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A New Lens on the Migration-home Nexus

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Migration and the Search for Home

Part of the book series: Mobility & Politics ((MPP))

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Abstract

Home is an everyday, vernacular notion which potentially holds very significant conceptual implications. Migration and the search for home defines it as a special kind of relationship with place – a culturally and normatively oriented experience, based on the tentative attribution of a sense of security, familiarity and control to particular settings over all others. Irreducible to either house or dwelling, home is an emplaced interpersonal process with irremediably prescriptive bases. It is also a valuable lens, and a research venue and subject, for migration studies. The migrant condition is unique in casting light on home by default, or from afar, and on the opportunities and dilemmas related to its achievement. Transnational migration need not entail a simple loss of home; rather, the complex interaction between home and migration should be critically and contextually explored. The concepts of migration-home nexus and of homing point to a way ahead to do so.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The emergence of research centres, networks and journals with a special focus on home has been a remarkable development in the last decade. Content-wise, while an extended bibliography is out of the scope of this book, a reference can be made to at least some key studies of home “on scales ranging from the domestic to the diasporic” (Blunt, 2003: 72): Altman & Werner (1985); Benjamin & Stea (1995); Chapman & Hockey (1999); Morley (2000); Miller (2001a); Blunt & Dowling (2006); Duyvendak (2011); Smith (2012); Briganti & Mezei (2012); Kusenbach & Paulsen (2013). In terms of journal articles, major conceptual overviews of home have been provided, from different disciplinary backgrounds, by Dovey (1985); Lawrence (1987); Saunders & Williams (1988); Somerville (1997); Moore (2000); Chapman (2001); Fox (2002); Mallett (2004); Easthope (2004); and Jacobson (2009). Illuminating reflections can also be found in the works of major sociologists (most notably in Schutz’s [1945] Homecomer), philosophers (e.g. Heller, 1995) and anthropologists (e.g. Douglas [1991] on home as a socially organized Kind of space).

  2. 2.

    The category of migrant, here, broadly refers to people on the move from high migration pressure countries. While highlighting home-related commonalities and dilemmas across migration systems, my map includes only some preliminary notes on the home experience of specific categories such as highly skilled migrants (cf. Nowicka, 2007; Butcher, 2010), migrant returnees (Markowitz & Stefansson, 2004; Ralph, 2009; Bivand, 2014), elderly migrants (Meijering & Lager, 2014; Buffel, 2015; Walsh & Nare, 2016) and, in a longer-time perspective, migrant diasporas (Brah, 2005; Blunt & Bonnerjee, 2013). Most notably, my account cannot be exhaustive of the complex and emotionally laden home experience of asylum seekers and refugees. Key contributions, in this case, include Black (2002); Korac (2009); Jansen & Lofvig (2009); Kabachnik et al. (2010); Brun (2012); H. Taylor (2015); Kissoon (2015); Donà (2015). 

  3. 3.

    “Home is where one starts from”, from T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943).

  4. 4.

    Exceptions include edited volumes such as Rapport & Dawson (1998a), Al-Alì & Koser (2002a); and Ahmed et al. (2003a). See also, most recently, the comparative study of Levin (2016).

  5. 5.

    See, however, Glick-Schiller & Fouron (2001); Espiritu (2003); Lam & Yeoh (2004); Brettell (2006); Wiles (2008); Ralph & Staeheli (2011); Liu (2014).

  6. 6.

    Besides this, a systematic analysis of the migration-home nexus has meaningful practical implications. Social cohesion, urban, welfare and integration policies have much to gain from an in-depth understanding of migrants’ ways of perceiving and experiencing home, compared with natives and non-migrants, in light of their respective assets and structures of opportunities.

  7. 7.

    Of course, the depiction of an isolated individual in Fig. 1.1 – whether a “sedentary” or a “mobile” one – is an oversimplification: individuals’ ways of homing are critically affected by, and interact with, those of their significant others (primarily family members and friends), on a variety of scales.

  8. 8.

    I am indebted to my friend Mubi for the drawings in Figs. 1.1 and 1.2.

  9. 9.

    At stake, then, is the gap between the real and the aspired shape of what an individual or collective actor frames as home – in terms of a dwelling place (Clarke, 2001) and beyond. Of course, the gap may be irrelevant, or inexistent, whenever there is substantive overlap between the real and the desired home.

  10. 10.

    From Wikipedia, last consulted on 10 October 2015.

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    Paolo Boccagni

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Boccagni, P. (2017). A New Lens on the Migration-home Nexus. In: Migration and the Search for Home. Mobility & Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58802-9_1

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