Imaginaries of Home: Residency Identity and Belonging (original) (raw)
Related papers
Multicultural places and the idea of home
Tasa 2008 Re Imagining Sociology the Annual Conference of the Australian Sociological Association 2008 2 5 December 2008 the University of Melbourne, 2008
Place identification in urban sociology has traditionally be associated with a sense of 'being at home' and connected to the formation of stable and fixed identities. The rise in transnational migration and the increasing number of refugees around the world has made particular regions and communities, within many western nations, culturally diverse. This has led to a re-conceptualisation and re-examination of the relationship between place and home. In light of this new paradigm I explore the existence of multicultural places and investigate the ways, if any, we can speak of 'being at home' in these diverse urban places. If home has been traditionally associated with order, sameness and identity while multicultural places are conceptualised in terms of fluidity, contingency, heterogeneity and difference then there seems to be an inherent tension between these two ideas. Are the ideas of home and multiculturalism mutually exclusive? I maintain that they are dialectically interwoven, especially when we acknowledge that otherness and home should not be conceived in binary terms. In order to examine this complex relationship the paper provides a brief discussion of home within the discourses of modernity and postmodernity and then links these discourses to phenomenological and sociological approaches to home. The concluding section demonstrates how home and otherness are expressed in intercultural moments where sameness and diversity rub against each other causing occasional friction but also moments of intercultural dialogue.
Introduction: home and migration -setting the terms of belonging and place-making on the move
Handbook on home and migration, 2023
What does home mean and entail for international migrants, and what is the promise of the home-and-migration interplay, as an interdisciplinary and multi-sited research field? The notions of home and migration are in a productive analytical and existential tension, whatever our understanding of home (homing) and the ways to connect it with house (housing), as a burgeoning scholarship suggests. This calls for a critical overview of the literature on home and homemaking after displacement and migration, as a large, diverse, unequal and politically contentious field. Following a discussion on seven key insights from a recent project on the same topic, ERC HOMInG, I present the contents of the handbook. Its seven parts are dedicated, respectively, to theoretical backgrounds, emerging questions, lived experiences, scales and materialities, differences and inequalities, methods, and non-Western research and approaches. Home matters for people on the move in ways that have elicited critical attention across social sciences and humanities, and call for a specific systematization.
Spaces of Belonging and the Precariousness of Home
Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2019
In this essay, I pose the question: what does it mean to be at home in a world where housing is increasingly a private commodity? I draw upon phenomenological analyses of the experience of home from Bachelard and Heidegger, both elaborating upon the fruitful descriptions of home as anchoring our temporal experience, while at the same time critiquing Bachelard’s all too hasty claim that all human beings begin in welcoming homes. As such, I claim that insofar as spaces of dwelling are not simply available in an increasingly precarious world, we ought to commit ourselves both to the work of cultivating more spaces of dwelling, and resisting an economic and political understanding of dwelling that reduces it to a purely material structure, or worse, an essentially fungible commodity or investment property, rather than a place that provides the conditions and parameters for human life.
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
Following the rhetoric of globalisation and hyper-mobility, the ideas of placelessness and detachment from place seem to be the essential features of contemporary cities. This conceals the human necessity to constantly create new senses of home and new home-making practices. Starting from ethnographic research in a multicultural condominium (called Hotel House) in Italy, the paper uses the urban experience of migrants to look at different home-making practices by analysing them as multidimensional (spatial, social and emotional) processes. Firstly, migrants living in Hotel House produce ‘home’ by imbuing domestic spaces with their own memory and meaning and creating public and collective spaces characterised by ‘homely relations’. In both cases, they produce material, emotional and symbolic resources. Secondly, the paper analyses the ‘dark side of homemaking’, inasmuch as the social density of the home-making practices in Hotel House’s domestic and public spaces also favours strong forms of social control, particularly relevant for women and young people. Thirdly, the paper analyses how the sense of home sustains a collective intercultural mobilisations against Hotel House’s institutional abandonment and stigmatisation that reveal the threshold-crossing capacity of ‘home’. Home, in conclusion, is not a romanticised, fixed and bounded place to protect. It is a plural and conflictual field of action that can support social exclusion but can also open new interconnections and possibilities of peoples’ empowerment.
Immigrants and Home in the Making
The search for home as a material and symbolic space is an increasingly salient social question across contemporary multiethnic cities. The boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic are increasingly contested and yet remain a crucial issue, especially for minority groups such as immigrant and ethnic communities. The domestication of everyday living spaces carried out by immigrant and ethnic groups entails a variety of ways of ‘cultivating home’. In a context characterized by transnational mobility, ethnic segregation and social marginality, domesticity—understood as the potential to enact a domestic dimension in meaningful places—is an important asset to resist present hardships, cultivate memory and lay out projects for the future. In this Editorial, we seek to untangle the multiple stakes entailed by the practices of ‘making home’ and ‘feeling at home’. We invite scholars to observe how, even in minute and mundane details, dwelling places and the built environment come to be imbued with social and cultural meanings, which are pivotal to survival and social recognition. The articulation of domesticity, commonality and publicness can be fruitfully mapped through the concept of ‘thresholds’, which brings together the case studies that follow. By doing so, this Special Issue as a whole lays out a new research agenda at the intersection of housing, urban and migration studies.
The Experience of Home and the Space of Citizenship
I argue that, although we are inherently intersubjective beings, we are not first or most originally “public” beings. Rather, to become a public being, that is, a citizen—in other words, to act as an independent and self-controlled agent in a community of similarly independent and self-controlled agents and, specifically, to do so in a shared space in the public arena—is something that we can successfully do only by emerging from our familiar, personal territories—our homes. Finding support in texts from philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences, I construe the claim that citizenship is a developed stance as a spatial issue. I conclude that a state (or, for that matter, a philosophy) that takes the human being to begin as an isolated individual agent fails to recognize the essential spatial relationships on which we depend— namely, those arising through our way of being-at-home in the world; and, as a result, such a stance not only misconstrues the parameters on which citizenship is itself possible but also risks developing a social situation that encourages behaviors we see in the agoraphobic—namely, the behaviors of alienated and fundamentally homeless human beings.sjp_29 219..245
Immigrants and home in the making: thresholds of domesticity, commonality and publicness
The search for home as a material and symbolic space is an increasingly salient social question across contemporary multiethnic cities. The boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic are increasingly contested and yet remain a crucial issue, especially for minority groups such as immigrant and ethnic communities. The domestication of everyday living spaces carried out by immigrant and ethnic groups entails a variety of ways of ‘cultivating home’. In a context characterized by transnational mobility, ethnic segregation and social marginality, domesticity—understood as the potential to enact a domestic dimension in meaningful places—is an important asset to resist present hardships, cultivate memory and lay out projects for the future. In this Editorial, we seek to untangle the multiple stakes entailed by the practices of ‘making home’ and ‘feeling at home’. We invite scholars to observe how, even in minute and mundane details, dwelling places and the built environment come to be imbued with social and cultural meanings, which are pivotal to survival and social recognition. The articulation of domesticity, commonality and publicness can be fruitfully mapped through the concept of ‘thresholds’, which brings together the case studies that follow. By doing so, this Special Issue as a whole lays out a new research agenda at the intersection of housing, urban and migration studies.
Home in Question Uncovering Meanings, Desires and Dilemmas of Non-home
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2021
What is the opposite of home? Is it necessarily something 'negative'? Similar questions, far from having a self-evident answer, make for a fruitful entry point for research into the social experience of home. Central to this article is a novel conceptualisation of non-home, against the background of the pre-existing criticisms of the normative, romanticized and de-politicized understandings of home. This article draws from fieldwork on the everyday dwelling experience of migrants and asylum seekers to illustrate the volitional dimension of non-home. Not attaching a sense of home to a dwelling place or set of relationships is not merely consequence of poor housing conditions. It may also involve an active choiceat least at some points of the life course, in certain household conditions. In this sense, nonhome is more than a matter of absence, dispossession, reconfiguration or implosion of home. In questioning the normative view of home as inherently positive and desirable, this conceptualisation highlights the reciprocal interact ion between home and non-home as mutually interdependent constructs.