Periodic Reporting for period 4 - HOMInG (The Home-Migration Nexus: Home as a Window on Migrant Belonging, Integration and Circulation)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-05-01 al 2022-04-30
Homing, an intransitive verb, points to the social process of sensing, constructing and making home as a critical source of insight into human mobility, space appropriation and inter-group relations.
While home is the apparently natural basis of everyday life, HOMInG has unpacked it through a systematic analysis of the ways of constructing, emplacing and circulating it under the influence of extended mobility and societal diversity. Home is to be understood, here, both as a bounded place and as an attempt to invest it with a sense of security, familiarity and control. How at home, if at all, migrants feel (to belong) in a given place/community is a key indicator of their attitudes and long-term attachment to it. This is equally critical to the living experience of their counterparts.
HOMInG has achieved a large-scale but ethnographically based understanding of migrants’ evolving home experience, in terms of ways of constructing, emplacing and circulating home. This has been based on comparative and collaborative research through in-depth interviews, life history collection, participant observation and exploratory surveys, among other techniques. Relevant research sites have been selected and explored in different European, Latin American, African and Asian countries. The target population has involved adult migrants and refugees, women and men, with a diverse composition by age, length of stay, legal status, housing tenure and family condition.
HOMInG has been driven by three key research questions: 1. How is it, and depending on what, that home is searched for – and possibly recovered, reproduced or re-enacted – by those who physically left it behind, such as international migrants and refugees? 2. How do mobility and ethnicity affect the sense and practice of home, individually and collectively, compared with other key variables, given the resources available to social actors and their external structure of opportunities? 3. What of the home experience is portable, i.e. detached from one’s material background and reproduced elsewhere, and what does the home experience in multi-ethnic contexts show about the interaction between views, cultures and practices of home, across societal backgrounds and along the life course?
Building on the concept of homing, at the intersection of home, mobility and diversity studies, this has enabled a novel understanding of the home experience and of its determinants along several comparative axes: migrant categories and household profiles; migration corridors; ethno-cultural backgrounds; countries, local contexts and spatial backgrounds of origin, transit and settlement.
While home is the apparently natural basis of everyday life, HOMInG has unpacked it through a systematic analysis of the ways of constructing, emplacing and circulating it under the influence of extended mobility and societal diversity. Home is to be understood, here, both as a bounded place and as an attempt to invest it with a sense of security, familiarity and control. How at home, if at all, migrants feel (to belong) in a given place/community is a key indicator of their attitudes and long-term attachment to it. This is equally critical to the living experience of their counterparts.
HOMInG has achieved a large-scale but ethnographically based understanding of migrants’ evolving home experience, in terms of ways of constructing, emplacing and circulating home. This has been based on comparative and collaborative research through in-depth interviews, life history collection, participant observation and exploratory surveys, among other techniques. Relevant research sites have been selected and explored in different European, Latin American, African and Asian countries. The target population has involved adult migrants and refugees, women and men, with a diverse composition by age, length of stay, legal status, housing tenure and family condition.
HOMInG has been driven by three key research questions: 1. How is it, and depending on what, that home is searched for – and possibly recovered, reproduced or re-enacted – by those who physically left it behind, such as international migrants and refugees? 2. How do mobility and ethnicity affect the sense and practice of home, individually and collectively, compared with other key variables, given the resources available to social actors and their external structure of opportunities? 3. What of the home experience is portable, i.e. detached from one’s material background and reproduced elsewhere, and what does the home experience in multi-ethnic contexts show about the interaction between views, cultures and practices of home, across societal backgrounds and along the life course?
Building on the concept of homing, at the intersection of home, mobility and diversity studies, this has enabled a novel understanding of the home experience and of its determinants along several comparative axes: migrant categories and household profiles; migration corridors; ethno-cultural backgrounds; countries, local contexts and spatial backgrounds of origin, transit and settlement.
The project's main findings, as the fruit of systematic fieldwork and collaboration between a team of eleven researchers overall, have resulted in a number of monographs, scientific articles and book chapters. Based on HOMInG's parallel and comparative fieldwork in ten different countries, both with qualitative and quantitative methods, the main results have involved migration and refugee studies, as well as critical social theory, housing and urban studies, material culture, development studies, architecture, and social welfare. In parallel to research, writing and publication, the team has promoted a systematic activity of dissemination and communication. Further details in all these respects are available in the relevant sections of the Report, as well as on the project website (homing.soc.unitn.it).
The findings of HOMInG have gone beyond the state of the art in at least five respects.
1. Approaching home in a dialectic perspective. HOMInG has demonstrated that the social experience of home, for any social group, is not a stand-alone condition. It needs to be investigated in relation to its opposites – homelessness, displacement, estrangement, the “unhomely” - as an ongoing question of thresholds and degrees. Its analytical purchase is strongest from the outside, from the margins or from afar, rather than from the inside of domestic experience.
2. Conceiving home as an ongoing relational tentative achievement. The project has illustrated the merit of a conceptual transition from home as a thing, however defined, to home as a tentative relational achievement. The focus is not only on the sense people make of home, but also on the ways in which they produce home, on the resources and constraints that affect this process, on the sustainability and consequences of its production. Central to this effort is the unequal possibility to inform one's life environment with a sense of familiarity, or to cultivate some predictability, intimacy and knowledgeability through everyday activities, against certain material backgrounds. The production of home is a space- and time-dependent process.
3. Making sense of home-related views, emotions and practices demands a deep and protracted engagement. People's experience of home, in an interview setting, is differentially articulated at different stages of the interview process. If questions of home are explicitly addressed from the outset, the reference to home tends to elicit a mental association with the place people live in, or the countries they come from. Moreover, it likely pushes participants to align themselves along exclusivistic identity lines (home, dualistically, as a matter of here vs there, my place vs your place, or us vs them). If, instead, questions of home are approached in a more indirect and constructive way, whether referred to an abstraction or to tangible aspects of people’s everyday lives (the places they lived in, the memories and sense-scapes associated with them, the weight of personal relationships etc.), participants are more likely to produce reflexive and non-formulaic accounts of what home means for them.
4. Scaling and differentiating the location(s) of home. HOMInG’s fieldwork has contributed to the emerging debate on the multiscalarity of home. Unlike the home as private dwelling, home as a distinctive form of place attachment and appropriation is also negotiated in the public domain. It does work out across several scales of reference, not necessarily overlapping with the domestic one. This opens up to the study of home(making) in a variety of public spaces. The core research question is then less who is at home there, than what accounts for the social distribution of the rights, skills and opportunities for people to make themselves at home.
5. Enlarging the scope of socio-demographic influences on views, feelings and practices of home. The immigrant/native divide needs to be unpacked further, just like the home/away one. An immigrant or refugee background is one only among the main influences on people’s orientation, possibility and motivation to attach a positive sense of home to their living circumstances. This also involve sociodemographics and structural factors, as well as temporality, i.e. age and length of stay.
1. Approaching home in a dialectic perspective. HOMInG has demonstrated that the social experience of home, for any social group, is not a stand-alone condition. It needs to be investigated in relation to its opposites – homelessness, displacement, estrangement, the “unhomely” - as an ongoing question of thresholds and degrees. Its analytical purchase is strongest from the outside, from the margins or from afar, rather than from the inside of domestic experience.
2. Conceiving home as an ongoing relational tentative achievement. The project has illustrated the merit of a conceptual transition from home as a thing, however defined, to home as a tentative relational achievement. The focus is not only on the sense people make of home, but also on the ways in which they produce home, on the resources and constraints that affect this process, on the sustainability and consequences of its production. Central to this effort is the unequal possibility to inform one's life environment with a sense of familiarity, or to cultivate some predictability, intimacy and knowledgeability through everyday activities, against certain material backgrounds. The production of home is a space- and time-dependent process.
3. Making sense of home-related views, emotions and practices demands a deep and protracted engagement. People's experience of home, in an interview setting, is differentially articulated at different stages of the interview process. If questions of home are explicitly addressed from the outset, the reference to home tends to elicit a mental association with the place people live in, or the countries they come from. Moreover, it likely pushes participants to align themselves along exclusivistic identity lines (home, dualistically, as a matter of here vs there, my place vs your place, or us vs them). If, instead, questions of home are approached in a more indirect and constructive way, whether referred to an abstraction or to tangible aspects of people’s everyday lives (the places they lived in, the memories and sense-scapes associated with them, the weight of personal relationships etc.), participants are more likely to produce reflexive and non-formulaic accounts of what home means for them.
4. Scaling and differentiating the location(s) of home. HOMInG’s fieldwork has contributed to the emerging debate on the multiscalarity of home. Unlike the home as private dwelling, home as a distinctive form of place attachment and appropriation is also negotiated in the public domain. It does work out across several scales of reference, not necessarily overlapping with the domestic one. This opens up to the study of home(making) in a variety of public spaces. The core research question is then less who is at home there, than what accounts for the social distribution of the rights, skills and opportunities for people to make themselves at home.
5. Enlarging the scope of socio-demographic influences on views, feelings and practices of home. The immigrant/native divide needs to be unpacked further, just like the home/away one. An immigrant or refugee background is one only among the main influences on people’s orientation, possibility and motivation to attach a positive sense of home to their living circumstances. This also involve sociodemographics and structural factors, as well as temporality, i.e. age and length of stay.