(Re)negotiating transnational identities: Notions of ‘home’ and ‘distanced intimacies’ (original) (raw)
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Revisiting the Meaning of Home in a World without Boundaries: Transnational Experiences of Migrants
Migration became the game changer fact of our global world particularly in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. According to the International Organization for Migration, the total number of migrants across the world has increased from 150 million in 2000 to 214 million in 2010 (Anon, 2016). The numbers of UNHCR (2003) also indicate that approximately one out of every 35 people in the world is a migrant and there is no single state that is untouched by human mobility (Refugees, 2016). As a result, this flow of people causes social, economic, political, cultural and also spatial problems. While people are being displaced, either voluntarily or forcedly, some concepts like culture, language, identity, belonging and home are being broken due to migration. Meanwhile, the world has also witnessed a heavy transformation process through the impacts of globalization. Every part of the world has been connected, all kinds of boundaries have been broken down and the speed of mobility has been increased. New technologies of communication and transportation allow frequent and multi-directional flows of people, ideas and cultural symbols. The result, for Castles (2002), is the transformation of material and cultural practices associated with migration and community formation, and the blurring of boundaries between different categories of migrants. So, we may argue that globalization has transformed the context of migration and since both these phenomena are now on the table together, they are affecting and transforming each other, the world and us. Therefore, in this boundless world the notion of " home " seems to be losing its nostalgic and anthropological meaning day by day. In this regard, this paper suggests to re-evaluate architectural academia's classical subject, 'what is home'. The structure of the study is threefold. First, the author aims to address contemporary international migration and challenges and opportunities arising from it; then tries to shed light on how the globalization process breaks down boundaries and establishes its new societies with the help of technological developments. Second, " home " as a notion and its changing meaning will be evaluated. Third, the survey conducted with a group of Syrian students, of a university in Istanbul is presented. Focusing on how they describe and experience home, it tries to understand how these young adults recreate an understanding of " home " away from their " real home " and also tries to examine if/how the idea of " home " and the sense of belonging differed since they had to face the effects of migration " unwillingly " in the era of globalization.
Introduction: Home, belonging and memory in migration: leaving and living Proof
Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration Leaving and Living edited By Sadan, Pushpendra, 2021
The chapter deals with belonging in migration, which encompasses the self, home, memory, journey, and intersectionalities with identities. The discourse on migration is dominated by a binary between living and leaving, where living at home is privileged over leaving; the latter often denigrated as abnormal and a rupture in the rhythm of social life. The chapter argues that while migration has been an ongoing historical process, the figure of the migrant is a modern conception. On the one hand, this figure is received as a “moral panic” among the hosts; on the other, any effort to normalise mobility runs the risk of undermining its exploitative and traumatic aspects. The chapter argues that apart from the traditional disciplines, women’s studies and scholarship on the partition, forced migration, marginalisation, experience, and pain and suffering have contributed immensely to enhancing our understanding of migration in its interdisciplinarity. The dominance of over-deterministic methodological frames of causal analysis has led to the neglect of migrants’ subjectivity towards belongingness and home in migration literature. Home is often conceptualised in binary to work, which the recent experiences of COVID-19 have ruptured by bringing into focus in academic discourse the issue of work from home and migrants’ lack of choice to live rather than longing to leave for home.
Imaginary Geographies: Border-places and ‘Home’ in the Narratives of Migrant Women
Women Migrants from East to West: Gender, mobility and belonging in contemporary Europe, 2007
The narratives of the migrant women interviewed in this research can be considered as maps of imaginary geographies, charted from their stories of mobility from Eastern Europe to Italy or the Netherlands. This chapter looks at these geographies, and especially at the migrant women’s images of ‘border-places’ and ‘home’, to analyse their relations and politics of belonging. In the analysis, these claims for belonging are connected to the dominant available ways to make sense of migrants’ social locations in contemporary Europe.
Sense of home in a transnational social space: New Zealanders in London
In this article, I explore the ways in which 'middling' migrant New Zealanders living in London and New Zealand discuss and identify with home. For these multi-local individuals, the discursive and material aspects of New Zealand as home form a framework for their everyday life as migrants living in London. Interpretation of the interviews using thematic and narrative analyses works through a conceptualization of home, migration, and identity as interdependent, through three interrelated themes: the symbolic or political nature of home; the importance of family and familiarity for a sense of home; and the role of physical material objects and places. Participants in this study see New Zealand as their home, yet by being away from home they gain new perspectives on home. In London, they engage with or resist a collective imaginary of New Zealand as home that is both self-perpetuated and externally imposed, and which both reveals and conceals ideas about individual and group identity and community. On returning from London, the idealistic and sometimes simplistic visions of New Zealand as home that structure their lives in London are often disrupted by the more complex yet more mundane version of home and self with which they are confronted. In this article, I draw on interviews about the migratory experiences and expectations of skilled New Zealanders (Kiwis) currently living in the United Kingdom or recently returned to New Zealand. I explore how they define New Zealand as home through the experience of being elsewhere, and define themselves through and against existing and new ideas of 'New Zealandness'. The discursive and practical enactment of New Zealand as home is shown to be an important framework around or against which this group constructs its various evolving identities as migrants in London. Rather than home being separate or dichotomous from migration, this group sees home and migration as interdependent (see Ahmed et al. 2003). Home itself is a slippery, multi-layered, ongoing process: although home might be thought of as a physical space, it is also, for this group, affective family and social relations, and the deployment of
Advancing transnational migration studies through home: a conceptual inquiry
HOMInG Working Paper 11, forthcoming in B. Yeoh, F. Collins (eds.), Handbook of Transnationalism, Edward Elgar, 2021, 2020
This Working Paper 1 provides a conceptual overview of the social experience of home and of its significance for transnational migration studies. Home, as a material setting, a special relationship with place or a source of distinctive emotions and social practices, is significantly affected by human mobility across borders. It is also a unique research venue to investigate and compare the transnational side of migrant everyday lives. Much transnational literature argues for migrants' unprecedented connectedness with home (societies), or for their novel scope to retain a sense of home across borders or to emplace it in several locations simultaneously. However, these evocative claims are often disconnected from empirical research. The very notion of home has been subject to relatively little elaboration in a transnational optic. Yet, there is a remarkable potential in using home, literally and metaphorically, as a prism to investigate migrant ability to retain, circulate and emplace significant aspects of the "other worlds" they are connected to, while being physically away from them. The typical dilemmas of migrant transnationalism and some new conceptual developments out of a homemaking lens are eventually discussed.
Examining migrants' notions of "home," "nation," "identity," and "belonging"
Journal of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences
This paper examines migrant workers' transnational experiences as they take on varying tendencies and trajectories that take place in both their host country and homeland settings. By introspectively looking at their non-economic personal issues, this paper explores how migrant workers construct/reconstruct themselves, seen through their notions of " home, " " nation, " " identity, " and " belonging. " Such notions are further filtered by locating them against the nexus of gender ideologies, concepts of family and parenthood, and religious affiliation.
2021
Since the 1990s, transnationalism, a as recent field of enquiry, has emerged as another theoretical lens through which we can look into the changing, evolving meanings of home, homeland, and belonging for international migrants. Studies of transnational migrants have focused upon varying aspects of the migrants’ lives: their ties with their kin; laws of naturalization in the host country, involvement in political organizations, the place of cultural iconography such as food, music, tradition in their daily lives. Because these transmigrants neither cut the ties to their countries of origin nor fully assimilate into the new culture of the host country, these immigrants fall under the rubric of transnationals However, transnational studies focusing upon the cross-border lives and activities of transnational subjects ignore the cross-cutting variables of gender, class, age, religion, ideology, period of immigration, citizenship status, different local sending contexts, which play a med...
Imaginaries of Home: Residency Identity and Belonging
2022
Our imaginaries homeplaces interweave many elements, including residence, belonging and identity. When they are attached to public spaces, countries, regions or local areas, these interweavings have problematic consequences. With reference to Paul Gilbert’s discussions in some of his later writings, (The Philosophy of Nationalism, Peoples, Cultures and Nations in Political Philosophy, and Cultural Identity and Political Ethics, as well as his chapter, ‘Residence, Identity and Well-being’ in Kate Galvin (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Well-being) this paper pulls apart these elements to explore less problematic ways of configuring our imaginaries of home
Dissertation, 2018
Wanderers in the spaces of their memories and the streets of their would-be homes, generations of suffering immigrants are traced back to the past, propelled by the crescendo of melancholic stillness that moves displaced bodies through states of in betweenness that both dispels and teeters on the far side of either assimilation or exclusion. Many transnational narratives situate the immigrant at a crossroads in terms of a loss of the ‘original’ culture in exchange for the new ‘American’ culture, where national diversities are confined to a singular framework and rhetoric of displacement, overruled by the myth of successful assimilation, whereby the hardships of adjusting to foreign spaces are ‘normalized’ and reduced to a series of trials. This portrayal, in turn, does not leave any room for the rhetoric of pain, or what I label as the ‘migrant’s mourning’, where the immigrant’s suffering is suppressed and eclipsed by a collective history of racial abjection. Insights into the psyche of the immigrant serve to map the hedge between the past and the present and absolute versus relative spaces. Applying psychoanalytical and postcolonial frameworks to literary analysis, this dissertation explores some of the prominent transnational narratives to establish that the melancholic dynamics of space, memory, and language can subvert misrepresentations and grant the immigrant mobility within the confines of homogenized spaces. It seeks to explore the ways in which the transnational American narrative employs melancholic tenor as aesthetics to empower displaced figures. Situating its protagonists at the locus of nations, these narratives underscore melancholia, mourning, and memory as tools and protocols of agency that challenge the myth of assimilation and re-think the rhetoric of displacement.