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.
