Abstract
This paper critically reviews some recent scholarly contributions on the topic of home in migration. The recent scholarship on home in migration regards it as a process rather than a status. This process is being understood as situated and intersectional. The paper theoretically draws on two complexities of home in migration literature: A: the contradictions inherent in the concepts of home and migration (one referring to settlements and the other movements); and B: to the struggles of migrants in relation to belonging and recognition (as part of the process of home-making). Three directions that home in migration literature is taking is identified: spatial home-making, temporal, and embodied practices. It is argued that whilst the first is well argued in the scholarship, the latter two need further research and reflection.
Introduction
Home can be a confusing concept. Its frequent use in our daily lives has resulted in it being a taken- for-granted concept which most people imbue with similar understandings. The extensive use of home as a subject of study in a variety of disciplines such as the arts, humanities, urban studies, architecture, history, geography and archaeology is indicative of the centrality of the concept within our lives. Uncovering the normative definitions of home as a place of warmth and frictionless space helps us to see the role of historical and socio-cultural determinants in shaping how home is actually conceived. This allows for a critical interrogation of the notion of home, which helps to illuminate how understandings about the ‘reality’ of a home and the aspirations and ‘imaginations’ associated with it, are in fact situated understandings (e.g. how one understands, feels and enacts home is deeply rooted in the intersection of ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, dis/ability, etc.).
Migrants’ experiences of mobility and settlement are often accompanied with feelings of ambiguity about being simultaneously here and there, causing complex emotional entanglements in relation to places, people, objects and relationships. Emotional attachments and feelings of belonging are at the heart of any place that is called home. Much of the literature in migration studies problematises ‘home’ in relation to a longing for a ‘homeland’, by elaborating on ties and connections to the past life and a sense of identification to the ‘country of origin’ after displacement. The growing literature in home studies and migration is moving away from the idea of homeland as an identifier of home for migrants, and instead place the focus on the varied practices of home-making in migration. In this way, although home-making practices are tied to the notion of belonging, they are very much about material practices of home-making that are focused in the present and immediate locations. Given these changing understandings of home within this evolving literature, it is timely to review some recent perspectives located mainly within the disciplines of sociology and geography. In order to provide a basis for the field of home in migration, I have identified three books published in the last years which sketch the basics of the concept of home-in-migration. They are: Boccagni, P. (2017) Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping domestic space in migrants’ everyday lives. Palgrave Macmillan; Lloyd, J. and Vasta, E. (eds.) (2017) Reimagining Home in the 21st Century. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar; and Nieto et al. (2021) Ethnographies of Home and Mobility: Shifting Roofs. Abingdon: Routledge.
My aim is to uncover and analyse the common threads that run through these recent books to untangle the myriad ways in which contradictory notions of home and migration are understood in relation to each other. These contributions should be understood as written within the backdrop of a growing literature in geography, sociology and anthropology on the notion of home in general and home, migration and belonging in particular. The paper is structured to thematically explore these complexities and to synthesise critical debates raised within these three books: Home-in-migration: a definition Spatial home-making practices (domestic materialities) Temporal narratives (memories, future) Embodied home-making (sensorial, materialities)
Home-in-migration: A definition
Debates around the notion of home in migratory processes draw on multiple elements which go beyond the physicality of a house or a structure (Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Miller, 2001). Geographical locations in transnational journeys alone cannot explain the complexities of home in migration (Korac, 2009; Pink, 2004), as migrant movements across borders contribute to the formation of the notion of home in different settings by virtue of their departure from their last place of residence and their re-settlement in a new place (Ahmed et al., 2003) that extend the transnational geographies of home to translocal geographies of migrant settlements (Brickell and Datta, 2011). As such, attempting to offer a definition of home is not only challenging and appears to be an impossible task, but it can also become an essentialist endeavour to pinpoint migrants to different locations.
Based on a critical review of several strands of literature, Boccagni (2017) offers a conceptual map for the study of migrants’ quest to find and make home. Whilst home is historically associated with sedentariness and migration with mobility, Boccagni attends to an understanding of home in this entanglement of moving and making a home. He argues that migration is a source of ‘de-naturalizing’ home as the act of mobility reveals the constructed notion of home. He presents his understanding of home as ‘both a material environment and a set of meaningful relationships, re-collections and aspirations to be emplaced, successfully or not, over space and time’ (xxiv). Home, in this book is presented as a ‘search’, which denotes an unfinished accomplishment and a process of negotiation that includes on one hand, a variety of migrants’ previous homes (perhaps in under-privileged conditions) in parallel with their ongoing attempts at re-making a new home.
Boccagni avoids using the loss of a home in transnational migration, but instead calls for attention to the dynamic interaction between home and migration contexts. He offers two concepts: migration-home nexus and homing as a way to push forward this dynamic relationship. Separating home from a house (as a place of dwelling), Boccagni argues that a home is a special relationship (rather than a bond or tie) with a place which is performative and interactive. Boccagni (2017: 7) offers three elements to home: security, familiarity and control.
By security he refers to the sense of personal protection and integrity that comes with being located in a place to which others do not have access, and where a person’s identity is not in question. Familiarity, both in emotional and cognitive aspects, refers to ‘space, stability, routine, continuity or even permanence’, all of which are not easy to reconcile with movement and migration. Familiarity also refers to the connection made between the domestic space and larger settings such as the neighbourhood. By control, as an equally important though less important factor than the previous two, he refers to the sense of autonomy of persons using the settings and both their ability to express themselves, and practice events, inside the space and outside of public gaze and judgement (pp. 7–9).
The other definitions of home are more or less similar to Boccagni’s approach, though the individual contributions in Lloyd and Vasta’s (2017) volume are wider, both in the array of definitions as well as the analytical scope of homes. The different chapters offer a multi-scalar approach to the definition of home. As they argue, home can ‘symbolize a place of warmth and security as well as a place of fear and exploitation’ (Lloyd and Vasta, 2017: 1). Home can also mean a locality, to which people feel some geographical proximity in relation to other people. For politicians, home can also mean a nation, fulfilling some criteria in relation to birthplace and culture (p. 1), although people tend to relate home to family, local and transnational home more than they do to nation according to the authors. However, counting the ‘nation as home is context based 1 and mostly controversial which needs to be read within historical contexts. The authors highlight that the focus of the book is about critically discussing the structures and contexts within which home is constructed, hence multiscalarity of home is evident throughout the book. They argue that ‘home can no longer be seen as a purely self-sufficient concept and place, as it is indeed these external pressures that make us feel we are at home or 'not at home’ (p. 1). This latter point is an important aspect of their book where they discuss the range of politics of belonging that are in place for migrants to achieve a sense of recognition. This book understands home as practised rather than a stable entity. Such an approach as the editors suggest, goes beyond notions of ‘being’ at home but rather, embeds the discussion on the process of making home. By offering ‘home as practised, as process and event, the debates open up home for new kinds of analysis as well as offering us a new set of possibilities to make ourselves at home in relation to others’ (p. 4). Such an approach entails new forms of belonging in the sense that the home ‘does not belong to us but we belong to home’ (p. 4).
Nieto, Massa and Bonfanti’s definition of home very much follows Boccagni’s definition of home in relation to the three main elements of security, familiarity and control. Nieto et al. address keywords that are pertinent to home using three theoretical approaches from phenomenology (Heidegger), diaspora studies (Brah, 1996) and mobilities (Sheller and Urry, 2006), their approach to mapping home in migration is diverse and offers important insights into the study of home in the context of transnational movement. The book is based on extensive fieldwork conducted by the authors with six different migrant groups (from Eritrea, Somalia, Pakistan and India, Ecuador and Peru) in five countries, namely, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK.
These definitions of home highlight the multi-faceted complexities that are inherent within the notion of home. The definitions offered above direct us to two important complexities of home. The first is the complexity of seemingly contradictory elements that are seen in relation to home-in-migration such as settlement and movement, departure and arrival, rooting and uprooting. The second complexity evident in these definitions is that although migrants may be ‘successful’ in creating a home, there are spatial, temporal and embodied concepts that run through most of these contributions: one is the sense of belonging stemming from emotional attachments to people, places and relationships (Yuval-Davis, 2006) and the other is the sense of recognition that one needs to feel as part of the process of home-making (Fathi, 2015).
Spatial home-making practices (domestic materialities)
Drawing on a distinction between space and time is a heuristic one as spatial and temporal practices are both necessary to understand home under the conditions of mobility and diversity. As migrants move, their definitions and practices of home can change. Martina Giuffré’s (2017: 57–71) chapter, ‘The transnational matrifocal home among Cape Verdean migrant women: The case of Santa Antão island’ presents the concept of home as beyond a merely physical space, by including a set of practices and repetitive habits of migrants. Her research on independent women’s emigration has changed the meaning of home in the island of Santa Antão where home is seen ‘as a place of habitual practices and interactions, creating another way of being-in-the-world’ (p. 57). Home, as Giuffré puts it, is both a place of identification that can be a personal space containing relationships with others as well as a contested space where intersectional categorizations are performed. Traditional divisions of labour based on gender determined the spatial divisions, where everything that was related to the sense of home (the Terra Mamaizinha) constituted the women’s world, such as the space of the house, which was defined as an exclusively female space. In contrast, the sea, the outdoors and the dangerous spaces outside of home were marked as masculine spaces (Terra Longe). Such a view also marked the outside world as dangerous and unknown and emigration as a masculine act which was performed in the forms of slavery, sailing and forced migration to other islands (pp. 59–60). This view has changed since the 1970s with women increasingly migrating to countries in Europe and North America.
Whilst men’s emigration was temporary and cyclical, women’s emigration has become more permanent in terms of their home-making outside the islands. These movements have changed how home is perceived in Cape Verde (home) and how Terra Longe (outside home) is now perceived. The latter has become ‘feminised’ by virtue of women’s permanent emigration to the outside world, and is viewed as now tamed and domesticated, posing no danger to those who venture off the island. The former, domestic and local spaces of Cape Verde have refashioned their picture of home as a domestic female space, where it is now viewed as nuanced spaces where the presence of men are experienced more. These gendered emigrations, as Giuffré puts it, create transnational and local matrifocality. She argues how female migrants’ remittances sent to pay for the left-behind children’s expenses also bestow relative power to other female family members such as aunts, grandmothers, or even female neighbours who take on the role of ‘local mothers’. This shifting role of women (even at a distance) as the decision-making heads of the family, a role that was formally held by men, reveals how spaces of home are tied to power and the relative financial positions of family members. Thinking through spaces and control as dyadic elements of home, what Giuffré’s research shows us is that women’s shifting positions within the family, shaped and facilitated through transnational mobilities of individuals and remittances, is an example of how control of space can be shaped transnationally, a concept that requires further research.
Whilst Giuffré refers to the dynamics of space ‘back-home’ in Cape Verde, in her chapter: ‘the migrant ‘stranger’ at home: ‘Australian shared values and the national imaginary’ Vasta (2017: 42) draws on another space, where migrants settle to make new homes. She argues that ‘migrants understand and experience the values, traditions and practices of the society into which they are settling or have settled, and in the process, they re-configure individual and collective identities’. Migrants are very often presented as the other or the stranger, as someone who is new to a social context and understands life differently or at a distance from other ‘settled’ citizens in that context. She draws on Simmel’s (1950) idea of proximity and distance (being in the group but not of the group), and individuality and community, to present how home is constructed and experienced by Australians of migrant decent. Analysing migrants’ experience and understanding of the Australian nation as home, she looks at ‘the migrant stranger at home’ (p. 42). She presents a contested argument about this duality in the Australian context: ‘Home becomes an ambiguous space, a paradox for the national imaginary where migrants are both insiders and outsiders, though they can be only one or the other’ (p. 42). For her, hybridity and hybrid knowledge does not rule out an outside status, it is about the coming together of different positionings, including marginalisation.
The findings presented here, driven from the insider/outsider positions of Australians with immigration histories, show how definitions of national home are bound to the dominantly defined Australian values within which a multicultural society (like Australia) needs to fit. As one of Vasta’s respondents puts it: “I tell you how I would like to define [Australian values]. I’d like them to be defined by being a multicultural society of people being vegetarian or going to a temple or going to a mosque or going to the beach or going for a walk…That’s the sort of Australian values that I hold” (p. 45, emphasis in original).
Vasta’s deep analysis of migrants’ position as a stranger at home places her argument within debates around recognition, and the sense of belonging. Since the 1980s, sociologists (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983) have examined how racialised boundaries are used to demarcate the distinction between who is part of ‘us’ and who can be considered ‘them’, even though that the latter (geographically) are living within what is viewed as ‘us’. As Yuval-Davis (2006) argues this situation (presentation of the ‘other’ living within ‘us’) poses an even more heightened ‘danger’ to the normalised and dominant narratives of belonging used in nationalist discourses represented in the space of a country.
Much of what is happening at national level in relation to home, can be traced back to the domestic space, as many feminist geographers have argued. Bonfanti (2021) in ‘Diversities’, focuses on private home places, and the intersectional interpersonal relationships, which considers the intimate space of home as a threshold between public and private life. Showing multiscalarity of home in this piece, Bonfanti says: ‘[…] any scale of homes (be they dwellings, neighbourhoods, cities or states) mirrors and forges people’s diversity: their multiple identities, belongings and subjectivities’ (p. 117). The three sections of the chapter illustrate diversities of home-in-migration: The first part is engendering homes, drawing on the space of the kitchen as the most gendered space within the domestic boundaries of a home where much of the decisions as well as much of the domestic violence happens (usually by men against women). She presents the kitchen space as an ambivalent space of nurturing and violence at the same time (pp. 119–123). The second part of Diversities is ‘Queering homes’, which focuses on bedroom space within the domestic sphere, characterising the heteronormativity of the space of home with underlying and hidden values around sexualised positionalities. The author, in the third section, '(Un)Waging homes', draws on the interplay of race and class on a global labour scale which in the domestic space is clearly manifested through ‘hired help’ (p. 134) attending to the exploitative relationship existing in the domestic sphere where most domestic labour is conducted by underpaid migrant labour in affluent homes, helping to create a home for others.
The above authors presented in this section draw on the multiscalarity of the space of home, that can range from a domestic space (as complex as it can be) (Bonfanti, 2021), to the nation (Vasta, 2017) or to transnational settings (Giuffré, 2017). The authors are here referring to the tension between space and positionalities in different contexts, all of which are intersectional (more gendered in the case of Bonfanti and Giuffré, but more racialised in the case of Vasta). The right to home (at different scales) and the ways in which space makes the people, and in turn people make the space is evidently discussed by all contributors. This leads us to the next category within the recent literature, that is the importance of temporality in the construction of home-in-migration.
Temporal narratives (memories, future)
Whatever home might mean, it changes over time. The time dimension is critical to home-feeling and home-making processes in general. In this regard, Boccagni (2017) argues that the time sensitivity of home-space denotes a reformulation in relation to the ideal home in the homeland or a desired one in the future. In either case, in the context of refugees, the temporally shifting contours of home are perceived as a lack of home in the here and now (pp. 66–67). Whilst space as a characteristics of a home is definedmore often , temporality is less obvious. However since the homing process is a situated one, both space and time are necessarily entangled with one another and make up the foundations of the homing process. He questions whether it is possible to examine a home in the present without taking into account the larger temporal frame.
Homing is a dynamic process, with the search for home, a ‘temporally open and dynamic understanding’ (Boccagni, 2017: 68). The time spent in a new place is significant and making new roots in a place is as important as the time that has lapsed since leaving the previous home. For migrants, making a home is time-dependent, not just in terms of the length of their stay, but in relation to making intergenerational roots which help in creating the sense of home (Lam and Yeoh, 2004). As such, the co-presence of significant others such as a spouse, children and relatives give a sense of home to a place (Allen, 2008 cited in Boccagni, 2017). Although there are other elements such as mastery of the language or learning about the history of a place, which creates a common knowledge about surroundings, which are also time-bound factors in any case. As Boccagni (2017) argues, these assimilating attempts have little to do with the previous home, or the homeland and are shaped temporally and in parallel to the life course of a migrant.
Temporality in Lloyd and Vasta’s (2017) book is presented through the ambivalences in the notion of the modern home which they present by referring to Duyvendak’s (2011) idea of the ‘crisis of home’, denoting rapid changes to the state of home over time. They argue that these changes create longing and nostalgia about the notion of home that reminds one of the social orders of the past. The different contributions show that although home in flux changes (particularly in migration experiences, both domestically and publicly), there is still an innate need to feel close to the idea of having a physical home to which one can take refuge. Much of this anticipation and imagination about a place of safety is formed in a future time. Although the notion of home in its diversity is contested, as shown in this book, the different lifeworlds offered by the authors show that multiple visions for home in the 21st century are possible. As the authors argue, home is much more than the domestic space. It is about ‘where we “are”’ (p. 16). Although the contributions in this book offer strong cases for spatialities of home and embodied experiences, their temporal contributions remain slimmer than the third book (Nieto et al., 2021). In particular, one of the chapters in Lloyd and Vasta (2017), which did not refer to temporality, can be analysed in relation to how time spent in the country of settlement creates the claims to home, or rights to home from a different dimension. Aleksandra Ålund et al. (2017), in ‘Home-making: Youth and urban unrest in multi-ethnic Sweden’ (pp: 135–149) differentiates between home and belonging among migrants. They call ‘belonging’, ‘the prime motor where genuine creations in terms of “home-making” are achieved’ (p. 135). In the Swedish language as the authors note, the word home-making (hemmastadiggörande) is different to being a resident and a citizen (hemmahörande). Being a citizen does not automatically translate into hemmastadiggörande (p. 135). Applying Simmel’s (1950) concept of stranger (being in the group but not of the group which was discussed above), they conceptualise migrants’ home-making as bridging isolated identities (emphasis mine). Such bridging seems to appear as connecting the disconnected parts and practices of a multicultural society. Using the notion of home and the door that separates the domestic from the external spheres, they argue that the door’s mobility represents a relationship between home and agency (its characteristics of bordering one from the outside, but also freeing one to the outside operates within this duality of home and agency). More importantly in relation to the door metaphor and agency, what is not discussed in the chapter, is the willingness of establishing relationships with others when residents within the domestic space are ready to do so. One of the disturbing facts about unhomes such as refugee camps is this lack of agency in drawing the boundaries of home and who is allowed in or out.
The migrant, as such, offers an ambiguity of belonging and non/belonging to a nation as discussed above by Vasta (2017). A migrant’s position of being located inside a country and yet also being an outsider is always posing a tension between being of the home but not belonging to it. This approach to insider/outsider has an important temporal element, which the authors do not refer to, although I see they are strongly linked in these terms. Ålund et al. (2017) argue that ‘a shared consciousness of institutionally embedded residential segregation and social subordination creates a sounding board for claims for social justice as a major expression of what home-making among contemporary youth is about’ (p. 137). In other words, youth (of migrant descent) use the structural inequalities and segregations in Swedish society to claim their right to home in the urban space through violent riots, everyday creative struggles of home-making and through building support and solidarity communities. The chapter is based on urban riots in 2013 in Stockholm. They propose an emerging understanding of urban activism as justice movements which reclaim the rights to the city, and to the nation and the country, and the social democratic vision of homeland on equal terms. The authors argue that it is the very experience of injustice and a common interest in forging a sense of community that gives rise to the notion of home among immigrant youth in Sweden, or what they call: ‘reclaiming Sweden’. Whilst the act of reclaiming a space by groups whose interests and identities are not respected within the social sphere, their acts of resistance towards these sentiments, brings young people closer to each other.
Ålund et al. (2017) argue that they see home-making as constituting a politics of belonging with ‘variations in expressions but similarities in the claims and goals expressed among succeeding generations of migrants and post migrant youth in Sweden’ (p. 147). It is the sense of non-belonging that encourages young people from migrant decent to struggle towards equality and acceptance of diversity. Whilst home is a matter of making and remaking it fresh for first generation migrants, for their dependents, home-in-migration is a different matter. Temporalities that are involved for making a home for youth migrants are not about how much time is lapsed since the last home was made, but about their lifelong struggle for recognition, that places home as a place of belonging within a future time frame.
Nieto (2021) in ‘Temporalities’, presents how time is an unseen element of home-in-migration and a component of quests for achieving an ideal one in the future. In this chapter discussing the different timings of domestic spaces, Nieto, offers the notion of ‘temporal regimes’, as the structured events of quotidian life. He rightly argues that this aspect of home making is less discussed in the literature on home compared with the attention that has been paid to space (Pink, 2012). Home-making is a time-consuming process: as much as it takes practice to put elements of home into action, their embeddedness within everyday life is a matter of investment of time. Nieto argues: ‘Past home-related experiences inform and shape current home-making practices. Habitual dispositions, meanings, use of artefacts and development of skills become inscribed in our bodies, just as much as into the materiality of our domestic spaces. Current practices carry traces that become oriented towards ideal futures. Therefore, it is possible to consider that home-making “makes” time as it unfolds and reconstitutes temporal regimes’ (p. 95).
The above studies in this section show that the quest for home is never finished: at a public level (Ålund et al., 2017) and domestic level (Nieto, 2021). Even those who reach some form of stability, may develop some idea about not belonging or misrecognition whilst testifying that how belonging and recognition both are needed necessary elements to make a home, and feel at home. What is at the heart of the argument on temporalities is that temporal aspects of home remind us that home lies beyond the issue of domesticity/publicness and materiality of space. Its boundaries transcend into temporal epochs.
Embodied home-making (sensorial, materialities)
The final theme present in the books is that of the embodied experiences of home in migration. Defined loosely, the embodied practices can be sensorial as well as in the material details of domestic homes. Lloyd and Vasta’s (2017) collection offer different studies and accounts of making the home in unconventional settings, in the domestic kitchen, the migrant citizen/stranger, and transnational households. Such situations in which home is analysed as both a home and a mobile concept is unsettling, as it makes the notion of home impossible to achieve. But they argue that there is salvation in this process of making the home and its achievability: ‘A home that is never settled requires human intervention, and dimensions of solidarity thus can be formed against totalizing and claustrophobic definitions of home’ (p. 6). As such, the arguments that underpin several of the chapters here belong to those of ‘agency’ and home as a subjective phenomenon that is concerned with the processes of identifications. ‘The process of making oneself at home in these spaces entails negotiating and manipulating our identities to suit the context as a way of retaining agency over the process of home-making’ (p. 7). In other words, many of the examples in this book critically discuss everyday forms of agency through the expansion on materialities that choreograph our sense of home.
Particularly in the last section of the book, two chapters stand out for the insights they offer in relation to material practices of home. Olivia Hamilton (2017), in ‘Senses of Home’, focuses on the embodied experiences of journeys migrants take, and offers a rare approach to the study of home through sensorial experiences of home and migration. She argues that senses locate us in the world, as they connect us to the world around us. They also have the quality of helping us travel across time by remembering and making sense of homes and places that are distant in time and space. The way the author approaches home is through the ‘intermingling of bodies and places that occurs over time as we inhabit places and places inhabit us’ (p. 189). The interpretation of home that Hamilton offers in this chapter as a ‘way of being in the world’, following Ingold (2010), is an area that needs further attention in the literature on home as much of the current literature is how we make home or impact the social world and spatialities around us. This approach has a reverse approach to home that looks at how one finds herself within the connectedness of the world including humans, objects and emotions. The relationship that one makes to the environment around them passes through the senses such as smell, taste, seeing and feelings of weather (cold, smog, rain, wind) and evokes nostalgia and memories from homes occupied in other places and times. What is common to these senses is ‘recognition’, the familiar understanding that connects us to other places and times. So, our senses work as our home, particularly in post-migration life where according to Hamilton, they assist us to feel included in the environments where we find ourselves under pressure to adjust.
Ilaria Vanni Accarigi (2017) in ‘Transcultural objects, transcultural homes’ offers a different focus on home, to uncouple the idea of a home from that of a place (p. 192). The emphasis she places on her approach to the analysis of home is on the process of homing rather than on points of departure and arrival from, and to new places. Following Sara Ahmed and her colleagues (2003), Vanni Accarigi argues that home in transnational mobilities is dissociated from geographical places and instead is attached to ‘specific everyday practices’. For her, cultural practices are central in transnational homing processes. Transnational homing processes (moving away from place attachments and instead moving towards the importance of practices) are facilitated by objects which make the continuity of practices possible. By continuity she means that ‘this context is not intended as repetition of the same, but rather as the ongoing translation of a practice into different circumstances’.
Objects in the process of migration for Vanni Accarigi, ‘act as translators, shifting the terms of uprooting and regrounding, moving between different orders, locations, sensoria and histories’ (p. 193). Her approach to objects reinforces the idea of home as processual and translational rather than geographical. Her argument around objects that travel from one culture to another and are used in the new place, is laid out in four different life history examples, each revealing one aspect of the link between object and homing: Memories that objects evoke, rituals that maintain sensorium, aesthetic practices of home, ordering and disordering of things in home.
Justine Lloyd in ‘At home in public: The work of mobility and anti-racist mobile witnessing practices’ (pp. 121–134) illustrates the structural racism that permeates Australian society and how the practice rests on ‘exclusionary notions of home, which create capacities for certain social actors to displace others in public places’ (p. 121). The author draws on the individualised spaces within public transport that are delineated by technologies - what he calls ‘home in public’. Feelings of security and comfort as Lloyd argues, are built on codes that extend the rights within the private sphere to the public through notions of property and legal dominance of privileged groups (p. 123). He argues: ‘To feel at home in this space demands a disposition towards publicness that cares for the space between others, and carries the individuals within the whole. To feel excluded in this space is to feel that you have indeed been left behind. Such exclusion is deeply complex, for others have decided that your mobility is not appropriate and that theirs should take precedence: your mobility is arrested and displaces from a narrative of progress’ (pp. 123–124).
Lloyd’s analysis in this chapter remains visceral, focusing on the public exposure of bodies that are seen as not belonging to the rest of the population. The exposition of migrants’ home-making in public is also accompanied by how they see themselves and how they are received by others. Experiences of racism that structurally limit the senses and feelings of being at home are at times reversed by recreating ‘spaces of care’ within public spaces, showing great degree of agency involved in ‘being in the world’ (Ingold, 2010).
Conclusion
The books discussed in this review paper address home from myriad approaches. In reading these contributions, there are elements that can be obviously or more covertly divided into three elements of spatial, temporal and embodied homes. Whilst the arguments presented in these books may not reflect such categorisations, there is much overlap between them. In fact, many authors who have written on home and migration argue that time and space are inseparable components of home (Nieto, 2021) and more recently, understanding home through emotions and materialities is hailed as in need of much more attention (Hamilton, 2017). The contribution here presents how home-in migration is complex in two ways which I outlined at the start: contradictions inherent within and between the notions of home and migration and second, the struggles towards belonging and recognition. Whilst some of these writings discuss one or both complexities, they all refer to the role agency plays in the process of home-in-migration.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Horizon 2020, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, Grant ID: 843333 - Youth-Home.
