be traced betweenmigrants’ housing conditions and the average standards of their countriesof reference – migrants’ houses being poorer in richer countries (i.e. thoseof destination), and richer in poorer countries (those of origin). In otherwords, migrants’ dwelling places are a tangible indicator of theirdifferential position in the social hierarchies “here” and “there”. Theyare the most visible embodiment of their displaced and inconsistent socialstatus (Nieswand, 2013) and, indeed, of the paradox of migration, as aconstellation of biographic attempts to bridge a large gap in living stan-dards, without necessarily questioning the conditions that perpetuate it.

By definition, international migration is an extended form of residentialmobility – hence, a major turning point in the dwelling histories of thoseinvolved in it. Borrowing from housing studies, immigrants’ life trajectories


can be revisited as housing careers and pathways, however complex, frag-mented and irreducible to one single pattern (Ozuekren & van Kempen,2002; Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Abramsson, 2012). What is unique inmigration-driven housing trajectories, though, is the coexistence betweenseveral housing contexts that may be equally invested with fundamentalmeanings and functions. Migrants’ housing careers are particularly hard tomeasure and compare with those of their “sedentary” counterparts, in lightof the tangle of housing-related views, values, and practices which is con-stitutive of them.

On the side of receiving societies, immigrant access to housing is first ofall a matter of livelihood, and then a condition for long-term integration.Such a concept, here, can simply be assumed as a gradual loss of salience inethno-racial markers of social relationships – similar to a revised under-standing of the old-fashioned concept of assimilation. In fact, “applied tothe housing market, assimilation can also be seen as the declining differ-ence between ethnic groups in terms of quality of dwellings, quality ofneighbourhoods, and access to homeownership” (Bolt, 2012: 109). Ofcourse, this is a long-term and open-ended process, which differentiallyinvolves different profiles within immigrant and ethnic minorities. In anycase, central to the social condition of immigrant newcomers is, first of all,the search for some housing protection within their new residential envir-onment. This process typically faces stronger barriers in the housingmarket and results in poorer housing conditions, related to their nativecounterparts (see, for instance, on Europe, CECODHAS, 2007; Doherty,2012). Furthermore, migrants’ housing career need not be unidirectionaland cumulative. It may be fragmented, even reversible, depending on theirbroader patterns of integration and on the intersection with family life andother life course events (e.g. family reunification, child birth, marriage orseparation etc.).

A number of case studies exist on immigrant’s access to the housingmarket, and on their housing experiences at large, particularly in urbanneighbourhoods. Relevant research topics include immigrant segregation,its societal determinants and its consequences over time, including thedubious results of social mix policies (Bolt et al., 2010; Peach, 2012); theaccessibility and distribution of home ownership, its sustainability andthe subjective meanings attached to it (Constant et al., 2009; Bolt,2012); the over-exposure to poor housing arrangements and to home-lessness, whether among immigrant newcomers or long-settled minorities(Somerville & Steele, 2002; Edgar et al., 2004); the involvement of


immigrant and ethnic minority groups in squatting and informal settle-ment-building, as well as in housing-related mobilization and claims-making (e.g. Glynn, 2005; Dedieu & Mbodj-Pouye, 2016).

At all of these levels, a suitably in-depth analysis should account for thebroader housing, home ownership and welfare regimes across receivingsocieties (Arbaci, 2007; Ronald & Elsinga, 2012). Here, nonetheless, it isenough to emphasize that migrants’ housing conditions are affected byseveral factors at the same time. National and local specificities are asimportant as the internal differentiation between and within immigrantgroups in terms of legal status, length of stay, ethno-national back-grounds, patterns of labour market participation, household configura-tion, age and gender distribution.

Having said this, revisiting migrants’ housing question through a homelens entails one step further into the subjective side of it – the evolving setof cognitions, emotions and social practices that parallel migration-relatedhousing careers. What kind of relationships do immigrants cultivate withtheir dwelling places and built environments in general? How far andunder what conditions are such relationships home-like, that is based onan attribution of security, familiarity and control to a given housingarrangement?

There is nothing obvious or generalized in the transition from house tohome, whether in terms of housing infrastructural quality or of subjectivesatisfaction with it (Lawrence, 1987; Gram-Hanssen & Bech-Danielsen,2012; Cancellieri, 2015). The ultimate construction of one’s place asmore or less home-like, on the continuum between a simple shelter, aprovisional accommodation and a permanent dwelling, is a time-sensitiverelational process. The ways of decorating and furbishing dwellings, as anindicator of “home improvement aspirations”, are a promising field forinvestigating this empirically (Clarke, 2001). In the case of migrants, theemplacement of home into a particular dwelling is affected also by theirbroader processes of acculturation and integration. As important is theirinterface with the communities of origin, as well as the future orientationof their life trajectories. On all of these questions, the study of emigranthouses – the other side of the coin – is a source of major insights.

A very large, if scattered and little systematized literature is available onmigrants’ new or refurbished houses in the countries of origin, as enabledby their transnational housing investments.1 To my knowledge, no aggre-gate figures are available on the distinctive contribution of emigrants tothe housing markets in their homelands, or on its correlation with their


demographics, or with their patterns of integration abroad. While thebuilding of new or better houses is clearly a self-selective process, since itis remittance-driven, a wealth of case studies point to its relevance acrosslabour migration systems – as a material achievement, or even only as awidespread and socially legitimized aspiration. In a nutshell, remittancehouses are the most tangible and elusive manifestation of migrants’ home-making.

It is common to find out, in fieldwork accounts from migrants’ coun-tries of origin, mentions and pictures of their often out-of-scale newhouses. While these buildings tend to stand out from the surroundinghousing landscapes, there would be hardly a more paternalist and lessinsightful stance than approaching them only as “conspicuous consump-tion”. In fact, emigrant houses – whether actually built, or just started upand left unfinished – are an extraordinary kaleidoscope on migrants’ evol-ving relations with the communities of origin. They are also a majorinstance of double construction of places for migrants themselves: they arephysically built, or refurbished, as much as “interpreted, narrated, per-ceived, felt, understood, and imagined” (Gieryn, 2000). The latter pro-cesses occur both from afar, through migrants’ virtual connectedness (andthe mediation of left-behinds), and in proximity, upon home visits (orafter return migration). Furthermore, migrants’ houses facilitate the culti-vation of a sense of home which connects their past experience with theirfuture-related aspirations (Cieraad, 2010), whereas their present housingcondition tends to be framed as a short-term transition. Major sacrifices inthe here-and-now are justified in light of future achievements, projectedtowards their houses “back home” (Boccagni, 2016).

Remittance houses perform key social functions – the protection ofmigrants’ significant others left behind and the security to still have a placeto return, sooner or later – as well as economic ones, related to theinvestment of savings and to intergenerational wealth transmission.There is nothing different, in this, to the basic functions of home owner-ship among “sedentary” people (Ronald, 2011). At the same time, lessstrictly functional factors also affect the development and use of these newhouses, which tend to be larger, of different design and of better buildingmaterials than the pre-existing ones. Some striking commonalities can befound, along broad coordinates of greater “modernity”, across the casestudies conducted on an almost global scale. It is worth expanding onthem, keeping in mind that we still miss a broader analytical framework,aside from two anthropological points: the powerful symbolic dimension


that is potentially inherent in all houses, as sources of identity, memoryand temporal continuity, even while their dwellers are absent; and theexistence of major cross-cultural variations in the expected relationshipbetween a dwelling place and its inhabitants, and in the interface betweenany house and the surrounding urban or rural fabric (Carsten & Hugh-Jones, 1995; Birdwell-Pheasant & Lawrence-Zúñiga, 1999a; 1999b;Carsten, 2004).

It is not infrequent to encounter, in the public discourse of migrants’communities of origin, stigmatizing representations of remittance housesas displays of luxurious consumption, emulations of architectural stylesand standards that are alien to the local environment, or, at the very least,quintessential symbols of a nouveaux-rich population (e.g. Klaufus, 2006,on Ecuador). Even leaving all of this aside, migrants’ houses are indeed aremarkable source of paradoxes. At one and the same time, they demon-strate migrants’ upwards mobility (or at least the aspiration to it), and theirsocial embeddedness in the status quo of their communities. Migrants’individual or family improvements come together with the persistence ofhome communities as frame of reference and term of comparison (Gallo,2013). Furthermore, a major tension exists, first, between the aspiration tobuild new houses and their materialization as fully developed artefacts,rather than half-finished buildings; second, between the expectations thatthey turn soon into migrants’ own dwellings, and the “discovery” that –with the exceptions of returnees or circular migrants – they will keep beingalien to, and physically afar from, those who own them and regard them astheir homes (Boccagni, 2014a).

To be sure, migrants’ investments in larger or better houses, which maybe left empty most of the time, are also driven by reasons of social statusmaintenance. Such houses are the most visible embodiment of migrants’persistent affiliation and belonging to their communities of origin, whiletentatively displaying their affluence – or at least, their better social position– as a result of migration. As Mata-Codesal (2014: 274) puts it, remittancehouses embody a “three-folded upward residential mobility in terms ofindependence, size and location”. Ironically, though, it is on the continuousphysical mobility of their owners that this housing success relies (López,2010). And even once emigrants are back, residential mobility in itself is noguarantee of social mobility to come along. While the house façades mayconvey a message of success, their physical and symbolic backgrounds donot necessarily correspond to a better achievement indeed. At the very least,though, remittance houses do embody homewards claims for both social


membership and social distinctiveness, thus suggesting that the future lifeprojects of first-generation migrants remain persistently, if sometimes elu-sively, home-oriented. In a nutshell, they are the most tangible and visibleform of presence of the absent ones (Fletcher, 1999; Dalakoglou, 2010;Bivand, 2012).

Having said this, there are several questions on which a more systematicobservation of migrants’ houses – still better, of the everyday ways of usingthem – would provide fresh food for thought. Three of them are wortharticulating here, to pave the way for more empirical and comparativeresearch.

First, these houses may contribute to transform the surroundingurban or rural built environment, and landscapes at large, well beyondtheir aesthetic impact (López, 2015). One question, then, involves theways in which they affect so-called vernacular architecture (Lu, 2012), upto introducing distinctive architectural styles (Lozanovska et al., 2013).More fundamentally, the issue is how the diffusion of remittance housesshapes traditional and gendered boundaries of the home space(Lawrence, 1985; Saunders & Williams, 1988) such as those underlyingthe functional and symbolic distribution of the rooms, and the hierarch-ical ways of using them; the distinction and balance between domestic/private and extra-domestic/public areas; the constitutive tensionbetween the façade and the interiors, which structures social relation-ships within the house in ways similar to the Goffmanian metaphor offoreground vs background.

In the second place, the development of migrant houses may affect theordinary patterns of interaction between the private and the publicrealms, as well as the space available for an intermediate communalrealm (Boccagni & Brighenti, 2015). Since the development of thesehouses is transnationally driven, although locally enacted, their positionvis-à-vis the pre-existing maps of identification and belonging deservesmore investigation. Dialectic categories for cross-cultural analysis of thedesign and use of dwellings, such as identity vs communality or opennessvs closedness (Gauvain & Altman, 1982), could be specifically re-applied here. Likewise, one could wonder if it is still true that “thedisplay of uniqueness” of a house – in the case of a flashy modernremittance house – “operates within the bounds set by communitynorms” (cit.: 28); or if, over time, the increasing development of richerprivate spaces, co-existing with poorer public spaces and infrastructures,changes community norms and expectations for good.


In the third place, the development of remittance houses can be read interms of migration-channelled influences on architectural style, patterns ofdecoration, building techniques and materials and so forth. In other words,emigrant houses are an embodiment of social remittances, and an exampleof their selective and personalized circulation. This brings us back to theportability of home – in the poignant formulation of Heller (1995: 14), the“sensual density of the spatial home experience”, including “familiar fra-grances, sounds and things”. It is important to remark again that thecirculation of house-relevant ideas and resources is affected by the perceivedquality, and the trust potential, of the personal relationships between sen-ders and recipients. These relational underpinnings are what critically dis-tinguishes migration-driven social remittances from other forms of culturaldiffusion (Boccagni & Decimo, 2013).

Overall, the argument made so far adds to appreciating the biographicinterdependence between housing conditions in the countries of originand destination. However, while much has been written on the transna-tional reconfigurations of migrants’ sense of home (e.g. Lam & Yeoh,2004; Smith, 2014; Sandu, 2013), the underlying transnational housingpractices stricto sensu have been singularly neglected. Empirical studies onmigrants’ evolving interactions with their houses “here” and “there” (suchas Fog Olwig, 1999) are relatively rare. What is worth emphasizing out ofthem, anyway, is the importance of a life course approach. The relativeinvestment in dwelling places in receiving or sending societies, besidesbeing constrained by the limited resources available, shifts along theindividual and family life course. It also depends on the expected andmutually negotiated future life projects of both migrants and their sig-nificant others. It is common to see, among first-generation immigrantswith weak financial resources and strong expectations to return, thatinvestment in the new houses “at home” is prioritized over their dwellingsabroad (Bolt, 2012). It also seems frequent, though, that their newremittance houses remain long half-finished, whenever other livelihoodneeds – including migrants’ own social reproduction – turn out to be moreurgent. Over time, and after family reunification, a number of migrantsmay then prioritize investment in relatively better dwellings abroad, as amore realistic and rewarding option.

Altogether, whether migrants’ simultaneous housing engagementamounts more to a win-to-win solution or rather to a trade-off is anirremediably empirical question. What can still be concluded is thatmigrants’ negotiation of the ways of allocating remittances vis-à-vis their


left-behind counterparts – whether for housing or anything else – is acomplex and potentially conflictual process (Carling, 2014; Boccagni,2015); and that house-related ways of investing remittances, and of culti-vating future projects, are an ideal research terrain on the nexus between(housing) integration and transnational engagement at large.

ON THE BOUNDARIES AND SCALES OF MIGRANTS’

HOME EXPERIENCE

Investigating if and how migrants attach a sense of home to one or moreplaces, and whether their housing arrangements are perceived as home-like or not, is a worthy effort in itself. That said, it also casts light on theshifting configurations of key social boundaries such as those between theprivate and the public, in-groups and outgroups, natives and aliens. Fromthe side of receiving societies, the settlement of immigrant newcomerstends to enhance, by reaction, the symbolic and even physical boundariesof what used to be home – a widespread psycho-social mechanism withmajor political implications (see Chap. 5). From the side of immigrantnewcomers, the boundaries of previous homes may get more blurred anddiscontinuous, as a result of their extended mobility and of its socio-legal,cultural and psychological aftermaths. How all of these boundaries arethen reproduced and distributed, on a local and transnational scale, iscritical to migrant identification with their host and home societies, froman often marginal position vis-à-vis both contexts.

For both migrants and their counterparts, the home experience – as anevolving assemblage of emplaced cognitions, emotions and practices –

need not be constrained to any particular domestic space. There is poten-tially much more (or indeed, much less) to home than the bricks andmortars of the place where one lives. Different ways of homing can bematerialized onto a variety of empirical references, and enacted on severalterritorial and relational scales: from the micro-level of the individualbody, across household and kinship groups, to larger units such as com-munities and neighbourhoods, nations (as homelands), and beyond. Itfollows that researching the migration-home nexus is a cross-scale effort,which joins together a variety of settings (as potential sources of home-likeidentification) and groups of reference (i.e. co-ethnics, natives, left-behinds etc.).

Importantly, then, a home lens can also illuminate the processes ofidentification with, and appropriation (even control) of, the public sphere:


the ways in which, and the reasons why, public space is constructed asmore or less home-like, based on the sense of security, familiarity andcontrol which emerges from the interactions with it. Long-settled nativesmay be more easily expected to associate a sense of home with the outerenvironment, or with some specific parts of it (e.g. streets, shops, parksetc.). Everything else being equal, they are more likely to feel it as homelyindeed (or to recall the “past time” when it was perceived as such), and tocultivate a sense of “moral ownership” over it (Kasinitz, 2013). However,the process of attaching a sense of home to public space, and possibly to its“quasi-public” (Smets & Watt, 2013) and “hybrid-domestic”(Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2015) variants, may involve native majorities andimmigrant minorities alike. In fact, it is affected by the distribution ofseveral socio-demographic variables, ethnicity and legal status being onlytwo among them.

While this topic has been extensively addressed in the new literatureon urban diversity (e.g. Berg & Sigona, 2013) and ethnic concentration(e.g. Smets & de Uyl, 2008), a major point remains: migration-drivenheterogeneity makes the home-likeness of outer environments less a nat-ural fact than a potential outcome of distinctive processes of “domestica-tion” – and possibly, parallel to this, of “privatization” (Kumar &Makarova, 2008). As important, negotiating a sense of home in the publicsphere is not simply a matter of place attachment. It also means, explicitlyor not, claiming for visibility, recognition and participation, as well as forownership. These stances do not necessarily result in progressive or inclu-sive agendas. Rather, they may be driven by all sorts of political agendas, asis typical of the discursive and emotional manipulation of home.

At the same time, the impossibility to thoroughly restrict the homeexperience to one place or domain has a broader implication. In light ofthe variety of backgrounds and locations against which home is experi-enced and reproduced, commonsense binaries such as private vs public, orinside vs outside, prove reductive and elusive, regardless of their “moralattraction” as elementary ingredients of inter-group relations (Van derHorst, 2004: 38). What migrants’ (and for that matter, natives’) homeexperience rather suggests is that the public and the private, and even theinside and outside, are in continuous interaction and mutually constitutive(Kumar & Makarova, 2008), for all the aspects of home that exceed thematerial walls of a dwelling; sometimes, even inside them, as the literatureon immigrants’ domestic work has shown (e.g. England, 2010;Ambrosini, 2013).


Having said this, there would be little point in appreciating the spatialfoundations of the home experience without interconnecting them withthe temporal ones, as I will do in the next chapter.

NOTE

1. A preliminary and non-exhaustive list of case studies on migrants’ transna-tional housing, from a variety of contexts of origin and perspectives, includesthe following: Smith & Mazzucato (2009), Obeng-Odoom (2010), Sinatti(2009), Freeman (2013) and Wagner (2014) on African countries; Fletcher(1999), López (2010), Boccagni (2014a) and Mata-Codesal (2014) regard-ing Latin American countries; Dalakoglou (2010) and Van der Horst(2010) in Eastern Europe; Bivand (2012), Aguilar (2009) and Taylor(2015) as instances from Asian countries.


CHAPTER 4

Migration and Home over Time

Abstract Time matters to migrants’ experience of home in several ways.Feeling at home in a place is also – particularly for outsiders – a question oftime spent there, of domestic routinization, of individual and family“regroundings”. Home assumes different meanings and emplacementsover the life course, depending on key biographical transitions, includingthose related to migration. Home can therefore be appreciated as a start-ing point for individual biographies, as a source of meaningful memoriesand biographical continuity, even as an aim for the future. Migrants’homing should be analysed as parallel to their housing and integrationtrajectories, in light of the variety of underlying physical locations, and ofthe tension between the long-term aspiration to an inclusive stability, anda prevalent sense of dwelling temporariness at present. Ultimately, it isonly over time that one can appreciate homing as a situated set of emo-tions, cognitions and practices towards a “better” home condition.

Keywords Home � Migration � Time � Temporality � Homing � Lifecourse � Continuity � Past � Present � Future

Much of the conceptual use of home across social sciences and humanitiesis permeated with a sense of existential centrality, or of commencement, asif home is the “point” where things, including individual biographies, startfrom. This simple remark suffices to highlight the relevance of a temporal


65

dimension, as much as of a spatial one, to the social study of home. This isby no means an issue of interest for historians only, albeit a history of theevolving meanings, boundaries and contents of domesticity would beworthwhile in itself (Rybczynski, 1986). The point, here, is that whetherwe understand home as a place, a set of embedded relationships, or a deepemotional experience, it still and anyway shifts over time. The meaningsand functions of home vary along the life course of those who constructand inhabit it. While a time dimension is critical to home-feeling andhome-making processes in general, it becomes particularly important tounderstand the meanings and practices of home over the life trajectories ofinternational migrants.

Appreciating the temporal bases of home entails a time-sensitive perspec-tive – indeed, a longitudinal one, whenever possible. The changing materialbases of home, and of the meanings attached to it, should be understood asconnected with the changing life course of each individual – for instance,over the gendered transitions from youth to adulthood (or from ascribed toacquired family roles), before or after the start of parenting and so forth.Variables such as age, length of stay abroad, or generation should also beconsidered. Migration itself makes for a major turning point in individuals’biographies, including their dwelling conditions and the underlying homingprocesses.

Time is constitutive of home as an everyday life experience, even forrelatively sedentary people. Yet, it is uniquely complex and dilemmatic formigrants. This is not only for the gap that may exist between the tempor-alities of sending and receiving societies – that is, for the difference in theirprevalent ways of constructing time, and its rhythm, in everyday life. Moreproblematically, the issue lies in the tacit procrastination of migrants’sensed and desired home. Several biographic studies have highlightedthat, under migrant and refugee life circumstances, the temporally shiftingcontours of home may be tantamount to a perceived lack of it in the here-and-now. It is not uncommon to find out that migrants’ home is subjec-tively redefined as an ideal(ized) life condition referred to the past, orprojected into the future, rather than positively pertaining to the present.Over time, assimilation tends to shape their housing experience, andacculturation likely affects their home experience, anyway, albeit in avariety of directions and trajectories. In the meantime, how far remittancehouses in communities of origin (and the expectation to return there)compensate for a limited sense of home in the context of immigration, orhow far a sense of home is simultaneously attached to different life milieus


or countries, are both open questions. The evolving dialectic betweenmigrants’ “external” and “simultaneous” sense of home, and its determi-nants, are a crucial research concern for the emerging field of migrationand home.

More broadly, an emphasis on the temporal dimension of home illu-minates the ways in which migrants’ home(land) is redefined across gen-erations as a cognitive and emotional space. While being fundamentallysymbolic, diasporic ways of redefining and celebrating the home spaceexert significant consequences in a variety of fields. These range from thesocialization of immigrants’ descendants, to the development of discursiveand emotional repertoires on which diaspora-related policies build for allsorts of agendas and interests.

When it comes to empirical research, as discussed in Chap. 2, a time-sensitive lens recommends caution on any ad hoc, episodic approach tomigrants’ sense of home. In practice, this entails oscillating between theaspiration to a truly longitudinal approach, and the reconstruction of theactors’ past home experience through their biographic accounts – ideally,relying on participant observation of the underlying home circumstances.

In what follows, the temporal meanings and implications of home arefirst of all discussed at a general level. A case is then made for the persistingsignificance of migrants’ past homes, both symbolically and materially; forthe need to analyse their evolving home trajectories, parallel to the migra-tion and integration ones; for a better understanding of the temporalitiesunderlying their subjective constructions of home, including their futureorientations.

FOR A TIME-SENSITIVE OPTIC ON MIGRANTS’ HOME EXPERIENCE

While the spatiality of migrants’ search for home is self-evident, itstemporality is perhaps less straightforward. However, the temporalcoordinates of the home-migration nexus are as important as the spatialones – bearing in mind that the distinction is fundamentally analytical, sincethey are mutually entangled in homing as a situated process.

A temporally sensitive approach to migrants’ home experience is neces-sary for several reasons. Common across them is the assumption thatstudying the interaction with one dwelling place, at one particular moment,does not suffice – even less so whenever extended mobility is at stake.Home as a personal experience is irremediably situated in, and shaped by,time. There is little scope in studying it here-and-now, without bringing a

4 MIGRATION AND HOME OVER TIME 67

larger temporal frame into the picture (Werner et al., 1985). Time matters,first of all, because the sense of home of a person tends to have differentcontents and bases, depending on their age (Fox, 2002);1 as obviously,because migration is also a temporal process (Cwerner, 2001), which runsparallel to the life course of those involved in it. Times matter, further-more, for all dwelling places have their own history, which may wellprecede, or be different to, that of their dwellers, while still affecting it(Lawrence, 1985); and because, in an ethno-methodological optic, homeis a set of practices which stem from individuals’ “practical and interac-tional accomplishments” in the micro-texture of everyday life (Kusenbach& Paulsen, 2013: 10), hence is irremediably processual and time-dependent.

All this being said, there is still more to the temporal meaningfulness ofhome. Once the study of home is empirically re-declined as homing, itnecessarily relies on a temporally open and dynamic understanding,whether regarding home-related views, feelings, or practices. If homeprimarily means search for home, as is often the case with migrants andrefugees, the temporal evolution of this search along migrants’ life time isas critical as its development over space.

As a process, attaching a sense of home to a given place – in the case ofmigrants, even to more places at once – is affected by the length ofresidence, among other individual, relational and structural variables(Després, 1991). Even in the best of circumstances, every new dwellingplace requires some time to be reconstructed as “living, participating andrichly experienced home place”, rather than as an “inert physical andspatial fabric” where many other people may have lived already (Saile,1985: 87). The significance of the time spent in a new dwelling place, ifonly for getting used to it, is still more critical whenever the new houseand dwelling conditions have little in common with those of the past – aseemingly frequent case for international migrants. The time-dependencyof their home experience can also be appreciated in another sense: thelonger their stay abroad, the greater the chances to achieve family stabili-zation and new “intergenerational roots”, which also contribute to shapethe sense of home (see, among others, Lam & Yeoh, 2004; Gram-Hanssen & Bech-Danielsen, 2012). In fact, what is conducive to anemplaced sense of home is not only length of residence per se, but alsoco-presence with a number of significant others (Somerville, 1997; Allen,2008). Homing is then a question of life course, rather than only ofchronological time. A parallel time-consuming investment seems necessary


for immigrant newcomers to attach a sense of home to any non-domesticsettings or circumstances, in order to “domesticate” them; or for thatmatter, to “get assimilated” into the receiving society at large, over timeand generations. Mastery of the native language is a particularly criticalrequirement to feel at home there.

Within the domestic space, in particular, the home experience is made ofelementary routines of interactions, that is, more or less ritualized activitiesthat are emplaced and evenly distributed over time. The day-to-day choresof domestic life, as well as the annual celebrations that punctuate family life,are there to structure a cyclical time of the home experience (Lawrence,1985). This is the apparently natural background to the sequential, linearlife course (as irreversible time, no matter how fragmented) of its dwellers.In short, the temporalization of everyday practices such as tidying up,sleeping, cooking, or eating, within a given place, contributes to make itfamiliar, secure and controllable.2 As Wardhaugh remarks,

[T]here exists also a temporal ordering of the home. Repeated physicalroutines, or ‘fields of care’, within a house, may over time create a sense ofhome . . . [t]he home thus becomes a source of identity and status, and allowsfor a sense of connection to both people and places, to the past and to thefuture. (Wardhaugh, 1999: 96)

Even this un-written, routine-based dimension of the home experience is,however, local and culturally specific, and so are the spatial layouts inwhich it occurs. Much of what has been written on it builds on “seden-tarist” assumptions and has native, middle-class nuclear families as a“natural” background. And even aside from that, the prevalent temporalpatterns of home as day-to-day domestic reproduction in migrants’ coun-tries of origin need not overlap with those in countries of settlement.Migrants have to navigate their own way between these different constel-lations of practice.

Furthermore, a time-sensitive lens is necessary to appreciate the evol-ving ways of constructing home, as well as the gap between its ideal andactually experienced aspects, over the life course. Since “home incorpo-rates both a lived and longed-for state” (Ralph & Staeheli, 2011: 522), itsrelative achievement over time – part of what I have defined as homing – iscentral to its study for both “mobile” and “sedentary” people. If homestands less for a product than for a process, temporality is as constitutive ofit as spatiality. Phenomenologically speaking, it is only in an open-ended


time perspective that we can make sense of homing as an ongoing andunaccomplished experience (Jacobson, 2012 – see also the Conclusion).

Ultimately, a time- and biographically sensitive understanding of homedoes not entail only a focus on its evolving constructions, negotiations andemplacements, as affected by major transitions such as international migra-tion. Parallel to this, the issue is how, at any given moment of the lifecourse, home as sense and cognition is attached (or not) to the presentcircumstances and dwellings; assumed to revisit the past, or some frag-ments of it, against the material background of the dwellings in which ittook place; re-directed towards the future, in terms of aspirations to feel athome in one or more place, and of the relational, emotional and materialunderpinnings of such aspirations. This exercise of cross-temporal imagi-nation is also embedded in the specific dwelling places which we inhabit:“We compare [our houses] also with the homes that are lodged in collectiveor personal memory and we picture them in the context of shared or secretaspirations for the future” (Chapman, 2001: 138).

At least in migration studies, little research is available on this temporalimplication of home – how the present construction (and condition) ofhome belongs in a longer search for biographical continuity, in light of theshifting domestic spaces underlying it. Even so, it is worth discussing, inthe sections that follow, how it is that home embodies migrants’ “relativeorientation . . . toward past, present or future”, given the different ways ofunderstanding, sensing and enacting it (Gurney, 1997).

HOME AS THE BEGINNING AND AS EMBODIMENT OF THE PAST

“Home”, writes Rykwert (1991: 51) with an echo of T.S. Eliot, “is whereone starts from . . .home is at the center”. Across social sciences and huma-nities, as much as in commonsense, the idea of home is often associated withthe origin, the starting point in time, even the roots of individual biogra-phies. At its heart, home is synonym with a meaningful life space that usedto be there at the outset, particularly during childhood and upbringing,opposed to whatever comes later. It also works as a term of reference tomake sense of the following developments in terms of (dis)continuity,advancement or regression, or even only of difference. Likewise, spatiallyspeaking, home stands as a point of departure, a relatively fixed anchorwithin otherwise mutable and unstable life circumstances. At a cognitivelevel, moreover, home is a major point of reference for categorizing “exter-nal” reality, as it is typically framed as the inside: a “secure and familiar base


from which people explore their world . . . and in which they return for rest,regeneration, and sense of self-identity”, opposed to the outer, less familiar,secure and controllable world (Saile, 1985: 92; cf. Jacobson, 2012; Gram-Hanssen & Bech-Danielsen, 2012).

Unsurprisingly, these expectations about the temporal and spatialmeanings of the home tend to build on the “sedentary” condition ofthose who have long been dwelling in it. How far they correspond tothe real home experience (particularly for immigrant newcomers), andwhy they may not, is a different question. In any case, the centrality ofhome to the everyday categorization of time, as much as of space, holdsregardless of the distinction between insiders and outsiders. While thereare strong internal variations in temporal orders along this and othersocio-demographical dimensions, the need to attach a temporal order tothe home experience seems relatively constant.

Whether for those who have a home or are searching for one,

Home as order is not only spatial orientation but also temporal orientation.Home is a kind of origin, we go “back” home even when our arrival is in thefuture. The home environment is one thoroughly imbued with the famil-iarity of past experience. It is the environment we inhabit day after day untilit becomes taken for granted as is unselfconscious. (Dovey, 1985: 37)

The temporal meaning of home has also to do with its being a privilegedsource of emplaced memories towards the past, and of emplaced aspira-tions towards the future (Werner et al., 1985). While the place in questionshifts over time in location, scale and configuration, a distinctive spatialitystill seems necessary to elicit a sense of home anyway, as discussed in theprevious chapter. To most (sedentary) people, dwelling places are privi-leged repositories for the memories of the past – meaningful people,relationships, emotions and so forth. The longest one’s residence in adomestic space, as background of family life, the most likely that itworks out as a “warehouse of material cultures and social customs, rou-tines, and rituals handed down from previous generations” (Lawrence,1985: 114). Domestic artefacts, appliances, and decorations can also con-tribute to reproducing a deep, if not necessarily realistic sense of the pasthome (cf., on international migrants, Walsh, 2006; Van der Horst, 2012).

In still another time-sensitive understanding, the home as ordinarydwelling place is far more than the materialization of biographic connec-tions with the past – even with family history, in case of long-settled


people. The home, argues Douglas (1991), is a “memory machine” alsofor functional purposes. It is typically organized in ways that tend toanticipate the future needs of its dwellers, at least at the most basic levelof ensuring protection, nutrition, rest and so forth. In this sense, the homeis fundamentally “an organization of space over time”, or “an institutionwhose uses cannot be defined except as a presentation of a general plan formeeting future needs” (cit.: 294–295).

Douglas’ view of the home is consistent with another widely sharedassumption – that “a fundamental aspect of the relationship of a personto his or her home is residential history” (Lawrence, 1985: 130). Onemay wonder, however, what happens if such history is increasingly dis-continuous and allocated across multiple sites. Residential continuity isfar from granted in nowadays’ home biographies, and is absent bydefinition in the case of international migrants. This raises a majorquestion: whether, within residentially fragmented and multi-sited lifecourses, the potential to reconnect people with their past – and toanticipate their future needs – can be still embodied by their ever newdwellings. How, and under what conditions, are international migrantsable to re-attach that potential to their dwelling circumstances – makingeach of them a repository of the dual function of archive of past mem-ories, and anticipator of future needs?

At the most basic and functional level, both requirements are metby most dwelling places, to most of their dwellers. In terms of deepemotion, though, the answer is much more elusive and context depen-dent. At the very least, migrants’ well-documented attachment to their“remittance houses” is telling of the time persistence of home also as aphysical structure – as “both heritage and future asset reproducibleacross the generations” (Saunders & Williams, 1998: 87). Extendedmobility need not affect the persistence of this expected function ofhome, although it does affect the possibility to enjoy its consequencesin everyday life.

All of these remarks foreground a social function of the home which isless obvious, but not less important, than the embodiment of dwellers’memories: the provision of a sense of continuity, or even of permanency,embedded in a place which is subject to routines of security, familiarity andcontrol. This is most clearly the case if that place is associated with a“continuity of possession (and for possessions)” (Mee & Vaugham, 2012:147) rather than to more unstable home arrangements – shelters, camps,squats and so on. However, life events such as international migration show


how fictitious that expected permanency is in practice. While the oxymoron“permanent impermanence” has been specially coined for protracted refu-gees and displaced people (Brun, 2012), it is evocative of the living condi-tions of vulnerable immigrants at large.

Whether a sense of home is (re)constructed towards the past or pro-jected towards the future, it still entails a dialectic between emotionalityand materiality, as much as between ideality and actuality (Blunt &Dowling, 2006; Murray & Dowling, 2007). A tension exists betweenthe imaginative side of past-related memories of home – as “childhood,and the idea of home that it is enmeshed with, ‘cannot simply be somethingthat proceeds chronologically’ . . . but . . . it is continually reprocessed, rede-ployed in narratives of beginnings” (Fortier, 2001: 414)3 – and the tangibleand “real” places with which this recollection is associated. The gap betweenthe ideal and the real side of past home(land) may get still wider forinternational migrants, due to their extended detachment from the materialbases of home.

To repeat, there is little of a surprise in migrants’ home being con-nected to more or less idealized memories of the past. The past itself, andhome as a salient dimension of it, “is always and continuously beenproduced . . . [it] has to be constructed” (Massey, 1992: 14). However,while recollections of the past home(s) may well indulge in “romanticized,mythologized, idealized memories” (Fox, 2002), they are still real andhave meaningful social consequences. These are not restricted to thesymbolic and emotional repertoires of diasporic memories (Ahmed,1999; Fortier, 2001). More pragmatically, even nostalgic memoriesabout the past home(land) can work out for migrants as “a source ofcomfort” against present hardships (Lam & Yeoh, 2004: 152). Within theemotional life of recently settled immigrants, then, remembering “whathome was like” is not just a source of nostalgia or melancholia. It is also areminder that there will always be another option available to them, albeitone less advantageous than the hostland, potentially at least (Boccagni,2015).

Furthermore, migrants’ memories of the past dwelling places havemuch to reveal on their implicit conceptions of home: what an appropriatehome space should look like, what household equipment it should have,what values and lifestyles are associated with it and so forth. This is abiographically and culturally shaped issue, which also affects their residen-tial experience and their housing and acculturation trajectories into thereceiving society.


Having said this, whether “the movement away from home-as-originbecomes the vector for reinstating [elsewhere] the ideal of ‘home’ as a siteof familiarity and control” (Fortier, 2001: 412) is an empirical question,all the more so for international migrants. How is it, if at all, that migrantsre-enact a sense of home over time, against the spatial and temporalseparation from what used to be their home? What is the role of distinctiveartefacts and dwelling places, in light of the outer environment and ofmigrants’ trajectories of integration?

ON THE BIOGRAPHICAL EVOLUTION OF MIGRANTS’ HOME

EXPERIENCE: LOSS, RETENTION AND BEYOND

The debate on the potential ways of reproducing home over time parallelsthe debate on its reproduction over space (see Chap. 3). That the spatialand temporal dimensions of home are mutually constitutive is no theore-tical abstraction. Rather, it is something that immigrant and refugee new-comers negatively sense in their everyday life experience, as a result of their“double displacement, in space and time” (Kabachnik et al., 2010).Particularly when the migration experience is a “forced” one, it entailsthe need to negotiate a new place in time, as much as in space. As Ahmedputs it,

[M]igration involves not only a spatial dislocation, but also a temporaldislocation: the “past” becomes associated with a home that it is impossibleto inhabit, and be inhabited by, in the present. The question then of being athome or leaving home is always a question of memory, of the discontinuitybetween past and present. (Ahmed, 1999: 343)

While the “question of memory” has been discussed in the previoussection, the temporal “(dis)continuity” in the home experience requiresmore elaboration here. Migrants’ search for biographical continuity overtime is central to the notion of homing, as a shifting set of practiceswhereby the sensoriality and materiality of home is retained, reproduced,or negotiated anew. Such a process, of course, is no prerogative ofmigrants. A degree of fragmentation and discontinuity in home biogra-phies, with simultaneous forms of home-making and un-making in anemotional and relational sense, but also in terms of material dwellings(Baxter & Brickell, 2014), cuts across divides such as the native/immi-grant one. Having said this, the migrant condition provides a privileged


viewpoint on this process, as it is necessarily marked by major changes inthe home experience and its background, whatever the degree of freedom(and the possibility to assess it) at the outset of migration.

At stake is first of all migrants’ possibility to retain their “routine livesand traditions” (Gram-Hanssen & Bech-Danielsen, 2012: 97), as long asthey have an affective and/or instrumental interest in doing so. A varietyof mundane social practices, not necessarily at odds with long-term assim-ilation, can be appreciated in this sense. Aspects of migrants’ everyday livessuch as ways of decorating and using the new dwelling places, involvementin homeland-related rituals and forms of sociability, or ongoing use of thenative language in the private realm, all reproduce emotional, sensorialand cognitive traits of the past home experience. Such practices are also,among other things, attempts to retain meaningful connections between“past, present and future homes” (Walsh 2006: 134). Likewise, migranttransnational connections are a powerful channel to reproduce home(land) cultures and practices; most notably, remittance houses are aniconic way of materializing them.

Much has been written on immigrant ways of “using objects and practicesas markers of people, places and values that are absent but whose symbolicpresence [is] necessary to maintain their conception of home” (Hollows,2012: 408). As important is to appreciate, though, that home-makingpractices are permeable to the domestic views, practices and representationsin the local context of settlement. Immigrants’ variable, but typically increas-ing adaptation to the home cultures and places of receiving societies – if onlyout of necessity – is differentially affected by socio-demographics such aslength of stay, educational and housing backgrounds, age, as well as labourand housing market inclusion. “Adaptation”, here, refers to several keydimensions of the home experience: ways of using domestic spaces, viewsof what a good home should look like (albeit not necessarily access to such anappropriate dwelling place), and self-tuning with the timeframes and cul-tures of the receiving society. This brings us back, again, to the debate onimmigrant assimilation and acculturation.

While the distinctive development of immigrant domestic cultures overtime is difficult to observe, there is no reason to expect it to diverge, overall,from broader assimilation trends, as discussed in the literature (see, on theUS, Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Alba & Nee, 2005). Strong inter- andintra-group differentiation occurs, of course, depending on the variablesmentioned above, and on the immigration history and structure of oppor-tunity of each receiving country. Indeed, there would be little point in


looking at the evolution of migrants’ domestic cultures, without looking attheir aggregate patterns of interaction with the countries of origin and ofdestination.

As soon as we move beyond these generalizations, though, we are facedwith a major knowledge gap about the evolution of the home experienceof immigrant newcomers. This calls for more field research. To appreciatethe home-relevance of a particular social practice, at a particular moment,is relatively straightforward. Less obvious but far more promising is to see,first, to which interpersonal relationships that practice is connected, for it tobe constructed as home-relevant; second, how a given set of home-relatedpractices, and migrants’ sense of home at large, evolve over time andgenerations.

It is worth repeating that home reproduction – and home-making atlarge – is a process with fundamentally emotional and relational bases.Migrants’ ongoing ties with their significant others left behind, but alsotheir evolving interactions within the receiving society, deeply affect theways and degrees to which they feel at home or not. The evolutionarydialectic of home loss vs retention, or transmission vs adaptation, isprimarily dependent on their kinship, affective and friendship connections,as well as on the resources and opportunities available in their new“homes”. Looking only at external markers of renewed domesticity, ran-ging from co-ethnic gatherings to displays of homeland symbols, wouldmake little sense, unless the underlying interpersonal relationships aresystematically investigated. This particularly holds for the influence ofkinship and co-ethnic groups; the more widespread and cohesive thelatter, the greater the chance for homeland languages and traditions to“survive” and be shared across generations.

In a time-sensitive optic, therefore, the relevant question is not only the(dis)continuity of the home experience across the migration divide, butalso its transmission and evolution over the long term. This calls for astronger research connection between the literature on migrant housingcareers and on the underlying housing histories (Holland & Peace, 2012),and the more phenomenologically oriented study of migrants’ changingsense of home, and of the ways of emplacing it.

This leads us back, once again, to the debate on the long-term trajec-tories of immigrant incorporation (Fitzgerald, 2014). Depending on theprevalent directions of their home identifications and practices, these canbe framed as a matter of assimilation (into the receiving society or, rather,into specific social segments of it); transnationalization (as an extended


retention of both homeland and hostland places and circumstances, assources of domesticity); or instead, dissimilation (i.e. divergence of homecultures and practices – among other attributes – vis-à-vis their left-behindcounterparts); and possibly, intergenerationally speaking, diasporization –

home cultures and practices being also a mirror of ethnic minority collec-tive identifications with the ancestral homelands.

Whatever the long-term trajectory, an emphasis on the search formigrant biographic continuity around home, and on its dependence onmeaningful personal relationships, is a warning against the risk of over-emphasizing the material continuity of home. While one or more houses(or other physical backgrounds) may well act as long-standing emotionalstorage of the past idea, sense and memories of home, they need notembody the same sense of home at present or towards the future. Theplace(s) where I used to feel at home is not necessarily the one where Iwould feel at home now, let alone in the future. Family ties, meaningfulrelationships and life course events are likely more influential, in thisrespect, than the bricks and mortar of any particular place.

In short, individual ways of negotiating continuity between recalledpast and desired future, successfully or otherwise, need not rest on theframe of one and the same place as “home”. While social research on homehas much to borrow from the study of the built environment and ofdomestic material cultures, it should also incorporate more from lifecourse and family studies.

Having said this, migrants’ homing trajectories are also worth studying inlight of the personal constructions of the life-time which underlie them – atopic to be addressed in the last section of this chapter.

HOMING BETWEEN PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE: TEMPORAL

(DIS)CONTINUITIES IN MIGRANTS’ SENSE OF HOME

Elaborating on the migration-home nexus in terms of persisting signifi-cance of the past homes, and of the search for continuity across them, stillleaves open a major question: how migrants’ subjective constructions ofhome evolve over time, with particular regard to their future orientation.Home is not only a special kind of relationship with place, and a changingbackdrop to everyday life over time. It also works out as a source of“temporal salience”: the emotional and cognitive process whereby people,under the elicitation of a particular object – such as a home place – recollect


(in fact, revisit) the past, and imagine the future, from the present (Werneret al., 1985). Home can then be appreciated as an emotional and cognitiveanchor, and a loose assemblage of places and settings, through which wemake sense of our temporal trajectories in terms of remembered past,experienced present and desired (or possibly, feared) future. The question,here, is how this process is differentially enacted under conditions ofmigration, and on which home environment(s) it relies (Smith, 2014;Cieraad, 2010; Kabachnik et al., 2010).

Life course variations in the meanings and emplacements of home arelikely to occur among immigrants and natives alike (and across the dividebetween “sedentary” and “mobile” populations); and for that matter, vari-ables such as class, age group and gender are equally influential in shapingthe home experience (Cuba & Hummon, 1993; Dovey, 1985; Mallett,2004; Holland & Peace, 2012). However, migrant biographies are markedby certain features – such as the discontinuity between the underlyingphysical and cultural backgrounds – which are particularly noteworthy forstudying the temporal reconstruction of home. While the past-oriented sideof this process has been discussed in the previous sections, more remarks arenecessary on its present dimension, and then on the future one.

Migrants’ present home experience is interdependent with the pastone(s), as recollected through home-related objects and rituals, and withthe future one, as prepared, anticipated and imagined from the here-and-now. However, it also needs more analysis in itself, as the venue where,especially for first-generation newcomers (and highly mobile people atlarge), an unusually high sense of temporariness tends to be perceivedand emplaced. While migrant’s present dwelling place may well be un-homely in many regards, it is also typically framed as the home “in and ofthe moment” – the expectedly “permanent home being locatedsomewhere else in time and space” (Allen, 2008: 90). Migrants’ remit-tance houses are a prominent instance of what a permanent home isexpected to look like, and of how elusive “homing there” may be inpractice. In this sense, migrants’ home experience is exemplary of formsof procrastination or “temporal displacements” that may involve also theirrelationships with the dear ones, and the construction of their own well-being (Boccagni, 2016).

Whatever the scope for migrants to return to the “real” home of thepast, their wish to do so should not be always given for granted. There is asubtle and problematic inclination, most visible in return migration stu-dies, to idealize migrants’ home(land) – as if their “normal” home


experience, prior to migration, had necessarily been an inclusive anddesirable one. In fact, not feeling at home in one’s habitual place may beone of the drivers of migration itself, particularly for refugees and asylumseekers. As Malkki put it in “Refugees and Exile”,

[I]f ‘home’ is where one feels most safe and at ease, instead of someessentialized point on the map, then it is far from clear that returningwhere one fled from is the same thing as ‘going home’. (Malkki, 1995: 509)

With this premise, a point remains: the present home risks being simplyancillary to the future-expected one, and far less rewarding than the pastone (at least in its selective recollections). It is, in practice, an ambivalentand potentially very extended parenthesis between them. Both the homeof the past and that of the future are an implicit benchmark for migrants toassess their current dwelling conditions – and seeing them as defective,more often than not, at least on the emotional side. Besides this, theinvestment in the home of the future may discourage migrant engagementwith the real, if provisional home of the present.

A constant tension between the present and the future dimensions ofhome is at work here. On the one hand, there is a risk that home – asplace-bound security, familiarity and control – be indefinitely procrasti-nated, rather than effectively experienced. On the other hand, it is onlywith some perceived good prospect ahead, in a given place, that the latteris deemed worthy of the sustained investment which would make ithome-like. This is no symbolic matter: immigrants’ home-making, overtime, demands significant emotional and practical endeavours in home-maintaining – as much as their “integration” at large requires majorefforts in learning language, fine-tuning with formal rules of behaviour,decoding unwritten rules and expectations and so forth. It follows thatachieving all of this in two home(lands) at the same time is nothingobvious. In principle, there is much to commend in individuals’ andfamilies’ ability to connect a sense of home to more places simulta-neously, so as “to embrace the inherent betweenness of having a placethat is ‘home’ and one that is ‘more home’” (Allen, 2008). In practice,how widespread this skill is, especially in the ranks and files of unskilledlabour migrants, is quite dubious.4

As usual, these sweeping statements should be circumscribed in light ofthe interplay between migrants’ position in the life course, the resourcesavailable to them, the thickness and distribution of their family networks,


or the primary drivers of migration itself. Case studies of first-genera-tion immigrant workers such as Turks in the Netherlands (Van derHorst, 2012) are very telling in this sense. Broadly speaking, the earliersteps of their migration process tend to be oriented towards economicadvancement in the country of origin. The obligation to remit moneythere may be privileged over the scope, however minimal, to achievebetter material conditions abroad. Over time, a shift in biographicpriorities occurs – parallel to immigrant integration and family stabili-zation – which results in increasing centrality of host society-relatedneeds. This also applies to housing, as attested by growing rates ofhome ownership. Ultimately, the long cherished “better houses” in thecountries of origin turn into homes for retirement or, at best, for shortholiday breaks (Wagner, 2014). In other words, the perceived tempor-ariness of home does not prevent that real housing careers – andpossibly, a growing sense of home – do take place over time. Whatshould be kept in mind is the relevance of the assets available tomigrants – or the lack thereof – to cope with such temporariness.

In the case of forced migrants and asylum seekers, who move away froma “home” plagued by chronic instability or even civil war (Jansen &Lofvig, 2009), the debate on home loses nothing of its significance – iteven gains more, in policy terms – but the temporal compression of homebecomes particularly salient. No wonder that for many millions ofdisplaced people worldwide, with equally poor prospects for integration,return or resettlement, “feeling at home” may be an unaffordable luxury.In fact, the positive potential associated with it gets displaced into the“normality and security” of the past, or is just shifted towards any sort of(better) future: “the home of the past and the future usurps the home ofthe present” (Kabachnik et al., 2010: 317). Under these circumstances,“temporary shelters” of all kinds may long work as the functional, buthardly emotional equivalent of domestic spaces (Brun, 2012).

Furthermore, whether forced migrants are long-settled in camps or stillon the move, their sense of being temporary in a given country may turninto a sense of being stuck in space and time – whenever their applicationsare rejected, or their aspirations to onwards mobility are frustrated(Belloni, 2015).5 At issue is less their very real deprivation (includingthe housing one), than their limited opportunities to overcome it bymoving elsewhere, or even only by gaining a legal status where they havealready arrived. The core of the question is not how temporary the presenthome condition is perceived, but rather how open it is to potentially better


developments, in terms of real opportunities and of migrant “capacity toaspire” (Appadurai, 2004) about them.

This eventually leads us to the future dimension of migrants’ homeexperience. A future-oriented home optic does not entail only a focus ontheir homing trajectories over time, as previously discussed in terms ofassimilation, dissimilation and the like. It also involves the ways in which,from one biographical point in the present, migrants’ future home condi-tion is perceived, desired and tentatively emplaced. How far the “presentpoint” is imbued with a sense of personal security, or otherwise, is criticalto migrants’ ability to cultivate positive plans for their future (Ghorashi,2002).

Importantly, the social constructions of the future, including thoserelated to home, matter, and have meaningful social consequences, evenwhen they rely on thin or unrealistic empirical bases. This also holds forfirst-generation migrants’ prospects for return, which is very much amatter of returning home – materially and symbolically – and of theattendant challenges (Ho & Kissoon, 2012). A wealth of case studies isavailable on migrant “myth of return”, pointing to its prevalence as afuture-oriented desire, or even only as a phantasy (Bolognani, 2016),more than as a real fact. However, the simple psycho-social process ofcultivating this option has social effects that are far from mythical – fromthe enhancement of migrants’ transnational ties, to the building or refurb-ishment of remittance houses. Aside from that, home-coming, on a per-manent or (increasingly) on a temporary basis, is an ideal research terrainon the transnational development of migrants’ homing – as much as theirassimilation, over time, is the necessary background to the study of their“local” homing.

Once back to the home(land), returnees may well recover something oftheir past home experience. They are also likely to find, though, that whatthey used to construct as home is no more the same place and even, as itwere, the same time.6 Of course, returnees’ own views, feelings andpractices of “a good home” would have changed over time anyway; none-theless, extended detachment from the previous living environments andsocialization into the receiving society make these changes more strikingand less predictable than for sedentary people. Ultimately, the previousdevelopment of transnational ties – including transnational home-makingpractices – is as critical to the perceived success of return migration, as arethe assets accumulated along the way. Temporally speaking, moreover,returnees are likely to encounter some form of “asynchronicity” between


previous hostlands and new/old homelands: distinct life rhythms, differ-ent ways of managing time, diverging views of the meaning of time itself(Levitt & Lamba-Nieves, 2013). This can be appreciated in the publicsphere, but also in everyday domestic and family life.

To repeat, it is difficult to disentangle the changes in the meaningand emplacement of home that would occur anyway over the lifecourse, from those that are specifically driven by (return) migration.Even so, one should not underestimate “the laborious effort that goesinto uprooting and regrounding homes” (Ahmed et al., 2003b: 1).While local home-making is already a practical and costly endeavour(rather than a simply romanticized attachment), this is still more thecase for the transnational dimension of this process. Longing for amore or less ideal home in the country of origin may be a widespreadexperience, at least at some steps of the migration course. Engaging ineffective home-making practices with it over space and time, though, isa far more selective process; one hard to be appreciated at present, butcritical to the retention of the home(land) as full-fledged home – thatis, as an emplaced source of familiarity, security and control – to thosewho still wish, and are able to, invest on it.

Having said this, a case could be made for home itself – in a suitablybroad and emotionally warm sense – to stand as quintessence for thedesired future, as a potentially open field for projects and aspirations.Particularly for displaced and highly mobile (disadvantaged) people, hom-ing can be decoded as “the desire for home as a goal towards which peoplebehave purposively” (Moore, 2000: 212), whatever the goal, its clarity,and the success in achieving it. Emotionally and symbolically speaking,home works out also as the future

“[P]lace you get to, not the place you come from” . . . ‘home’, here, is not anorigin, but rather a destination; there is no return, only arrival. And it is anarrival that is always deferred. (Fortier, 2001: 409)7

This future home prospect looks specially alluring to those organized mino-rities who, from within marginalized or stigmatized groups (such as LGBTsin Fortier’s account), struggle for recognition and inclusion – hence, for ametaphorical home – as open-ended claims, rather than as a part of their past“homes”. Once again, apparently intra-individual and intangible emotionssuch as feeling at home can be fruitfully brought down to the ground ofcollective mobilization (see Chap. 5).


This, in turn, calls for one last conceptual link with the elusive butpervasive role of home in diaspora studies (Cohen, 2007; Silva, 2009).In this extensive and interdisciplinary literature, home – primarily ashomeland – plays a central role, as a variable combination between theroots of an ancestral Heimat, and the routes towards a future-oriented“spatial imaginary” of it (Blunt & Dowling, 2006). In terms of every-day life practices in the here-and-now, at stake is the transmission ofmigrants’ sense of home to the second generations, and beyond; anissue that can be empirically appreciated in terms, for instance, ofethnic retention in domestic spaces and leisure activities, or of homevisits to the “ancestral homeland” (King et al., 2014). At an aggregatelevel, the question is what kind of time orientation underlies theconstruction of the homeland among expatriate communities andtheir descendants: in a nutshell, “the ways in which the home is under-stood are important for the ways in which the future is perceived”(Ghorashi, 2002: 150). Different dimensions of the home(land)experience can be differently sensed and mobilized for different pur-poses, depending on a fundamental distinction: whether the predomi-nant ways of approaching home(land) are exilic, that is, focused on thepast roots of a physical place which, albeit “lost” for generations, is stillclaimed as “own place”; or rather, diasporic, that is, oriented to re-construct some features of the homeland at present through sharedtransnational practices, rather than striving to re-establish its pastnational “essence”.

There is not space enough here to expand on the literature on homeand diaspora, let alone exile (e.g. Said, 1984). However, building onGhorashi’s insight, a preliminary distinction can be introduced betweendifferently time-oriented ways of framing home, and homeland at large, inthe public debate of multi-ethnic receiving societies – immigration being atypical elicitor of the difference between them. Within the narrative con-tinuum of past, present and future, home(land) can be represented with afundamental emphasis on its past, hence on the need to preserve itshistorical boundaries and essential roots (or so presumed), along somevariant of Malkki’s (1995) “sedentarist bias”; or, rather, it can be funda-mentally framed with a focus on its future perspectives and on the routesahead to make them real, following, potentially at least, more inclusivepolitical agendas.

Ultimately, whether migrants’ (or anybody’s) search for home is re-constructed along spatial or temporal coordinates, one thing is clear:


home is by no means an exclusively private or a simply “domestic” matter.As a claim for signification or even appropriation of place, and as a form ofboundary-making between what should lie inside and outside, home is anirremediably public and political issue. This is to be discussed further in thelast chapter of the book.

NOTES

1. Within a household, for instance, the home experience of an adult is likely tobe different to that of a child; an age (and generational) variation which isstill more evident, but perhaps less debated, than the gendered one betweenmen’s and women’s ways of constructing and experiencing home (Dovey,1985; see also Mee and Vaughan [2012], for a typology of the socio-demographic influences on the experience of home). In general terms, thedistinction between younger and older age cohorts does correspond todifferent ways of conceiving and emplacing home, all other things beingequal. As Cuba and Hammon (1993: 548) suggest, based on a case study ofinternal migrants in the US, “older migrants are relatively more likely toconstruct a sense of home based on the dwelling place and previous affilia-tion with the locale; younger migrants more often rely on affiliations invol-ving friendship, family, and emotional self-attributions”. Judging from theliterature available, this generalization may hold for native and sedentarypeople as well, at least in broad terms.

2. Importantly, such practices can provide a minimal sense of home even out ofa dwelling place – or without it. In this sense, Berger (1984: 64) highlightsthe significance of “habits” – “the raw material of repetition” of mundaneeveryday practices, through whatever “physical objects and places”, heldtogether by meaningful memories – as a rudimentary form of home (i.e. as asource of relative “permanence” and “shelter”).

3. The quote includes also an excerpt from Agamben, cited in Probyn (1996).4. At a basic level, a distinction can be made between migrants’ (or refu-

gees’) prevalent ways of framing the receiving society as “the practicalhome . . . associated with the material and ‘legal security dimension ofplace”, and the framing of the country of origin as the “cultural-spiritualhome”, with its emotional and identificational underpinnings (Graham& Khosravi, 1997; cf. also Al-Alì & Koser, 2002b). How far migrants dofeel at home in either society, though, is a context-dependent issuewhich defies all generalizations.

5. A still worse form of home temporariness is possibly that of immigrantdeportees – where a forced and supposedly definitive “return home” maymake even harder the experience of home itself, even in the country of


origin. More research is needed, however, on the homing implications ofthis particular form of mobility.

6. Cf. Markowitz (2004), Stefansson (2004), De Souza (2005), and Wiles(2008) for empirical accounts; Schutz (1945), Berger (1984), andWerbner (2013) for more theoretical analyses.

7. The quote includes a sentence from the novel Half-way home by PaulMonette, as cited in Sinfield (2000: 103).


CHAPTER 5

Migrants’ Home as a Political Issue

Abstract Home, as a place and an experience of it, has meaningfulpolitical implications, since it embodies the material and legal boundarybetween insiders and outsiders. Migration, as the life condition of thosewho are physically away from their previous homes and often marginalizedfrom the natives’ ones, is a unique research venue on the political dimen-sions of home, at many levels: regarding the need and aspirations for newand better homes, whether achieved or not, which drive migrant lifetrajectories; for the metaphorical conflation between home and homeland,the nation, or the state, which pervades the public discourse of receivingsocieties vis-à-vis immigrants and their descendants; for the mixed signifi-cance of home, as a discursive and emotional resource in migration-relatedforms of political mobilization and claims-making.

Keywords Home � Migration � Politics � Homeland � State � Domopolitics� Mobilization

Although the concept of home seems to point only to a domestic andprivate question, it has also major public and political relevance. Thisholds first of all in the literal sense of the home as a dwelling place. Itscharacteristics, including the ownership of it, are generally related toone’s social position and reflect broader patterns of social stratificationand inequality. Class is hardly less relevant than ethnicity or migration


87

background, in this sense. The same holds for feeling-at-home as anemotional experience: the ability “to maintain an identity betweenhouse and home – that is, to actually dwell in the place one regards ashome”1 – is affected by much broader economic and political factors,rather than being only a matter of personal attitudes or emotions. Thisability is particularly critical, challenging to achieve and unequally dis-tributed under circumstances of international migration.

The political relevance of home, however, holds still more fundamen-tally in an identitarian and symbolic sense. Whether as a place or as acountry, home is the deep-rooted and institutional marker of the bound-aries of legitimate membership and belonging. In this sense, migrants andforeigners are by definition antithetical to home; their position is typicallyperceived as external or even opposite to it. Unsurprisingly, migration – asa source of extended mobility and societal diversification – is one of thepressures that account for the renewed popularity of the homeland-as-home (or nation-as-home) ideal, as pursuit of internal homogeneity andsecurity vis-à-vis outsiders. Migrants’ relations with receiving countriesand with countries of origin are highly revealing of the political signifi-cance of home, as a stake of inclusion or exclusion. So are their strugglesfor inclusion and recognition, and the related counter-mobilizations, inlocal contexts of settlement. In a nutshell, migrants’ “search for home” isan inherently political and politicized question.

In order to unpack the political side of the migration-home nexus, thischapter addresses the ways in which the rhetoric and imaginaries of homeare mobilized in all sorts of political agendas about migration. There is farmore to the concept of home than a domestic space for livelihood andeveryday social reproduction. This concept is also a strong discursive andemotional elicitor of political stances around the management of migra-tion and ethnic relations. In the face of outsiders such as migrants,appeals to the preservation of (insiders’) home can facilitate the devel-opment of exclusionary ways of governmental regulation in terms, forinstance, of “domopolitics”. Likewise, a home-centred discursive reper-toire can be appropriated by social movements, including migrant-ledones, whatever the underlying views, interests and claims. Even from theside of countries of origin, appeals to migrants’ home(land) are constitutiveof new strategies of diaspora-reaching, for a number of economic andpolitical purposes.

Overall, home is revisited in this chapter less as a material entity than asan elicitor of symbolic, cognitively and emotionally meaningful actions


and reactions in the public sphere. Central to this understanding is itsrelationship with the homeland, or the state, in light of the same funda-mental meanings of home (i.e. aspiration to familiarity, security andcontrol), opposed to outsiders such as international migrants. Whateverthe scales and boundaries of home, the core issue remains the search for itand the inclusion in it, for migrants and (political) outsiders at large; andfor their native and sedentary counterparts, the retention of its traditionalforms and functions, against the real or perceived disruption engenderedby external forces such as international migration. In short – but quiteextraordinarily, for a notion that literally applies to a very mundane andeveryday space – home is to be critically appreciated “as a material andideological entity of geopolitical significance” (Brickell, 2012: 575).

My argument revolves around three major points: first, the politicaldimension which is inherent in home as a terrain and catalyser ofdialectic, potentially conflictive relations between insiders and outsiders;second, the meanings and functions of the overlap between home andhomeland, in the eyes of long-term resident and native populations;last, the symbolic and emotional significance of home as a metaphor forpolicy-making and for political mobilization, among ethnic majoritiesand minorities alike.

WHY HOME IS A POLITICAL QUESTION (AND MIGRATION

CASTS LIGHT UPON IT)International migration, as argued in the previous chapters, inherentlyquestions the apparently obvious and self-evident “nature” of home,even when the latter is scaled up as homeland or as nation-state.Migration also affects the political dimension of home. For one thing,newcomers bring with themselves a need for home, symbolically andmaterially (Staeheli & Nagel, 2006), which interacts with the home posi-tions and conceptions of native and long-term residents. More broadly, aslong as the home experience stems from a physical and legal boundarybetween insiders and outsiders, it is a privileged research window on bothsides of it, and on the structuration of the boundary itself: what it means towhom, how it is negotiated over space and time, how porous or selective itis in practice.

In this sense, scholars of migration and ethnic relations have as much tosay as their counterparts in gender or sexual minority studies, regarding

5 MIGRANTS’ HOME AS A POLITICAL ISSUE 89

the need to move beyond privatized and intimate conceptions of the homeas a separate, almost autonomous life world. This is necessary to betterappreciate what occurs within it and its systematic interdependence withthe “outside”, but also, more fundamentally, to understand the under-lying social mechanisms and their political implications.

In a nutshell, “the home is also a site of politics” (Hollows, 2012: 411).This may well apply in a literal sense, assuming home as the habitualdwelling place. There is a remarkable political significance to it, as back-ground to the social reproduction of predominant norms and values, and,overall, of the attendant patterns of inequality. The domestic sphere is“probably one of the least appreciated yet single most important arenas ofpolitical action . . . as well as of reactionary political nostalgias and repres-sive social imaginaries” (Buchli et al., 2004: 3). The domestic realm is afield of contention, most notably, for gender relationships and inequal-ities, on scales ranging from the division of domestic and care labour, togender violence. It is also a site in which migrants can reproduce pasttraditions and lifestyles (homeland, ethnic or religious ones), includingthose that majority societies frame as segregative or oppressive. At all ofthese levels, the separation and (supposed) intangibility of the domesticsphere is a source of contention between communal rights and obliga-tions, and individual (or group) needs, rights and claims – including themost reactionary ones, as the quote reminds.

This also leads to wonder how home, as special relationship with place,is claimed and made real in the public sphere – besides interacting with it,as dwelling place. The political, here, lies in the unequally distributedpotential to attach a sense of security, familiarity and control to outerliving environments such as streets, parks, shops, “hangout” and recrea-tional facilities and so forth; and possibly, in the most radical sense, toclaim a place as one’s own home. How far a sense of home is perceived andtentatively enacted in public or semi-public contexts, from whom, andbased on what resources and legitimacy, is an issue worth of more elabora-tion (Kusenbach & Paulsen, 2013; Boccagni & Brighenti, 2015).

In the case of migrants, the “domestication” of public space (Kumar &Makarova, 2008) does not depend only on outsiders’ opportunities andabilities to gain familiarity with their life milieus, to feel secure there, or tohave a sense of control over it. All of these issues are critically affected bythe perception of their presence as a more or less legitimate, “normal”one, from the side of native populations. Particularly in ethnically diversepublic spaces, the potential for attaching a sense of home, from different


categories of users, is shaped by “people’s attitudes about who should livewhere, and for what reason” (Benjamin, 1995a: 8).

Feeling at home or not in the public sphere is, of course, a subjectiveexperience; as such, it is affected by personal and biographic circum-stances. It is also an intersubjective one, though, hence mediated by thenegotiation of who is formally entitled, and practically legitimated, to feelat home there; a question of cultural, legal and even moral ownership overspace (Kasinitz, 2013). The political dimension of home, in the publicsphere, has also to do with a sense of external recognition: whether some-one is framed by the outer environment as belonging there or not (Olwig,1999; Ralph & Staeheli, 2011). Migrants’ potential to feel at home, oreven “to claim a place as home” (Buitelaar & Stock, 2010: 167), dependsalso on the “climate” of majority–minority relations in a given context.This generally holds not only for their local homing relations, but also – ifless visibly – for their transnational ones.

What is arguably unique of home, as a politically meaningful category, isthe potential to be appropriated by all sorts of political agendas, consistentwith its flexible meaning and understanding. While the discursive andemotional use of home among “conservative” or nativist political actors ismost visible, its relevance to “progressive” stances should not go unnoticed.This mirrors a constant dialectic between home in the singular and in theplural; as a claim for control, or for inclusion; or indeed, as seen in theprevious chapter, between home as an anchor to the past (to be safeguardedand protected from outside influences), and home as projected into thefuture (an aspiration, or a political project, still to be achieved in full).

Summing up, home – and even the home – is a terrain and catalyser ofdialectic interaction, and possibly conflict, across divides such as private vspublic, insider vs outsider, native vs immigrant. However, what does migra-tion add to the political significance, and the potential for contentiouspolitics, of home? This is to be explored in what follows, by interrogatingthe conflation between homeland and home, the home subtext of publicpolicy towards immigrants and ethnic minorities, and the appropriation ofhome metaphors and emotions in migration-related mobilization.

HOMELAND: THE FOUR WALLS OF (NATIVES’) HOME?In order to appreciate the political significance of home vis-à-vis outsiderssuch as migrants, we should first revisit its semantic and emotional over-lapping with homeland. There is nothing obvious in the bundle of home


and homeland; some critical discussion of it is in order here. At least overthe last centuries, says Berger (1984: 55), the commonsense notion ofhome has played a deeply ideological (in fact, politically driven) function,whenever it has been “taken over by two kinds of moralists, both dear tothose who wield power”:

The notion of home became the keystone for a code of domestic morality,safeguarding the property (which included the women) of the family.Simultaneously the notion of homeland supplied a first article of faith forpatriotism, persuading men to die in wars which often served no otherinterest except that of a minority of their ruling class. (Berger, 1984: 55)

In a nutshell, following Berger’s insight, the predominant ways of under-standing home and homeland have contributed to the diffusion of certainmorality regimes (private property, patriarchy, patriotism) which werefunctional to the self-reproduction of particular elite groups. What ismore of interest, here, is the historical parallel between the morality ofsafeguarding the “home” and that of protecting the “homeland”, asnothing else than an extension of the former. In this sense, home andhomeland are interdependent and mutually constitutive. The moral orderwhich Berger attributes them gains particular salience, and turns outparticularly elusive to be fully achieved, under circumstances of interna-tional migration.

Of course, the discursive conflation between homeland – and/ornation – and home is particularly deep-rooted in nationalist regimes;however, it is by no means restricted to them (Duyvendak, 2011). Ithas both broader and country-specific roots, depending on the ways inwhich homeland has been conceptualized and politically institutiona-lized over time. All of them touch deep emotional chords among com-mon people, and are particularly salient after biographical developmentssuch as extended mobility, or visible ethnic diversification in one’s livingenvironment. Leaving the homeland, particularly under circumstances ofvoluntary migration, may well engender an all-encompassing nostalgiafor it as synonymous with home. The overlapping between home andnation (or other frames of collective identification) is equally enhanced inthe eyes of native inhabitants of receiving countries, in the face of aperceived disruption, or even loss, of the sensorial landscapes that usedto surround them. This is still more the case for those who cannot afford


to isolate themselves from the potential downsides of day-to-day inter-ethnic relations in deprived areas.

Underlying the homeland-home equation is a fundamentally (andnecessarily) territorial frame (Malkki, 1992). The meaning and functionof “home as a territory” (Fox, 2002) – a privileged space to be protectedand brought under personal control – is replicated in the territoriality ofhomeland at large. How far the replication can or should reach is, how-ever, far from clear. On the one hand, the attribution of distinctive mean-ings and emotions, to distinguish what is home from what is not, mayapply also at a larger scale of homeland or nation. On the other hand,while this concerns the familiarity dimension of home, the prospects forreplicating security and control are more dubious. Furthermore, the trans-national attachments and relationships on which the experience of homerelies, particularly for mobile people, are difficult to replicate on the scaleof homeland.

At the same time, one need not enter the debate on so-called globaliza-tion to see that the homeland pretension to full territorial control,renamed as sovereignty and autonomy, is still more elusive than thehome one. Whatever the merit of “home defined as a country”, the“territorialization of citizenship, community, identity, and belonging”(Lucas & Purkayastha, 2007) on which this definition relies is at oddswith cross-border processes and influences such as those engendered bymigration. Despite this, or possibly because of it, the conflation has stillvery real and significant social consequences.

In itself, of course, the extension of home to the homeland or to thenation is just a metaphor. Even so, its power for emotional mobilizationcannot be underestimated. Such a discursive reconstruction can be purpo-sefully advanced by a variety of political actors, resulting in competingclaims about “who fits into the polity, the political home” (Staeheli &Nagel, 2006: 1599); in other words, to whom the homeland is actuallyhome, under what conditions and why. This makes for a multi-sited andcontentious discursive field, where different political interests and agendasinteract under different balances of power (cf. the following sections).Native inhabitants, groups and authorities, including nativist and populistpolitical actors, have a major stake in this process. A parallel discursivereframing resounds in the public representations of governments in emi-gration countries, wherever diaspora-reaching discourses and policiesappeal to migrants’ nostalgic allegiance to their (supposedly unabatedand collective) home (Skrbis, 2008; Ralph, 2009; Boccagni, 2014b).


Most important, some overlapping between homeland and home tendsto be retained in the emotional and cognitive frames of migrants them-selves. Quite telling about this are their shared recollections, at leastregarding the “warmer” traits of what they left behind. A sense of ongoingprojection of home toward the homeland – rather than only the place orthe household left behind – has been highlighted among immigrant new-comers and even their descendants, as emerging from their ways of iden-tification, domesticity and sociability (e.g. Wiles, 2008; Abdelhady, 2008;Silva, 2009).2 At least in terms of symbolic ethnicity, then, migrants’search for home may be also – among other things – a search for the(past) homeland (cf. Basu, 2001).

Nonetheless, having said of the emotional power of the homeland-as-home discursive field, migrants and their descendants, as much as retur-nees, tend to occupy an awkward position within it (Baldassar, 2001;Markowitz & Stefansson, 2004). As Van der Horst concludes:

As long as they are not fully accepted members of their new society theirhomelike ties to their country of residence are not fully recognised, either bythemselves or by others. But this is not necessarily compensated with a homein their country of origin. They often retain relations with “home villages”but when there, take the role of visitors and in fact are expected to do so.(Van der Horst, 2004: 38)

In order to research the political side of the migration-home nexus, there-fore, the homeland-home equation should be systematically unpacked. Itis not enough to recognize that home is a scalar concept, unless itsdifferent meanings at different scales, and their mutual interactions, areanalysed. There is nothing obvious or natural in it – for migrants or, forthat matter, their sedentary and native counterparts. What migrants orreturnees frame as homeland need not overlap with their past homelandexperience, with the current one of left-behinds, or with the “emotionalrestyling” of the homeland in diaspora-reaching policies. Ironically, theparallel between home and homeland is suitable in another sense: they areequally ambiguous, evocative and romanticized terms. Nevertheless, theirmutual overlapping conflates a variety of meanings, expectations andinterests that should be unveiled and distinguished, in light of the actorsthat formulate or identify with them. This holds for migrants and theirdescendants, as much as for returnees. Wittingly or not, their life experience


questions the home(land) overlap, while often bearing the emotional bruntof its disruption.

THE STATE AS HOME? DOMOPOLITICS, AND BEYOND

Homeland, nation, or even citizenship3 are not the only political cate-gories which tap into the discursive and emotional repertoire of home.The same metaphorical conflation can be made between home and thestate, in equally variable and historically dependent ways (Davies, 2014);and, once again, with migrants as a typical term of reference to mark, byopposition, what “home” should stand for (and be distinguished from).

The ways of framing the state as home are a good instance of the multi-scalarity of this concept. For political purposes, the private/public divide,supposedly constitutive of the home, can be scaled up and conflated withthe divide between the nation-state (the domestic, in a literal sense), andthe outside world, as a set of mutually separate and exclusive (aliens’)homes (Brickell, 2012). In fact, the public and private dimensions of homestand in mutual interaction, rather than being neatly distinguishable fromeach other. Whatever the scale, the domestic and the extra-domestic aremutually constitutive (Chapman, 2001; Blunt & Dowling, 2006). Justlike public issues, claims and values affect the private sphere of the home(Chevalier, 2012), its symbolic codes and its idealized functions are repro-duced in power relationships, and even in the governance, of the publicspace.

Public policy itself, and its underlying rationales, can be revisited in ahome optic. This leads to investigate the influence of predominant home-related views, emotions and practices on the ideational breeding ground ofpolicy-making. The best-known theoretical effort advanced in this sense,with particular regard to the nexus between social security and internalsecurity policies, is the one of Domopolitics, as “a master identity andnarrative for the state” (Walters, 2004: 243). This neologism shows pre-cisely how the mainstream repertoire of social representations, emotionsand moralities surrounding the idea of home is transposed to the state ashome(land); and then, politically speaking, deployed to advance the neces-sity to protect the “home space” from outside interferences, includingthose engendered by large-scale immigration (“Domopolitics: ‘our’homes are at risk” [cit.: 247]).

On the surface, this is a more benign and less discriminatory politicalregister than an ethno-politics one. As long as someone belongs to the


domus (the Latin for both house and home), he/she is entitled to equaltreatment (although, in practice, household and domestic life is marked bywell-known and extensive patterns of inequality, gendered or otherwise).However, a domopolitics frame still relies on an apparently natural andneutral distinction between long-settled inhabitants and outsiders; on therecognition of the former as naturally holders of higher entitlements thanthe latter; most notably, on the legitimate need, indeed obligation toprotect the home – once conceived as a fixed, autonomous entity and aprivate property – from any unauthorized external influence. Likewise,internal security is conflated with personal security – that of each legit-imate inhabitant of the (national) domus. Little recognition can be made,in this frame, of the rights of dwellers and non-dwellers as mutuallyinterdependent – indeed, of the diversity and mobility of dwellers them-selves, who might find their very home to be far from a natural, let alonean optimal one.

In short, domopolitics stands for all ways of drawing from common-sensical and widespread constructions of home, to institutionalize theminto the frame of public security policies:

Domopolitics implies a reconfiguring of the relation between citizenship,state, and territory. At its heart is a fateful conjunction of home, land andsecurity. It rationalizes a series of security measures in the name of aparticular conception of home. Of course there is a history to the under-standing of homeland and a notable variance in its meanings across coun-tries . . .however, in a great many of these uses it has powerful affinities withfamily, intimacy, place: the home as hearth, a refuge or a sanctuary in aheartless world; the home as our place, where we belong naturally, andwhere, by definition, others do not; international order as a space ofhomes – every people should have (at least) one; home as a place we mustprotect. We may invite guests into our home, but they come at our invita-tion; they don’t stay indefinitely. Others are, by definition, uninvited. Illegalmigrants and bogus refugees should be returned to “their homes”. Home isa place to be secured because its contents (our property) are valuable andenvied by others. [ . . . ] Hence domopolitics embodies . . . a game whichconfigures things as “Us vs Them”. (Walters, 2004: 241)

While Walters’ original argument was primarily referred to the UK, it doesresonate across immigration countries at large – from the You will notmake Australia home of an Australian governmental campaign againstasylum seekers,4 to the typical reaction of right-wing parties to the


“refugee crisis” across Europe in 2015. The question remains, though, ifthis is necessarily the only way of mobilizing home-related emotions andrhetorics for institutional political purposes (Davies, 2014). Need appealsto domus be only instrumental to “the quest for domesticity and order”,hence to “the protection of the homeland in a world of dangerousmobilities” (Walters, 2004: 248)? This is a compelling argument in thepost 11/9 world order and in the current emotional climate of interna-tional relations. Yet it still amounts to an underestimation of the potentialof home as a political symbol. For one, home and its emotional repertoirecan be appropriated by different actors, on different logics, with differentinterests. Outsiders such as migrants, most notably, can claim “home” assynonym with inclusion and recognition in the receiving society, albeitfollowing potentially conflictive – in any case, irremediably political –

pathways (see the next section). Having said this, the metaphorical useof home can open up to diverging political views and agendas toward theinside. There is some research promise in exploring how the home meta-phor is redeployed vis-à-vis the sedentary inhabitants (including migrantsand ethnic minorities) of the state itself.

Even in this domain, admittedly, the predominant understanding of thestate as home follows the exclusionary lines highlighted above. A homelens is revealing of the normative subtext of immigrant policies inspired bysome variant of civic integration (Goodman, 2010), or even by a “cultur-alization of citizenship” (Lithman, 2010). Common across them is theexpectation that migrants should somehow feel at home in receivingcountries, as a requisite for their presence to be legitimate there. As hasbeen recently observed with respect to the Netherlands – but the samecould be said across much of Europe:

Immigrants have to prove their loyalty to it [the mainstream culture of thereceiving country], prove that they feel at home in their country of settle-ment by subscribing to its dominant ideas, convictions, habits and emotions.(Duyvendak, 2011: 87)

Nothing new, apparently, in these widespread political expectations.However, their practical articulations and the ways of implementingthem are quite context-specific – on a local, rather than just a nationalscale. One could even wonder how actual policy provision interacts withthis set of expectations – does it simply reflect them, or does it contributeto shape them, along inclusive or exclusionary lines, over time? In other


words, how far does public policy facilitate, or hinder, the development ofmigrants’ (and ethnic minorities’) sense of home?

Of course, the debate on immigrant integration policies is too complexand diverse to be addressed here (cf. Bertossi & Duyvendak, 2012;Koopmans, 2013). That said, it would be interesting to revisit it in lightof the potential to create – particularly at a local level – conditions suitableto migrants’ and natives’ feeling-at-home where they are; bearing in mindthat this outcome, even when deemed desirable, depends also on otherstructural, group and biographical factors. Empirically, the home-makingpotential of public policy could be explored – and then assessed, on theside of implementation – looking at indicators such as the scope formigrants not only to retain their native language and ways of sociability(and possibly transmit them to second generations), but also to learn thereceiving society language. Mastery in the local language, and openness tointerethnic relations, are arguably as crucial to an emplaced sense of homeas inclusion in the labour and housing market, or in educational andwelfare services.

For sure, how intrusive public policies can be, and should be, is adelicate and contentious question. The key point lies however, followingHeller (1995), in the need to go beyond an unduly individualizedapproach to the migration-home question. Whether someone feels athome in a given place or not is not only a matter of personal emotions,but has significant societal consequences. The predominant concern withwhere, how and why people – most notably, immigrant newcomers – feelat home, should be reframed with a more holistic focus on the institutionaland structural conditions that make this possible or not:

The issue is not whether someone can feel at home in X democracy, butwhether the democratic institutions themselves should be considered asbasic, or almost sufficient, homemakers. (Heller, 1995: 11)

The potential for home-making of public policy, along with its variableimplementation and the perceptions of it, varies in the eyes of differentsocial groups and categories. However, it is hardly perceived as a priority,even less so when it comes to migrants and refugees. This notwithstand-ing, their symbolic and material access to receiving societies as homes – orrather, their exclusion from them – is a highly contentious and debatedquestion, to be illustrated in the last section of this chapter.


HOME IN MIGRATION-RELATED MOBILIZATION

Rootedness, autochthony and belonging to a particular place, possibly along-inhabited one, are strong and traditional markers of the mainstreamview of home (Dovey, 1985; Fox, 2002). While the roots themselves mayturn out to be fictitious, and the ways of thinking that rely on them canlead to oversimplification or essentialization (Malkki, 1992), the rootmetaphor does affect predominant imaginaries and emotions abouthome. It also echoes in some nativist public discourse against immigration,but it is not enough – in my view – to account for the political salience ofmigrants’ search for home. Rather, what makes home unique as an issuefor political contention is the attendant claim to exert control over place.Whether for mobile or for sedentary people, home-making entails somedistinctive and potentially exclusionary appropriation of space. In order towork out as an internal or privileged place (and as a meaningful relation-ship with it), home entails a boundary, or at least a “threshold” to beestablished vis-à-vis an outer, less than homely environment (Wardhaugh,1999; Boccagni & Brighenti, 2015). As such, home results in a “highlyselective experience” (Kusenbach & Paulsen, 2013: 5). Since it discrimi-nates particular places or circumstances against all others, it also “seems toentail including some and excluding many” (Duyvendak, 2011: 39).

Based on these general remarks, it is no wonder that home works out inmigration-related debates as a source of essentialist claims and counter-claims, in an oppositional dialectic between different groups and stances.Within sedentary and native majorities, there is hardly a more effectiveslogan than Not-your-home to condense the predominant spirit towardimmigrant and refugee newcomers. Even long-settled ethnic or religiousminorities – second generations, and beyond – can be questioned in theirloyalty and accused of not really belonging to a supposedly cohesive andhomogeneous majority society. Quite symmetrically, the social represen-tation of home as an exclusive and exclusionary condition can be pervasiveamong immigrant minorities – related to their own ethnic groups abroad,or to other homeland or diasporic units of identification. For migrantsfrom the same context of origin, as much as for long-settled natives,“representations of homes become representations of the self or group.Homes become the symbols of selves or cultures” – in fact, the bedrock ofgroup identity (Al-Alì & Koser, 2002a: 6–7). In this essentialist under-standing, home is to be “naturally” reproduced from the inside andprotected from the outside – successfully or not, depending on power


relationships between groups, and on the relative openness of the bound-aries between them (hence on the flexibility and adaptability of their viewsand practices of home).

Nonetheless, there is an irremediable ambiguity, or even ambivalence,in the political mobilization around home as a combination of placeattachment, collective identification and long-term residency; in anutshell, in the politics of home as a “public manifestation of home feelingsby an exclusive group on a territory claimed as their own” (Duyvendak2011: 83). While this stance may appear natural and spontaneous, it turnsout to be “problematic” whenever it entails a principled exclusion ofoutsiders that exert some claim or aspiration over the same place or setof resources. Of course, there is no surprise in local policy provisions beingoften overly restrictive, or downright discriminatory, vis-à-vis immigrants(see, for instance, in the field of local housing, Luna & Ausley, 2009, onthe US; Arbaci, 2008, on Southern Europe).

However, the crucial point lies, less obviously, in the need to deconstruct“the constructed primordial right to belong”, with its pervasive “appeal ofnaturalness” (Duyvendak, 2011: 117). A fil rouge can ironically be traced, inthis regard, between political right-wing nativism and the left-wing solida-rities with indigenous people and their territorially fixed roots, “based onthe idea that natives have territorial rights solely due to their status as thefirst inhabitants” (cit.: 117). Of course, these political stances may welldiverge, as for the openness of the views of home underlying them, andpossibly in the relations of power between long-settled people and new-comers. In any case, the point is that extended mobility challenges the pre-existing ideas of home and the attendant boundaries of belonging. At thevery least, migration unveils the double-edged nature of home-elicitedrepresentations and emotions – potentially instrumental to both exclusivistpolitical agendas and to inclusive ones, at least when home stands out as agood or a reward to be achieved, rather than a possession to be protected.

Immigrants, and other minorities and subaltern groups, can also try toappropriate the language and emotions of home for collective mobiliza-tion. A wealth of case studies exists on migrant (and pro-migrant) orga-nized forms of claims-making vis-à-vis receiving societies; whether forrecognition (ranging from appeals to their rights of legal stay to anti-discrimination and political rights, up to “cultural” ones), or for redis-tribution (i.e. claims for more inclusive policy, most notably in socialwelfare) (e.g. Koopmans et al., 2005; Leitner & Strunk, 2014; Eggert &Pilati, 2014). Part and parcel of these initiatives are also migrants’ (or for


that matter, natives’) claims for the home in a literal sense: against resi-dential deprivation, forced eviction or discrimination in the housing mar-ket, and striving for decent housing (see, for instance, the case studies ofGlynn [2005] in London, and of Habal [2007] in San Francisco).Whatever the agenda of contention, immigrant civic or political mobiliza-tion is also a way to claim home in a symbolic sense: as access to thenatives’ collective home (particularly in terms of security and social pro-tection, e.g. housing and welfare provisions); as a claim for identity reten-tion or maintenance of the minority home (hence for multi-cultural ordiversity-sensitive policy provisions); more promisingly and problemati-cally, as a demand to enlarge the boundaries of a communal, multi-ethnichome, in terms of equal rights and socio-political participation. In prac-tice, the impact of migrants’ collective claims-making is highly variable,diverse and context-dependent. It is also affected, however, by the more orless open and flexible conceptions of home, citizenship and belongingwhich inform it (Staeheli & Nagel, 2006).5

This multiplicity of uses and implications is no surprise, for a discursivecategory which is embedded in the everyday life experience – or at least inthe mainstream repertoire of desires and aspirations – across divides suchas native vs migrant, sedentary vs mobile, or political right vs left. As forthe latter divide, several authors have highlighted the possibility thatconservative, regressive, or nativist stances colonize fully the discursivefield of home, by virtue of its exclusionary downside. However, there isno reason to understand home only as an inherently conservative andbackward construct. Rather, the challenge is to appreciate that “feelingat home matters” (Duyvendak, 2011), for better or worse, and that theboundaries of the home experience can be made more extended andinclusive, rather than dismissed as pointless nostalgia (Young, 1997).

Having said this, there is more to the “topographies of home andcitizenship” (Staeheli & Nagel, 2006) than a downright oppositionbetween majorities and minorities. In an optic of homing, migrants’ lifetrajectories overall articulate a claim to feel at home – to encounter placesand opportunities conducive to a sense of belonging, recognition andprotection. Such a stance may, but need not, overlap with the establishedboundaries of household and ethno-cultural belonging; in other words,with inclusion into a domestic place or other ethno-culturally ascribedcontainers (religious, associational, market-based, etc.). Nevertheless, allof these sources of domesticity may also be sources of un-domesticity –

possibly simultaneously so, for different members of the same household


or group (e.g. men vs women, or adult vs youth); or sequentially, atdifferent stages of individuals’ life course (depending on length of stay,family obligations etc.). Some sense of home, as a situated attribution offamiliarity, security and control, can then be negotiated or even onlyimagined – if at all – in the public sphere, based on more inclusive andhorizontal forms of social relationships and support, “ethnic” orotherwise.

This is the argument, for instance, of Back’s (2007) study ofthe informal processes of attribution of a sense of home to semi-publicplaces – gardens, libraries, street corners, etc. – among ethnic minorityyouth in peripheral London neighbourhoods. As one delves into theirways of “making home from home”, the latter home stands for patriarchaland gendered kinship arrangements (which may also be a source of pro-tection, in a basic sense); the former home points to a pursuit of familiarityand control, or at least of personal security, as sometimes more feasible outof the domestic or ethnic group. Of course, no overt political stance is atstake in these intangible forms of home resignification between the privateand the public. Even so, it is hard to deny the political relevance of home –in fact, of the limited opportunities to attach a sense of it to the publicrealm, let alone the private one – that stems out of them.

Summing up, the field of political mobilization around home, as amatter of inclusion, recognition and participation or lack thereof, is shapedby two different understandings of home – a “fixed” and a “mobile” one.6

This holds across majority/minority divides such native vs immigrant,heterosexual vs LGBT, mainstream religion vs minority religion(s) andso forth. Contention stems, first of all, out of competing claims for theproperty, ownership, or at least accessibility of home as a domestic space,and/or as legitimate participation in the public sphere. Underlying suchclaims, however, there may be opposite understandings of the basis ofhome: fixed, sedentary and naturalized views, vs mobile, open-ended andpotentially multi-sited ones. The latter, among migrants, are often areactive choice against marginalization from fixed and territorializedhomes, rather than a purposeful, cosmopolitan life option to move beyondthem.7

This second understanding of home is more complex, less prevalent andmore difficult to be politically mobilized than the former. It also holdsgreater potential for political contention along progressive lines, though.After all, it is in this sense that the migrant condition is an inherentlypolitical act: it stems from the decision to leave previous (national and


household-based) homes and search for new ones, as a source of protec-tion, recognition, improvement (Walters, 2004; Waldinger, 2015). As away of “voting with one’s feet”, migration is far more than the loss ofhome. It rather entails an open-ended and multi-sited understanding ofhome, to be achieved or not, and irremediably questions deep-rootedboundaries and conceptions of fixed home-as-homeland.

Based on this faceted understanding of the political side of the migra-tion-home nexus, it is now time to close the circle, and revisit all of theprevious argument through the concept of homing, in the Conclusion.

NOTES

1. Stea (1995), cit. in Fox (2002).2. However, the recollection and reproduction of home through diasporic

practices can apply also to different scales, such as urban spaces (e.g. Blunt& Bonnerjee, 2013) or religious networks (e.g. Riccio, 2002). For a broaderreflection on the “changing notions of homeland and home in diasporastudies”, see Cohen (2007).

3. In fact, another discursive intersection, even in liberal/democratic regimes,is the one between home and citizenship. In a way, this category is afunctional equivalent of homeland or nation – a less essentialized butmore formalized one – to separate what is home (i.e. the domestic sphere,based on territorial nation-states) from what is not. As an institutional set oflegal provisions, national citizenship acts as a boundary between membersand non-members, insiders and outsiders or, at least in principle, “thosewho are ‘at home’ and those who are not” (Sirriyeh, 2010: 214). In practice,though, migrants’ access to fundamental rights is based on legal residency –at least in Western countries – and can be associated with denizenship, ratherthan full-fledged citizenship. Formal citizenship itself is “only” an institu-tional mechanism of allocation of rights: no guarantee that naturalized (orindeed, native) citizens do feel at home as a result. Instead, citizenship as asocial practice (e.g. Ehrkamp & Leitner, 2003; Staeheli et al., 2012) can beprecisely appreciated as a claim to be at home, materially and symbolically,within a given polity, particularly for outsiders such as migrants (Staeheli &Nagel, 2006).

Having said this, international migration invariably affects the overlappingbetween territory, residence and entitlements – ultimately, the sedentaryview of membership and belonging – on which citizenship conventionallyrelies. This has engendered an extensive debate on non-territorial forms ofcitizenship (transnational, postnational, external etc.; see, for a synthesis,Bloemraad et al., 2008; Joppke, 2010). How the subjective experience of


extra-territorial citizenship interacts with migrants’ sense of home, as nego-tiated across different locales and countries (and on multiple scales), is an issuethat calls for more empirical and comparative research.

4. See the Counter People SmugglingCommunication on https://www.border.gov.au/about/operation-sovereign-borders/counter-people-smuggling-communication (last consulted: January 31, 2016).

5. See also Brickell (2012) on the mobilization of home-related emotions andpractices in several forms of grassroots protest, such as the “Occupy” move-ments, aiming to assert “public domesticity” vis-à-vis governments, corpora-tions etc.

6. There is some overlap between this distinction and the one between essen-tialized and “light” ways of feeling at home, and of approaching the publicsphere accordingly, in Duyvendak (2011).

7. More broadly, the apparent universality of the home experience, and itsemotional power, can be mobilized in the transnational initiatives of NGOsand international organizations, in order to sensibilize public opinions onthe worldwide loss of the home as a result of war, famine, environmentalcrises etc. See, for instance, the Oxfam GROW campaign against landgrabbing – “Home is . . .where the bulldozers are” – analysed in Brickell(2012).


https://www.border.gov.au/about/operation-sovereign-borders/counter-people-smuggling-communication



CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Abstract Migration and home are less opposite than mutually interde-pendent notions. Homing itself can result in quite different claims –

towards belonging or control – depending on the underlying views andunderstandings of home. Sayings like “one can never return home”assume different meanings and implications accordingly. Migrants’ waysof homing, driven as they are by the need to question what is usually takenfor granted, are revealing of the material and relational bases of the homeexperience at large. This leaves two questions to be relaunched: first, thebases of a new research agenda on the ways of constructing, emplacing andcirculating home, related to migration; second, the potential implicationsof the migration-home nexus at a practical, policy-relevant level, as well asin other fields of research across social sciences.

Keywords Homing � Home � Migration � Research agenda

As I have highlighted across the previous chapters, there is an irremediableinterdependence between the notions of migration and home. Contrary tocommonsense, however, these terms and their respective synonyms arenot necessarily opposite to each other (Ahmed et al., 2003b;Mallett, 2004;Ho & Kissoon, 2012). Rather, they are mutually constitutive. Theirboundaries may blur into – and co-exist with – each other. Nonetheless,


105

the determinants of their mutual influence, and the differential position ofthe actors involved in it, are a matter for empirical analysis.

At the very least, the study of migrants’ experience is invaluable in “de-fetishizing” the meaning of home (Fortier, 2001; S. Taylor, 2015). This isnot necessarily a single and immutable place, nor an emotionally warm, letalone ideal, condition. As exemplified by migrants’ typical biographies,home should instead be appreciated as an ongoing process of emotionaland relational attribution towards a variety of places, parallel to the lifecourse of individuals and families. At the same time, migrants’ search forhome as (also) place-bound materiality is there to stay.

With this premise, four final points are touched upon here, to pave theway for further elaboration of the migration-home nexus. First, the notionof homing is revisited in light of the different constructions of home whichimplicitly shape it; second, the implications of my argument for the homeexperience of non-migrants are discussed; then, three research axes aresketched out, to orient future investigation; last, a case is briefly made forthe practical relevance and implications of the migration-home nexus.

KINDS OF HOME, KINDS OF HOMING

The notion of homing has been reshaped, in this book, to representpeople’s tentative ways of appropriating their everyday life circumstancesand make them home-like, in light of their views and feelings of home.Once applied in a longitudinal perspective (e.g. a biographical one), andrelated to migration, this concept brings fruitfully together the spatial andthe temporal bases of the home experience.

I have used homing as a theoretical fil rouge to interconnect the socialpractices whereby international migrants search for home, emotionally andrelationally as much as in a material sense. Their outsider position towardsthe receiving society (or for that matter, the sending one) makes suchpractices necessary to their livelihood and long-term settlement; conten-tious to the eyes of native citizens as self-perceived (and legally entitled)“home-owners”; revealing of the evolving interaction between humanmobility and appropriation of space.

What should still be emphasized is that migrants’ ways of homing, asattempts towards place appropriation, can be driven by two fundamentallydifferent, if potentially co-existing stances: a claim to belong, hence to berespected, recognized, ultimately included on equal terms; and far moreradically, but within the same discursive frame, a claim to exert control – to


make new life settings resemblant to what home “should” look like, givenone’s biographical, social and cultural background. When it comes tomigrants’ interaction with receiving societies, homing-as-belonging is aless ambitious stance, but one more likely to be positively experienced bymigrants themselves, and relatively tolerated by their sedentary and major-ity counterparts. More ambiguous and problematic is the “control” sub-text, whether it involves the public sphere or the domestic one, as anexpected carbon copy of the ways and cultures of homing in the countriesof origin.

Of course, the ways of homing need not be always inclusive or pro-gressive – for migrants, or for anybody else. Much depends on the under-lying conceptions of home, which are as influential (and possibly resistantto change) as invisible, unless they are explicitly questioned and fore-grounded as a research topic. All other things being equal, homing exertsdifferent consequences, whether it is informed by a view of home as only aplace, or also as a relationship with it; as a product already well establishedout there, or a process, somehow in the making; as a necessarily inward, oralso to some extent outward space, as long as the interdependence withthe external system contributes to its active maintenance.

A processual and open-ended understanding of home is, in my argu-ment, the one which better matches with the actual home experience ofinternational migrants. However, it is by no means the only one, nor thepredominant one at an emic level. Subjectively speaking, whenever amigrant (or anybody else) does not feel at home where (s)he usually lives,reframing home “only” as an ongoing search is nothing obvious. Clingingto more or less idealized fragments of the past home (e.g. memories anddomestic objects), or to unverifiable expectations about the future home(e.g. a remittance house), are easier ways of coping with the distress of notfeeling at home in the here-and-now. Over time, nonetheless, the past andthe future may prove tricky and insufficient as sources of home feelings;even more so, whenever they are subject to reality tests such as migrants’home visits. It then often happens to find out that, as Stuart Hall famouslyput it, “one can never return home”; not, at least, as long as home is framedas a fixed point in time and space, such as the house, the household, or thelocal community of origin. This implicit frame, which brings home back tothe state of a frozen entity of the past, seems to permeate much commonwisdom about home. In the case of migrants, in particular, the risk exists ofidealizing pre-migration homes as idyllic or inherently preferable to thecurrent domestic spaces; or, at the very least, as their necessarily normal

6 CONCLUSION 107

and natural condition – rather than, simply, the customary one. This is atypical reproduction of the sedentary and “botanic” bias, so effectivelyexposed by Malkki (1992).

If however, by choice or necessity, home is reframed as also a set ofrelational and emotional circumstances, a better case can be made for itsportability over space and time, as long as people have suitable resources.While a house is bound to stay put, home, as emotionally driven andrelationally based appropriation, has some degree of independence andmobility away from it. In short, revisiting home as a process, more than aproduct, holds a greater potential for a progressive sense of home-makingover migrants’ life circumstances (Cancellieri, 2015).

HOMING, FROM MIGRANTS TO THE SEDENTARY AND NATIVES

What home means, and how (if at all) it can be achieved, are questions thatbecome particularly meaningful and challenging in the everyday life ofinternational migrants. However, the ways in which migrants cope withthe material, emotional and relational need for a home, and their variablesuccess in meeting it, have much to say on the home experience ofsedentary people at large.

Through the concept of homing, Migration and the Search for Homehas tried to overcome the stalemate between the traditional “assumptionof home as a fixed and stable entity” (Sirriyeh, 2010: 214) and the recentemphasis on the fluidity of home, on the prevalence of “routes” over“roots” in shaping its experience, or even on its de-territorialization. Myargument has been that there is little point in emphasizing mobility-drivenconstructions of home, unless the underlying power stratifications andsocial inequalities are unveiled (i.e. who can afford to construct home onthe move more or less rewardingly, and under what circumstances). In asimilar vein, there is no way of underestimating the significance of thematerial foundations of home, all the more so for displaced and migrantpeople.

A major indication which stems from the map of this book is thatmateriality keeps being crucial to home. However, it need not translateinto fixity, and it is increasingly unlikely to do so. There is little empiricalevidence, across migration studies, of a sustained home experience whichdoes not rest on some emplaced materiality. Instead, locality, or at leastunilocality, does not seem to be equally central to it. As a wealth of casestudies suggests, the need to embed one’s sense of home into particular


socio-material circumstances and local places still permeates the everydaylife of international migrants. This holds irrespective of its actual accom-plishment, at some elusive balancing point between material or symbolicretention of the past homes and subaltern adaptation to the new ones. Ofcourse, leaving one’s dwelling place behind, or even losing it as a result ofwars, “natural” catastrophes or other negative circumstances is a majorand dramatic occurrence. However, the sense of home of those involveddid not exclusively overlap with such a place even before, and is unlikely tobe totally over as a result of its demise, or of the detachment from it. Theloss of home as dwelling need not involve a parallel loss of home as a socialrelationship with place – or at least, as an ongoing search to recreate it vis-à-vis other places and settings, hence to reproduce home-like materialities.The ensuing homing processes tend to be more tentative, multi-sited andopen-ended, and possibly less rewarding, than for most sedentary or non-migrant people. However, homing as an ongoing process is still there, andkeeps relying on some distinctive material support.

This also leads me to re-emphasize the relational bases of home, asirreducible to the material or territorial ones. In a homing view, themateriality of home is less a given and natural fact than the outcome of aprocess of sense-making and emotional attribution. It follows that adegree of temporal and spatial mobility in what home means, and inhow it is emplaced, can be appreciated even among relatively sedentarypeople. What is critical to homing as a tentative achievement of a good (ifnot ideal) home is, first, the relational infrastructure underlying the empla-cement of home (i.e. the biographical development of family and friend-ship relations); second, the shifting form of the “ideal home” itself, as asocio-cultural construction which changes over time, particularly aftermajor transitions such as migration; third, and most important, theresources and opportunities available to achieve a decent home experience– let alone an ideal one. Such a social condition risks being unattainable, orsimply projected elsewhere in space and time, for highly vulnerablemigrants. While the ideal home may turn out to be elusive anyway, itssystematic postponement is a particularly visible pattern in the life trajec-tories of international migrants.1

Ultimately, the bulk of sedentary people tends to perceive and repro-duce home as little more than a neutral background. Home is “naturallyhere”, as long as one’s biography and residential career is not marked bymajor disjunctures. Instead, migrant and displaced people – but also, indifferent ways, the homeless, evicted people and so forth – are in a

6 CONCLUSION 109

predicament which questions the home experience, symbolically or evenmaterially, and forces them to a more or less extended search for it. In thissense, the migrant condition is unique as a research terrain on the promisesand dilemmas of home as a processual, multi-sited and possibly incompletesocial experience (Ahmed, 1999; Giorgi & Fasulo, 2013). When migrantsretain strong transnational connections, in particular, the “interactionbetween multiple homes” over the life course is a source of distinctiveopportunities and dilemmas, which are eloquent of the need to “recognizethe plurality and tentativeness of the home experience” (Allen, 2008: 96).

Whatever the reach of transnational connections, migration entails afundamental deconstruction of home – but not of the need, and thedesire, for it. It is also a privileged venue to understand, at more advancedstages, forms of disarticulation of home-related views, features and baseswhich cut across the distinction between mobile and sedentary individuals.Phenomenologically speaking, migrants’ experience embodies home as“an accomplishment” which is irremediably “dependent upon our action”(Jacobson, 2009: 364), rather than being a pre-given place or condition:

[T]here is no escaping the fact that we are beings who are always makingourselves at home and always such that we are never completely at home. Weare forever becoming at home. (Jacobson, 2012: 181)

Wittingly or not, international labour migrants experience upon them-selves what a number of scholars can theorize at most, without bearing theemotional and relational costs that stem from it in practice.

TOWARDS A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA

ON THE MIGRATION-HOME NEXUS

Following with the argument in Chap. 2, some remarks can be made onthe research prospects ahead, along three lines. All of them are based onmigration studies but speak to the general debate on individuals’ potentialto appropriate space and make it personal, meaningful and secure. Such apotential tends to vary with the key demographics of each individual, andover her/his life course. It is also critically affected by the external struc-ture of opportunities and by the underlying patterns of inequality – relatedto education, social class, social capital and so forth, no less than to animmigration background.


In practice, the first research axis – the ways of constructing home –

involves the study of the cognitive and emotional bases of the homeexperience. Comparative and multi-method data should be collected onthe subjective constructions of home that emerge from migrants and theirnative and left-behind counterparts. Individuals’ ways of constructinghome should be studied under the influence of extended detachmentfrom earlier home-like milieus (for movers), of increasing societal diversity(for natives) and of the aftermaths of emigration (for left-behinds). Thisaxis interrogates the determinants of migrants’ evolving constructions ofhome, in light of their migratory and housing pathways. This calls fororiginal fieldwork on the reported experience of home, as embodied,disembodied and re-embodied over individual and family biographies.

Another axis – the ways of emplacing home – addresses the spatial andperformative bases of the home experience, as affected by the majordisjuncture of migration. It analyses the extent, forms and impacts ofmigrants’ home-making, against the backdrop of their local structure ofopportunities – including the prevalent reactions of native populations andtheir access (or lack thereof) to the job market, welfare services and, mostobviously, housing. This aims to a comparative understanding of thechanging spatialities underlying home, after its migration-driven displace-ment; of the ways in which the experience of home is differentiallyattached to significant people, places and objects under migrants’ lifecircumstances; of the material and relational arrangements, if any, whichthey find accessible and suitable to embody home, given their migrationhistories and profiles, and the resources available to them.

Last, the ways of circulating home, as a research axis, involve the aggre-gate effects of migrant ways of homing on pre-existing home cultures andpractices, thus advancing the study of the migration-home nexus in atransnational fashion. Developing insights from the literature on socialremittances, cultural diffusion, and translocality, systematic analysis shouldbe done, first, of the dimensions of the home experience that are them-selves mobile and portable in parallel with migration, and of the factorsaccounting for their circulation; second, on the mutual influences betweenhome views and cultures in home and host societies, as stemming frommigrants’ cross-border networks. The question, then, is how home-associated ideas, emotions, cultures and practices “travel” throughmigration; how far, under what conditions and for whom a sense ofhome is cultivated, detached from a specific material setting; how“place-related systems of meaning” (Ronald, 2011: 434), as embodied

6 CONCLUSION 111

in the homes, evolve through human mobility; how these cultural changesfeed into housing practices and policies.

These research lines share the goal of analysing how migrants’ homeviews, feelings and practices evolve over the life course, compared withtheir native and sedentary counterparts; how the biographic rupture ofmigration constrains the opportunities and orientations to (re)constructhome, and what the attendant social practices indicate about migrantintegration and transnational engagement; how the ways of feeling-at-home and home-making of majority and sedentary populations changeaccordingly; how different home cultures are circulated between countriesand local communities, as a result of migration.

AND THEN WHAT? THE MIGRATION-HOME NEXUS

AS A PRACTICALLY RELEVANT MATTER

It is standard practice, while overviewing an emerging research field, todedicate a section to its practical, possibly policy-relevant implications.This is not what I can do in-depth here, although it would be easy toshow that impalpable questions such as feeling at home or not in a givenplace or community have much to say on its social cohesion, or lackthereof; that the perceived contours of the ideal home illuminate people’sviews of their own future, and their frustration for being often far awayfrom it; or that predicting the material conditions in which people likelyfeel at home or not, in particular places or settings, is a critical requirementfor all sorts of residential activities – from tourism to social welfare, forinstance regarding shelters or community environments for vulnerablepeople. At all of these practical levels, and at so many more, the experi-ential side of home has meaningful implications in the public sphere.

However, at least within the academic subfield there is a more funda-mental and obvious objection which I cannot expect to skip, even at theend of the book. So many times, while discussing this publication projectwith my friends and colleagues, a subtly sceptical objection was there: andso what? More smartly rephrased: what’s the relevance of a homingresearch focus, unless for specific research fields such as domestic cultures,housing and the like?

Much of this scepticism, I suspect, is just here to stay. Having saidthis, I see the relevance of homing – even more so as enacted from theoutside and (to an extent) over distance, in the case of migrants – to be


clear and irreducible to the niche, however increasing, of home-philescholars. A home lens, whether focused on views and feelings, practicesor places, has a largely unexplored potential across social sciences. Bylooking at people’s home conditions and search for (hopefully better)homes, and by delving into their home-related views, emotions andpractices, a uniquely better understanding can be gained of their lifeconditions and trajectories at large. It is hard to think of any aspect ofeveryday family life that could not be investigated in the home and,more originally, through homing practices.

At the end of the day, whether a rewarding and inclusive home experienceis achieved or not is an empirical and context-dependent question, which hashuge practical import. However, this does not affect the prevalence of theaspiration to achieve it (what I have called the search for home), nor theimportance of studying the underlying social processes and mechanisms.

By now, my map of migrants’ domestic space is provisionally complete –an oxymoron which all good maps should stick to. It’s time for it to bewrapped back from a desk (or paused on a mobile device, if necessary), andbrought into the field. While more, and better, could still be said onmigration and home theoretically, it is on the empirical side that morework is to be done yet. Entering homes, making sense of the homeexperience on the move and of its determinants, and comparatively asses-sing how far (if at all) the gap between real and ideal homes can bebridged, are all avenues along which Migration and the Search for Homeinvites to move ahead.

NOTE

1. Of course, there is far more to the temporality of home than the postpone-ment of it, as Chap. 4 has shown. Whatever the material background, majorbiographical variations can generally be appreciated in the ways of emplacinghome and in the meanings associated with it. Even when a given place ishome-like in the sense of being a repository of the past memories (forinstance, those of one’s childhood), the same place need not be framed asa home-like dwelling at present; and even when a dwelling or a communityfeels like home here and now, it need not retain the same attribute in future.The spatiality and the temporality of what looks or feels like home, and isapproached as home-like, are mutable and evolving over the life course. Therelationality of home, instead, is what really persists across the temporalframes and the spatial contexts in which home is embedded.

6 CONCLUSION 113

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INDEX

AAcculturation, 53, 57, 66, 73, 75Adaptation, 20, 75, 76, 109Age, 7, 34, 38, 57, 66, 68, 75Anthropology, 6Appropriation

emotionally-driven, 108grassroots ways, 42home, 4of home metaphors, 91of place, 84relationally-based, 108of space, 49, 99, 106

Architecture, 4, 6, 60Aspiration, 8, 13, 15, 25, 37, 40, 43, 50,

52, 57, 58, 65, 67, 70, 80, 82, 87future-related, 58home improvement, 57prevalence of, 113socially legitimized, 58

Assimilation, 21, 56, 66, 75–76, 81immigrant, 75long-term, 75old-fashioned, 56

Asylum seekers, 2, 17, 54, 79, 80, 96Attachment, 4, 8, 11, 20, 30, 37, 41,

50, 54, 63, 82, 93, 100

emotional, 20to remittance house, 72romanticized, 82scales of, 50spatial, 8transnational, 93

Autochthony, 16, 99

BBeing at home, 18, 26, 74Belonging, 6, 11, 20, 21, 30, 43, 47,

59, 60, 88, 91, 93, 99–101, 107attendant boundaries, 100homing-as, 107materialization of, 43

Biographical interviews, 41Biography, 109Boundaries, 3, 5, 10, 12, 14, 20–22,

53, 60, 62–64, 83, 84of belonging, 100gendered, 60historical, 83institutional marker, 88material, 3, 22social, 62state, 53

© The Author(s) 2017P. Boccagni, Migration and the Search for Home, Mobility & Politics,DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58802-9

129

Built environment, 4–6, 30–32,41–42, 57, 60, 77

CCamps, 72, 80, 96Case study, 20, 30, 32, 39, 46, 53, 54,

56, 58, 80, 81, 100, 102Centredness, 10Citizenship, 93, 95–97, 101

culturalization of, 97relation with state, 97territorialization of, 93topography of, 101

City, 16Claim, 20, 23, 59, 82, 88, 90, 91, 95,

97, 101, 102Claims-making, 23, 44, 57

organized forms of, 100Class, 7, 78, 87, 92

middle-, 69social, 34, 38, 110

Cognition, 17, 31, 57, 62, 70Comparative research, 37, 46, 60Concentration, 37, 46, 60Conservative, 13, 91, 101Construction, 7, 14, 26, 30, 38, 45, 50,

63, 66, 69, 71, 77, 78, 81, 96, 106Continuity, 7, 26, 70, 72, 74, 76, 77

biographical, 65, 70, 74residential, 72temporal, 59

Control, 21, 23, 32, 42, 57, 62–63, 71,72, 74, 79, 82, 89–91, 93, 99, 102

DDecent home, 109Decorations, 61, 71De-fetishizing home, 106De-materialized, 44

De-territorialized, 10, 19, 50Diaspora, 25, 27, 50, 67, 83, 88, 89,

94, 103Displacement, 17, 18, 50–55

conditions, 3double, 74migration driven, 111temporal, 78war-driven, 40

Dissimilation, 77, 81Distance, 23–25, 112Diversity, 31, 36, 96, 111

multi-cultural, 101societal, 111urban, 63

Domestication, 34, 63, 90Domestic culture, 41, 75, 76, 112Domestic ethnography, 43, 45Domesticity, 2, 14, 23, 29, 30, 32–35,

50, 66, 76, 94, 97, 101home and, 14, 23renewed, 76sources of, 50, 77, 101subjective bases, 30variable configurations, 34

Domestic objects, 11, 43, 54, 107emotional value of, 11functions of, 54use of, 43

Domestic space, 8, 14, 22, 30, 32, 41,43, 54, 62, 69–71, 75, 80, 83, 88,102, 107, 113

Domopolitics, 88, 95–98Domus, 96, 97Drawings, 36, 41, 45Dwelling place, 2–3, 11, 14–16, 21,

23, 37, 39, 42, 50, 52, 55, 57, 59,61, 67–68, 70–75, 78, 87, 90,109

home as, 2, 87scale of, 16

130 INDEX

EEducation, 38, 75, 110Embodiment, 54, 55, 59, 61, 70–74Emotion, 1–12, 17, 20–21, 29–31,

39, 40, 42, 50, 52, 57, 62, 63, 66,67, 71–80, 87–89, 91–95,97–100, 106, 108, 109–111, 113

elicitors of, 39home-related, 97intangible, 82memories and, 43personal, 98

Emplacement, 12, 57, 70, 78, 82, 109Ethnicity, 34, 38, 63, 87Ethnic relations, 88, 89Ethnography, 30, 32, 41–46, 55Experience

day-to-day, 17domestic, 12, 24emotional, 11, 66, 88everyday, 3, 11, 15, 24exploitative, 14hard-to-access, 33homeland, 94international migration, 9multi-sensorial, 42, 45open-ended, 3personal, 67residential, 20, 73social, 2, 5, 13, 30, 33, 36, 51, 52, 110subjective, 10, 42, 91

FFamiliarity, 1, 2, 7, 23, 32, 36, 42, 57,

63, 71, 72, 74, 79, 82, 89, 90,93, 102

Family life, 9, 44, 55, 56, 61, 69,82, 113

Feeling at home, 11, 30, 37, 38, 79,80, 82, 88, 91, 98, 101

Filming, 45Forced migration, 14, 40, 80

GGender, 7, 34, 38, 43, 57, 66, 78,

89–90Geography, 6Go-alongs, 30, 41

HHistory, 6, 37, 40, 41, 66, 71, 72,

75–76, 111Homecoming, 81Home cultures, 52–54, 75, 77,

111, 112Home experience, 2, 7, 10–14, 18–23,

26, 31, 32, 34, 36–38, 40, 43, 46,49–55, 62–64, 66–70, 74–78, 81,89, 101, 105–111

Home interiors, 42, 43Homeland, 25, 36, 52, 57, 62, 75,

76–77, 82–83, 88–95ancestral, 25–26, 83as-home, 88, 94, 103co-ethnic gatherings, 76feature of, 83languages and traditions, 76protection of, 97

Home lens, 16, 21, 57, 62, 97, 113Homeless, 18, 43, 109Home-making, 7–9, 12, 19, 21, 23,

32, 39, 42–45, 54, 58, 66, 74, 75,79, 81, 82, 108, 111, 112

dimensions of, 42forms of, 7, 43, 74local, 82potential, 44, 54progressive sense, 108transnational, 81

INDEX 131

Home ownership, 56–58, 80Home studies, 6, 21–22Home tours, 30, 46Home unmaking, 17Home views, 26, 34, 38, 111, 112Home visits, 58, 83, 107Homing, 3, 8, 16, 18, 22–26, 30–32,

34, 37, 42, 44, 50, 51, 54, 66–70,74, 77–84, 91, 101, 106–110

Household, 5, 7, 11, 14, 34, 39, 42,45, 50, 53, 57, 62, 84, 94, 96,101, 103

Housing career, 38, 50, 56, 57, 76, 80Housing pathway, 37, 39, 111Housing studies, 32, 41, 55Hybrid-domestic, 63

IICT, 44Ideal home, 24, 43, 82, 88, 109,

112–113Identification, 2, 11, 17, 20, 21, 37,

53, 54, 60, 62, 76, 92,94, 99

collective, 92diasporic units, 99home-like, 62

Identity, 7, 11, 38, 53, 59, 69, 71, 88,93, 95, 99, 101

vs. communality, 60national, 38place, 38source, 59

Inclusion, 8, 75, 82, 88, 89, 91, 97,98, 101

In-depth interviews, 37, 39–41Inequality, 19, 34, 43, 87, 90

attendant patterns, 90forms of, 55patterns, 96social, 8

Insidedness, 10, 26Integration, 21, 38, 45, 56–58, 67,

74, 97, 112civic, 97immigrant, 80, 98local pattern, 21long-term, 56patterns, 58trajectories, 45, 59

JJourney, 17, 40

KKind of home, 16Kind of place, 50

LLabour migrants, 15, 50, 54, 79, 110Language, 5, 37, 52, 53, 69, 75, 76,

79, 98, 100learning, 79native, 52, 69, 75, 98

Left-behinds, 44, 46, 52, 58, 62, 77,94, 111

Life course, 4, 7, 12, 15, 24–26,37, 38, 40, 41, 51, 56, 61, 66, 68,72, 77, 78, 82, 102, 106, 110,112

family role, 7housing and, 41importance, 61linear, 69mobile, 7multi-sited, 72

Locality, 108, 111Location, 12, 15–17, 19, 27, 39, 40,

49–51degree of freedom, 54

132 INDEX

geographics, 51interaction, 15material, 4residence, 5response, 16spatial, 54

Loss, 17, 56, 74–77, 92, 109

MMajority-minority relations, 91Map, 3, 9, 36, 108, 113

conceptual, 3Material culture, 6, 15, 32, 37, 71, 77Materiality, 10–13, 34, 36, 51, 55, 74,

106, 108, 109Membership, 60, 88Memories, 38, 40, 52, 59, 70–73, 77

personal, 13warehouse of, 4

Migrant houses, 55–62Migration, 1–26, 30–33, 36–40,

49–64, 65–84biographic rupture, 112development of, 51drivers, 79housing careers, 50international, 2, 6, 15, 16, 19, 26,

29, 33, 36–38, 41, 43, 55, 56,70–74, 89, 92, 93, 106–109

labour, 50, 54, 58return, 52, 78, 81stages, 50temporal engagement, 40transnational, 20, 22transnational approach, 5

Migration-home nexus, 2, 17, 19–22,37, 46, 55, 62, 67, 88, 94, 106

Mixed methods, 29, 30, 44, 46Mobile, 3, 6, 18, 51, 52, 54, 82, 93,

99, 101, 102, 110, 111, 113biographic trajectories, 3

Mobility, 16–18, 25, 26, 34, 36, 38,44, 52, 54, 62, 67

conditions of, 36extended, 3, 26, 52, 62, 67, 72, 88,

92, 100homewards, 25human, 44, 106, 112residential, 55, 59spatial, 109upwards, 59

Mobilization, 44, 57, 82, 88, 89, 91,93, 99–103

Moral ownership, 63, 91Multiscalarity, 8, 21, 22, 95Multi-sited, 18, 21, 36, 37, 51, 72, 93,

102, 103, 109Myth of return, 81

NNation, 16, 22, 53, 70, 88, 89, 92,

93, 95Natives, 10, 17, 22, 26, 44, 52, 56, 62,

69, 73–75, 78, 84, 89–94,98–102

Nativism, 100Naturalized, 8, 102Neighbourhood, 7, 32, 50Non-migrants, 106, 109Nostalgia, 73, 90, 92

PParticipant observation, 42, 44, 67Past

being-at-home, 18emotional retention, 52emotional storage of, 77home culture, 53home experience, 52homeland experience, 94

INDEX 133

Past (cont.)normality and security, 80reminiscent of, 43retention of, 109significance of, 77traits, 52trajectories, 40

Permanence, 7, 45Phenomenology, 9, 26, 33,

69, 110Pictures, 45, 58Place

appropriation of, 84attachment, 63autobiographies, 41de-link, 52domestic, 2, 12, 101as home, 16, 91identity, 38integrity, 7marker of, 5physical, 11rootedness, 16social actors, 8

Place-making, 12, 50–55Policy, 80, 89, 91, 98, 100, 101

inclusive, 100local, 100public, 98

Political, 5, 7, 13, 32, 63, 83, 87–95,97, 99–103

actors, 88, 91, 93agendas, 10, 63, 83, 85, 91, 100dimension, 14, 89, 91discriminatory, 95factors, 12implications, 26, 62, 90institutional purpose, 92mobilization, 89, 101–102relevance, 87–88right-wing nativism, 100

salience of migrants', 99significance of home, 88

Politics, 90, 91, 100Portability, 12, 52, 55, 61, 108Prescriptive, 13–15, 29, 31Present, 14, 36, 41, 43, 50–53, 58, 66,

70, 77–84being-without-it, 18connect with past, 10home condition, 80home environment, 43home experience, 13, 78home risks, 79home situations, 40housing condition, 58sense of home, 52

Private/public, 14, 95Procrastination, 66, 78Progressive, 10, 63, 91, 102,

107, 108Protection, 56, 58, 72, 97, 101–103

homeland, 97personal, 7

Public space, 44, 60, 63, 90, 95

QQualitative research, 17, 37Quantitative research, 38Quasi-public, 63

RReal home, 12, 14, 17, 71Receiving society, 52, 55–57, 66,

73, 75, 76, 81, 97, 98, 100,106, 107

frames and culture, 75language, 98recognition, 97society, 69

Reception centres, 54

134 INDEX

Recognition, 63, 82, 88, 91, 96, 97,100–103

struggle, 82, 88Refugees, 2, 17, 66, 68, 73, 96–99Regrounding, 82Relational, 3, 6, 8, 10–13, 20–22, 34,

36, 41, 51, 68, 70, 74, 76, 105,106, 108–111

arrangements, 8dimensions of home, 6scales, 62underpinnings of home, 11variables, 68

Relocations, 15, 19, 40Remittance houses, 20, 42, 50, 58–61,

66, 72, 75, 81, 88, 107Remittances, 20, 50, 58–62, 66, 72,

75, 78, 107, 111Replacement, 18Reproducibility, 52Research, 3–15, 29–46, 53–55, 70,

76, 81, 89, 91alternative, 30, 37biographically oriented, 39comparative, 37, 46, 60empirical, 8ethnographic, 55fieldwork, 31heterogeneous, 31home as a, 6ideal, 62, 81matrix, 34rubrics, 20setting of, 11social, 3, 19, 26, 31, 33, 77tools, 38

Research agenda, 22–26, 32, 46,110–112

Residence, 5, 68, 71, 94Residential mobility, 55, 59Rootedness, 5, 16, 99

SScale, 10, 16, 20, 30, 45, 50, 62–64,

89, 90, 93–95cross-scale, 62local, 62macro, 31–32mirco, 31–32, 45out-of-scale, 58transnational, 62

Search for home, 19, 22–26, 44, 67,68, 83, 88, 94, 99, 106, 113

Security, 17, 32, 36, 42, 57, 58, 63,72, 79, 80–82

attribution of, 57internal, 95, 96internal homogeneity and, 88normality and, 80personal, 81, 96, 102place-bound, 79public, 96routines of, 72sense of, 32, 63, 90social, 95source, 17, 42

Segregation, 14, 20, 56Semi-public space, 44Sense of home, 2, 3, 6, 9, 17, 20, 23,

24, 31, 32, 34, 37–39, 50, 52–54,61–63, 66–69, 73, 76, 77–84

Sensorial, 43, 45, 74, 75, 92Setting, 4–6, 11–12, 17–19,

22–23, 26material, 111meaningful, 22private, 30privileged, 12, 17unique, 43

Shelter, 43, 57, 72, 80, 112Sociability, 44, 52, 75, 94, 98Social class, 34, 38, 110Social inequality, 8, 108

INDEX 135

Socialization, 67, 81Social practice, 5, 14, 26, 43, 57, 75,

76, 106, 112Social relationship, 12, 22, 31–33, 42,

53, 54, 56, 60, 102, 109disembedding, 53embedded, 12ethno-racial markers of, 56horizontal forms of, 102micro-expressions of, 42open-ended, 4reliance of, 34

Social remittances, 22, 61, 111Social stratification, 16, 55, 87Sociology, 6Space, 5, 8–16, 49–64

appropriation of, 49, 99, 106biographic, 16domestic, 8, 14, 22, 30, 40, 54,

69–71, 75, 80, 83, 102,107, 113

dwelling, 54emotional, 67external, 21home, 43, 60, 67, 73, 89, 95physical, 12privileged, 93public, 60, 63, 90, 95social, 34social reality, 10

Spatiality, 16, 26, 34, 36, 67, 69,71, 111

Squats, 54, 72State, 26, 32, 36, 53, 69, 79, 89,

95–98, 107immobile, 19inclusive, 13

Stratification, 16, 55, 87, 108Survey, 30, 32, 37–38

TTemporality, 29, 34, 36, 40, 66,

67, 69Temporary, 43, 65, 80, 81Territorial, 5, 7, 19, 50, 62, 93, 100,

102, 108, 109Time, 2–5, 10–15, 26, 34, 38,

39–42, 45, 46, 50–52, 61,65–84, 89, 92, 93, 103,106–109, 111–113

Translocality, 111Transnational engagement, 45,

62, 112Transnationalism, 21, 46, 50Transnational relationships, 52

UUprooting, 82Urban environment, 44Urban studies, 4, 6

VVernacular architecture, 60Video ethnography, 46Virtual space, 44Visual methods, 30

WWays of circulating home, 111Ways of constructing home, 66,

69, 111Ways of emplacing home, 39, 111Ways of homing, 26, 50, 62, 106,

107, 111

136 INDEX

migration and the search for home: mapping domestic space in migrantsâ€™ everyday lives

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