**IMISCOE Research Series**

# Mastoureh Fathi Caitríona NíLaoire

# Migration and Home IMISCOE Short Reader

**IMISCOE Research Series**

This series is the offcial book series of IMISCOE, the largest network of excellence on migration and diversity in the world. It comprises publications which present empirical and theoretical research on different aspects of international migration. The authors are all specialists, and the publications a rich source of information for researchers and others involved in international migration studies. The series is published under the editorial supervision of the IMISCOE Editorial Committee which includes leading scholars from all over Europe. The series, which contains more than eighty titles already, is internationally peer reviewed which ensures that the book published in this series continue to present excellent academic standards and scholarly quality. Most of the books are available open access.

Mastoureh Fathi • Caitríona Ní Laoire

# Migration and Home

IMISCOE Short Reader

Mastoureh Fathi Department of Sociology and Criminology University College Cork Cork, Ireland

Caitríona Ní Laoire School of Applied Social Studies University College Cork Cork, Ireland

ISSN 2364-4087 ISSN 2364-4095 (electronic) IMISCOE Research Series ISBN 978-3-031-51314-5 ISBN 978-3-031-51315-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51315-2

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## **Contents**




# **Chapter 1 Conceptualising Home in Migration: An Introduction**

#### **1.1 Introduction**

Migration and home-making are both integral to the history of human settlement. In order to secure livelihoods, fnd new partners, form families, educate ourselves, fee from war, violence, climate or freedom of expression, as humans, the quest to fnd another place in which to live is as old as human settlement itself. However, the extent to which the multiple locations in which we live can be referred to as *home* varies and is context-dependent. Home can be regarded as a core part of the human condition. Indeed, according to the United Nations, shelter, alongside adequate nutrition and education, is considered a basic human need (King, 1998). However, we know that home is about much more than simply a place of shelter: 'home' encompasses deeply personal feelings about the places and spaces of the intimate spheres of our lives.

As such, home is a signifcance source of identifcation for migrants. Mobility does not erode processes of identifying with or attaching to place (Cuba & Hummon, 1993) and in fact can bring questions of 'home' into sharper focus than in contexts of immobility. In an era of unprecedented global mobility, the idea of 'home' has particular resonance in debates surrounding questions of migration and bordercrossing. Public and political concerns have crystallized around the fgure of the migrant, imagined as a person 'out of place', triggering international policy concerns about migration management, increased securitisation of borders, as well as rising xenophobia in many contexts, refecting anxieties that are, at their core, about 'who belongs where' and 'who *can* belong where'. At the same time, migrants and diasporic communities develop individual and collective strategies for remembering past homelands, shaping new homes or making home in mobility itself. In other words, migration triggers questions, narratives and discourses about belonging/notbelonging in and through places and spaces, provoking refections on the notion of home and what it means.

Hence the idea of 'home' is a powerful, yet contested, one in scholarship on migration. Geographers, sociologists and anthropologists have grappled with this idea of 'home', with its deeply emotional, yet ambiguous, resonance for migrants and those close to them (Ahmed et al., 2003; Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Boccagni, 2017; O'Connor & Crowley-Henry, 2020; Pink, 2004; Ralph & Staeheli, 2011). Migration highlights the complexities inherent in the idea of home as a place or space of belonging in contexts of mobility and border-crossing where home can be a place that is lost or mourned, that is constantly being made, that is imagined, or that is found in the in-between spaces of here and there (Ahmed et al., 2003; Brah, 1996). Most migration scholarship on home views it as a phenomenon that has a much wider and deeper meaning than simply a domestic place of dwelling (Boccagni, 2023; Mallett, 2004; Fox, 2016; Miranda Nieto et al., 2021) and instead looks at structure, biographical signifcance, and feelings associated with home in contexts of migration (Mitchell, 1971; Myers, 1989; Cuba & Hummon, 1993; Altman & Werner, 1985; Ahmed et al., 2003; Mallett, 2004; Fox, 2016). Home, as a space that is associated with strong emotions (Svašek, 2012), is not just a space to which one resorts from the outside world; it becomes a site from which people understand their place in the world.

As such, home has been associated with a range of (mostly) positive feelings and experiences of belonging, such as security, familiarity, control, comfort, familial and caring relationships, intimacy, place embeddedness and hope (Ahmed, 1999; Boccagni, 2017; Boccagni & Duyvendak, 2019; Hage, 1997; Ralph & Staeheli, 2011). For example, home is usually associated with meaningful relationships such as those with one's children, spouse/partner, parents, siblings, extended family, fatmates, friends, neighbours and wider (imagined) communities. However, it is important to recognise that sites deemed to be 'home' can feel unhomely and be associated with negative and ambiguous feelings, as 'home' is always saturated with power relations (Ahmed, 1999; Brickell, 2012). Discussions revolving around ideas such as non-home (Boccagni & Miranda Nieto, 2022), critical geographies of marginal home (Brickell, 2012) and unhome (Fathi, 2022a), refer to a range of negative feelings that challenge the positivity so often associated with the concept of home. Sometimes, notions of homeliness or home-likeness are more relevant than the idea of a singular complete home. The idea of feelings of homeliness can capture the ambiguities of home by recognising how homes can be more or less home-like, shifting with changing circumstances. In this way, the idea of 'a home' can be distinguished from the more complex and ambiguous qualities associated with 'making home' (Fathi, 2021). In other words, it is recognised that home is in some ways an ideal, something that is worked towards, rather than a fxed place.

However, the vast and rich social-scientifc literature that exists on home and migration from various perspectives needs a thorough theorisation that could be of use for scholars across several disciplines. In this book, we delve into the existing scholarship on home and migration, in doing so drawing on our own experiences as migration researchers, to present this Short Reader. However, we do so through a theoretical lens that incorporates the concepts of intersectionality and structural im/

possibility in order to ground migrant homing and home-in-migration in debates on power, privilege and precarity.

In this opening chapter, frst we outline some of the key conceptual principles, or tenets, that have emerged from contemporary social-scientifc literature on home and migration, then moving on to build on these key principles to present an intersectional and structural conceptual framework for reading migration-and-home scholarship. In the fnal part of the chapter, we refect on the implications of our own home-in-migration biographies and positions for our reading of this literature and present an overview of the structure of the rest of the book.

#### **1.2 Key Tenets of Home in Migration**

We present here some key tenets of the existing social-scientifc scholarship on home in migration – some conceptual principles around which much of the literature has evolved in recent decades and which provide underpinning core principles to the subsequent discussions in the rest of this book.


(Ahmed et al., 2003). Indeed, in this way, home is understood as intimately bound up with mobility and border-crossings, or, as being shaped through the experience of migration, but also in the sense that home itself is always changing and characterised by porous boundaries (Ahmed, 1999; Ahmed et al., 2003).

(c) *Home in migration as process:* As a counterpoint to traditional understandings of home as a fxed and bounded place that one either leaves behind or stays in, current thinking, located in a more constructivist ontology, emphasises the processual, fuid and dynamic nature of home (Boccagni, 2017; Ralph & Staeheli, 2011). Home is understood through a range of concepts such as *homing desire, homing* and *home-making*, denoting home as a process encapsulating those practices, performances, desires and acts through which home is lived, felt and done (Ahmed et al., 2003; Boccagni, 2017; Brah, 1996; Tolia-Kelly, 2004; Walsh, 2011). While the three concepts have certain aspects in common, they are not exactly the same.

The concept of homing desire is usually attributed to the work of Black feminist writer, Avtar Brah, for whom the desire for home is inherent to diasporic identities, and which she distinguishes from the more essentialist idea of desire for a homeland (Brah, 1996). This idea of homing desire suggests an 'almost out of reach' quality to home, acknowledging the ways in which 'homes' (domestic dwellings, homelands) have not always been places of safety, comfort and belonging for those on the margins and challenging nativist and essentialist constructions of place and belonging. Brah (1996, p. 192) makes a distinction between feeling at home and claiming home, recognising that the idea of home is integrally bound up with 'the social regulation of belonging', wherein for some, the feeling and claiming of home overlap easily and for others, they are out of step. Hence, embedded in the idea of homing desire is a rejection of the idea of fxed origins and recognition of the multi-locality and contingency of home in diaspora (Brah, 1996).

More recently, from a sociological perspective, Boccagni (2017) has developed the concept of homing which similarly captures the processual and unfnished nature of home. He uses the concept to denote a lifelong process of 'attaching a sense of home to […] life circumstances'. In Boccagni's (2017, p. 26) theorisation of the term:

Homing […] is a range of *spatialized social practices through which migrants* – as exemplary of people who went through extended detachment from their earlier homes – *try to reproduce, reconstruct and possibly rebuild meaningful home-like settings, feelings and relationships*. (italics in the original)

In this sense, homing is viewed as an individual-level biographical process, though with a political aspect, involving an ongoing search for home, and with normative, emotional and practical dimensions, in which home in migration is more an ideal than a reality.

Finally, the concept of home-making emphasises that home is made up of practices of inhabitance at the micro level. There is not a fxed thing that is called home. Home is composed of repetitive, routine, quotidian practices, performances and acts that are done, with or without a purpose of making a home, but that function as

makers of a home. This is what can be called home-making – a process that through habitual acts, produces particular meanings, places and identities (Muñoz, 2018). The concept of home-making has been adopted widely in recent years in the home and migration literature as a valuable way of connecting the micro-level, material and everyday practices of doing home to wider social and cultural processes (Boccagni, 2014; Meijering & Lager, 2014; Walsh, 2011; Wilkins, 2019).

These processual aspects of home, as homing desire, homing and homemaking, together point to three further important observations: (1) That home is a *yearning for something that is out of reach*. Even when we think we have achieved home, there is always something that reminds us that the feeling of comfort or safety is only temporary. (2) Home lies in the *constant and ongoing attempts* towards those desires for home. It is shaped within the desire for home and through the efforts and practices of working towards making home. (3) Finally, the processual aspect of home shows us that achieving home is a *process of the imagination* in that it comes into being through our longings and desires. The spaces and places of our lives become home through the meanings that we give them. These insights remind us that home is an ongoing process that is constantly under construction through everyday practices as well as enmeshed in longer-term projects of desire.

(d) *Home and the boundaries between outside and inside:* Home is understood as an oft insecure phenomenon, incorporating strangeness and difference within it (Ahmed, 1999). The stranger is always in proximity, and as Ahmed (1999, pp. 21–22) argues:

Strangers are not simply those who are not known in this dwelling, but those who are, in their very proximity, already recognized as not belonging, as being out of place. Such a recognition of those who are out of place allows both the demarcation and enforcement of the boundaries of 'this place', as where 'we' dwell.

What Sara Ahmed means here is that by recognising the stranger as a character who does not belong to this place, we are facilitating the (re)production of social, political and geographical boundaries that demarcate places as homely or unhomely. The one who belongs may fnd the former to be valid whilst the alien, the stranger and the one who is placed outside of these boundaries, is the one who feels the latter. In fact, the idea of home is often deployed in popular or political discourses of 'community' and 'nation' that seek to draw boundaries between those who belong and those who do not. Thus, home is integrally bound up with the politics of bordering at different scales.

(e) *Home as temporal:* Understood in the sense of an ongoing process, home can be seen as composed of a set of practices and feelings that tie the past, present and future together. Home in migration is shaped in relation to memories of the past, practices in the present and hopes for the future (Boccagni, 2017; Fathi, 2021). Migrations can result in ruptures in life histories, separating migrants from their familiar social worlds, from a feeling of home that is in the past. For some, this is experienced as loss, but home may be re-created in the present

through remembering, maintaining transnational ties or carrying elements of past homes into the present. For others, who might have felt like strangers in their past homes, home can be re-constituted through migration, creating a new home in the present or working towards a home in the future (Fortier, 2003). The temporality of home is also bound up with biographical temporality, whereby certain life stages are normatively associated with aspects of homemaking/homing, such as leaving a parental home or setting up a new home. However, the ruptures produced by migration can complicate this association and challenge homing expectations (Fathi, 2022b; Sirriyeh, 2016).


#### **1.3 Structural Im/Possibilities: A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Home in Migration**

The above seven tenets of home in migration are well-recognised in the existing scholarship. However, we suggest that a stronger social and political framing is needed to contextualise home within the wider power relations and structures that shape where, when and for whom home in migration is more or less possible. There is an understandable tendency for studies on home and migration to focus on the small scale, intimate and personal level at which home is experienced. Many of these valuable studies (which we discuss throughout this book) do reveal the ways in which these small-scale experiences are underpinned by, and constituted through, wider structural and political processes of migration and settlement. However, there is a need for a coherent and comprehensive theoretical framework of home in migration that recognises this structural and political underpinning and puts power at its heart. Here inspiration can be taken from scholars of home in migration such as Ahmed et al. (2003), Blunt and Dowling (2006) and Brun and Fábos (2015), who have made signifcant contributions in this respect. Drawing on existing scholarship and wider literature, we propose here a conceptual framework for understanding home in migration that focuses on what we call the structural possibilities and impossibilities of home.

In conceptualising how migrants imagine and do home/homing, it is important to acknowledge the wider structural contexts in which desires and imaginations are formed and the *possibilities* of home are opened up or closed off. Such an approach would integrate an understanding of the everyday lived and felt aspects of home-inmigration with a critical analysis of the structural contexts in which 'living and feeling home' is made possible. Home is inherently about the politics of belonging and bordering (Mitzen 2018) – about who can belong where and the role of boundary construction, maintenance and contestation in lived experiences of home and homing (Brah, 1996; Yuval-Davis, 2006; Yuval-Davis et al., 2018). As Moore (2000) argues, home is as much about exclusion as inclusion. While home-in-migration is about the everyday and personal lived experiences of home-making and homing, it cannot be separated from questions about the resources available to migrants with which to do home. As Ralph and Staeheli (2011, p. 520) point out, it is necessary to 'be attuned to the different ways in which migrants, with different resources and different social locations, negotiate the extensibility and fxity of home'. They suggest that it is likely that migrants in different legal and social positions, with different levels of material or cultural resources, will imagine and 'do' home differently.

We understand this to have two key co-constitutive dimensions. First, social location/position is about the *intersectionality* of experiences of home, recognising that home is experienced differently by people in different social positions. Home is gendered, classed, racialised and marked by axes of social difference and power. Secondly, *transnational migration regimes* play a key role in how migrants imagine and do home, not only in terms of the infuence of laws and regulations but also as mediated by economic and political regimes of migration. Together these two

dimensions structure the possibilities and impossibilities of home in migration – via the boundaries and borders of belonging and the access to resources with which to make and imagine home. If home is a site of safety, security and belonging, then it is essential to think about it in relation to the power relations that circumscribe and delineate who can feel safe, secure and that they belong, and where and how these feelings are more or less possible. We refer to this as the *structural im/possibilities of home in migration*.

These two dimensions of intersectionality and migration regime cannot be easily disentangled from one another as migration regimes are themselves inherently racialised, gendered and classed (as well as intersecting with other categories that for the sake of concision, are not mentioned here). However, we foreground these as two core concepts that together aid an understanding of the social and political nature of home in migration. The following sections detail how each concept can contribute to understanding the structural im/possibilities of home in migration.

#### *1.3.1 Intersectionality, Identity and Home*

Home is 'situated' and should be analysed with an awareness of, and identifcation with, the interrelated dynamics of gendered, classed, aged and racialised relations and systems (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). Home as a social and individual process is always underpinned by circuits of power and networks of people. We argue that the ways in which migrants understand home and identify with a home are always linked with the intersectionality of their identities: gender, social class, the method/ route of migration, their migration status, their language skills, sexuality and age among others. As such, home is intersectional.

Intersectionality has been taken as 'the most important theoretical contribution that women's studies, in conjunction with other felds, has made so far' (McCall, 2005, p. 1771). Indeed, intersectional analysis can be traced to multiple movements oriented to equality, human rights, feminism, and development (Cho et al., 2013). Given its history, intersectionality is not a unifed body of theory, but it has spanned different disciplines that are concerned with multiple axes of power relations and how systems of oppression and marginalisation reinforce and constitute each other (Crenshaw, 1991). Each of the social categories, although related to each other, ontologically is independent and has distinctive meanings. However, they are coconstitutive, that is, their meanings are always constructed in relation to others in their ontological bases.

It is this aspect of intersectionality (the co-constitution of systems of power and marginalisation) that makes it a useful tool to understand how home-making is rooted in differential positionings across axes of power, that is, how some people are able to make a home and other are not. Whilst categories of class, gender, race, age, sexuality, ability and others are important for analysing the degree to which a migrant feels at home, intersectionality allows for an understanding of how the underlying power relations intersect each other to constitute one another and once different systems of marginalisation are compounded, they impact individuals' abilities and chances to feel at home, belonged and wanted in a society. For example, intersectionality reveals how racism constitutes classism (and vice versa) and how patriarchy operates hand-in-hand with racism and ableism. In other words, by focusing on power relations that defne and value certain individuals, groups and ways of living and thinking (Yuval-Davis, 2006), we can see how one form of homemaking in migration is valued and enabled over another.

Intersectionality then offers an understanding of knowledge as situated, which challenges the positivist view of knowledge which sees everything from the position of nowhere (Stoetzler & Yuval-Davis, 2002). Yuval-Davis (2015, p. 95) argues that:

Situated intersectionality analysis, therefore, in all its facets, is highly sensitive to the geographical, social and temporal locations of the particular individual or collective social actors examined by it, contested, shifting and multiple as they usually are.

So in this view of intersectionality, we are always positioned along an axis of power, and have a standpoint that we do not share with others. For example, as an Iranian migrant woman, or as an Irish return-migrant woman, we share some but not all understandings of home with other people with the same intersectional identity categories. While intersectionality and migration regimes structure the possibilities of migrant home, it is imagination that gives lived experiences their particular meaning. We understand who we are and we make sense of the world through the power of imagination. Imaginations are the bedrock of identities and practices and play an important role in how home is experienced and its meanings are developed. Indeed, everyone has an 'ideal home' in mind that for the present time is only achieved through imagining it. But the extent to which this ideal is understandable by others comes from the situated positioning of the person. The concept of 'situated imagination' is useful here (Stoetzler & Yuval-Davis, 2002). It recognises that no one imagines from a position of nowhere. We are always situated in how we understand the world around us and this situation has a determining effect in how we construct imagination about self and others. According to Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis (2002), imagination is the corporeal, impulsive and creative force within us that makes sense of lived experience but is always grounded in intersectional social positioning. Through our situated imagination, we construct an image of an 'ideal' (possible) home and a 'non-home' (as the two extremes) and direct our attempts towards achieving the former and distancing ourselves from the latter, that is, we imagine home and act on this basis in doing home.

These perspectives are benefcial for thinking about how contemporary migrants understand and imagine home (in ways that span temporal and spatial imaginaries), what home means to them, and how they put this understanding into practice (at multiple geographical scales from the domestic and local to the translocal). For example, how do feelings of at-homeness or out-of-homeness articulate emotionally and materially in migrants' lives? And how do ideas about past, present and future home/s form part of migrants' imaginings and how these imaginings are articulated and put into practice in their everyday lives? These are questions about home-making processes and homing desires.

In order to understand home in migration intersectionally, we must consider how a person's social location, which is intersectionally experienced, shapes the possibilities and impossibilities of home creation, maintenance and feelings. For example, home is inherently a gendered phenomenon and may be experienced very differently by migrant men and migrant women. Additionally, social class, which intersects closely with migrant status, shapes material possibilities of home-making in terms of access to housing, ability to establish comfortable surroundings and lifestyles and ease of transnational mobility. In the rest of this book, we tease out these structural im/possibilities of home in migration and we draw particular attention to the ways in which different axes of power intersect with each other.

#### *1.3.2 Migration/Citizenship Regimes and Bordering*

The concept of migration regime is increasingly being discussed and adopted in migration studies (see Cvajner et al., 2018, for an overview). While the concept is understood in a number of different ways, with different theoretical inspirations (Horvath et al., 2017), the term is used here to refer to a constellation of regulatory infuences, practices and power relations that impact on the formation of migration and migration-related social processes in any particular migration context (Bernt, 2019; Horvath et al., 2017; Williams, 2012). These infuences can include immigration and citizenship policies, regulations, histories of migration, discourses of migration, labour market dynamics, care cultures and family cultures in societies of destination and/or origin (Amelina, 2017; Lutz, 2017; Williams, 2012). This understanding of migration regime recognises the role of (powerful) non-state actors, such as business interests, in shaping migration processes, and also acknowledges that while the nation-state is a very powerful player in migration regimes, many constellations of infuence also operate across national borders.

Regimes of citizenship are closely intertwined with migration regimes. Erdal et al. (2018) argue that citizenship (understood in a formal legal sense) matters for migrants and non-migrants in relation to feeling secure and recognised in society. In effect, citizenship, as Yuval-Davis (2006) argues, is a method of governance that regulates 'the politics of belonging' in a given nation state. The politics of belonging is regulated through a series of policies used to govern and control populations, demarcating boundaries between majority and minorities and defning the boundaries of who belongs and who does not. Erdal and Sagmo (2017) argue that citizenship, as a vertical relationship between the state and individual, grants membership of this collectivity in a way that allows members to defne themselves in relation to their belonging to it. We argue in this book that citizenship and the right to stay in a host country for a migrant is an important part of feeling at home. It is not the only aspect, but is structurally very important for the foundations of making a home. The legal right to stay is a key part of what we call *spatial security*, or the feeling of secure inhabitance in a place, which comes about when the right to stay is

accompanied by meaningful place attachment (Fathi & Ní Laoire, 2023). Spatial security is an essential prerequisite for home in migration.

Structures such as international and national migration and citizenship policies as well as the dynamics of global labour markets and globalised imaginaries produce different migration regimes, which differentially facilitate or restrict migration and settlement, or possibilities of spatial security, according to migrants' social positions. These structures include forces such as the demand for cheap labour in the global North as well as the politics of immigration and legal frameworks that defne who can move where and who belongs where. These forces determine material aspects of home-making of migrants, such as their access to housing, work and social security. Beyond the immediate material aspects, how might the macro-level structures of global migration make it possible, or impossible, at the micro-level, to feel at home, to make home and to imagine home? For example, to what extent are European migrants in EU member states made to feel like migrants compared to migrants from Yemen, Algeria or Afghanistan? While some of the bordering mechanisms at work are subtle, others are less so. In very obvious ways, asylum regimes in many destination countries deliberately seek to restrict migrants' possibilities of home-making (Howlett-Southgate, 2021). Migration policy is replete with the symbolism of home/not-home, evident for example in the language of 'home affairs' and 'homeland security' that refects a view of the state and its territory as a 'home' to be protected (Walters, 2004) or diaspora policies that seek to encourage return migration of those deemed to be 'coming home' (for example, the Irish government's #hometowork campaign in 2015–2016). The powerful forces that shape regimes of home and migration also encompass the role of media, for example, in re-producing constructions of home, host and newcomer, as one element of the apparatus of bordering that works to defne belonging/not-belonging in contemporary migration and citizenship regimes. For example, the use of ambiguous language in infating migrant identity and the 'skilled or non-skilled' distinction has been a tactic used in showing the UK as not a homely place for migrants in general in the UK government's Brexit campaign (Parnell, 2023).

In the twenty-frst century, we are witnessing regimes of bordering becoming ever more present in our lives, as everyday bordering introduces rationalities and regulation of inclusion/exclusion into spheres of everyday life (Yuval-Davis et al., 2018). This means that structures of im/possibility can permeate everyday life very quickly and easily, limiting the possibilities of feeling at home. Recent immigration and refugee policies (such as Dublin Regulation III, 2017, new deportation practices and relocation of borders to outside the EU borders) are central to migration regimes within the European contexts. These policies pose a potential reconfguration of what constitutes home as part of a broader shift towards migration/citizenship regimes that are more complex than in the past. The growth in 'proliferation of migrant statuses' that means that immigrants may fnd themselves constantly moving in and out of more-or-less 'legal' or documented situations over time, points to the increased fragility and temporariness of immigrant statuses (Gonzales & Sigona, 2017). As a result, migrants may become immobile in migration for long periods of time, stuck in legal/policy limbos and separated from family members, unable to return to a past home, move on to a new home or build a home in the place where one is stuck.

This situation can be contrasted with the EU policy agenda of 'free movement' which allows EU citizens' to live and work in other EU countries with little restriction or regulation (though in ways that are contingent – see Parker & Catalán, 2014), thus distinguishing between EU and non-EU citizens in terms of their structural possibilities of home in migration. Lulle et al. (2018) refer to the privilege of EU citizenship in enabling fuid mobilities among EU citizens in pre-Brexit UK. Correspondingly, the rupture of Brexit, in removing the right to free movement between the UK and the EU, has been experienced as an affective event by EU citizens living in the UK, threatening their future stability (Lulle et al., 2018) and disrupting their dynamics of belonging (Ranta & Nancheva, 2019). Similarly, Miller (2019) refers to the 'unsettling' effect of Brexit on the sense of home among older British migrants living in Spain, which she relates to the uncertainties and questions raised by Brexit about where home is now and where it will be in the future. What this research on Brexit highlights is the unsettling effects of shifting borders of citizenship, but more importantly, the emotional effects of such changes, which can be related to how people feel about where they live and have made home/s (Guma & Dafydd Jones, 2019; Lulle et al., 2018; Miller, 2019; Tyrell et al., 2019). Thus migration/citizenship regimes not only shape the im/possibilities of home through rights of residence and citizenship but also through how they make people feel about where they live.

#### *1.3.3 Home as Intersectional and Bordered*

Therefore it is important to pay attention to the migration regimes within which migrants' lives and movements are regulated – the laws, policies, labour markets, citizenship regulations, institutions and borders that prescribe and proscribe the possibilities of emplacement, belonging, autonomy and social connection – in short, that frame the socio-political-economic context in which home is imagined and practiced. However, it is important to emphasise here that migration regimes, as underlying power relations that regulate migrants' lives, do not in themselves make or unmake home, but it is only as places and spaces are endowed with meaning by migrants that they can become homely or home-like. Emotions can be seen as a 'constitutive part of transnational family experience' (Skrbiš, 2008, p. 236), part of the belonging process (Yuval-Davis, 2006) but also, importantly, linked to imaginations about what home may look like in future. We argue that home and emotional attachments in migration need to be understood intersectionally in order to tease out the multiple experiences of migration within which people feel excluded, included, privileged or marginalised simultaneously.

It is also important to recognise that imaginaries of home are bound up with wider discourses and norms relating to gender, social class, ethnicity or sexuality. Gray (2000) shows how gendered discourses of nation and family shaped the contours of the landscape within which Irish migrant women in England in the 1980s navigated expectations and im/possibilities of home and belonging. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the wider collective discourses that migrants engage with, such as the nostalgic discourses that construct myths of return to a remembered homeland (Christou 2006), or the discourses of cosmopolitanism that drive mobilities, or the gendered heterosexual norms that dominate imaginaries of home. Thus, home as a site of belonging is about personal feelings and attachments to spaces, people and objects, although at the same time these feelings are embedded in wider collective discourses and regimes of inclusion and exclusion. Home is integrally tied up with the personal and intimate lived experiences of relationality, emotion and materiality (dimensions discussed throughout this book) while being permeated by power relations. Therefore, migrant homing and home-making can be viewed as negotiated and practiced in the context of intersectional power relations and powerful transnational migration regimes. This raises a key question that is at the heart of this book:

How are intersectionalities and migration regimes understood, felt, experienced, lived and navigated by migrants, who are differently positioned, in various contexts, in the making and imagining of home?

Foregrounding this question illuminates the role of intersectional power relations at both macro and micro levels in shaping the possibilities of everyday homing practices and of dreams of imagined home. Thus, home in migration can be explored through the lens of migrants' own imaginings and practices of home and homing. However, this analysis can be deepened by paying particular attention to the power relations that shape the possibilities of imagination and practice and the ways in which migrants navigate these possibilities. Such epistemology of home allows us to think critically about how mobilities, settlement, practices and ruptures are shaped in current debates on home and migration, focusing more on intersectional elements of home and how migration regimes limit and expand the boundaries of these imaginations and practices.

Studies of home in migration draw our attention to everyday acts of homemaking, practices to belong, feelings and emotional attachments to places, the daily routines and ruptures of life as a migrant. The role of mobility as well as fxity, of past as well as present and future, in making sense of these practices and feelings, is emphasised. However, it is important to acknowledge the ways in which wider power relations make those practices and feelings possible, understandable, reproduceable, and transmittable. Intersectional power relations frame emerging, continuing, and reiterating imaginations of home. This is the space in which confict between movement and settlement can be teased out and that shapes the meaning of home as, for example, a gendered identity, as a memory of the past, as a generational practice, as practices of the present, or as a racialised space. An analytical framework of imaginations interconnected with im/possibilities allows us to examine the role played by rules and regulations, policies and polities, discourses and memories, in migrants' different forms of identity construction, practices and expressions of feelings in relation to home. Such an approach would foreground migrants' own narratives and imaginations of home, homing and home-making and, importantly, would set these in the context of structural possibilities that frame and condition imagination. Looking at home through this framework, this book provides a reading of existing scholarship that seeks to disentangle multiple layers of power relations that are in place when we discuss home and home-making in migration, presenting a uniquely intersectional and transnational theoretical perspective on migrant homing and home-in-migration.

#### **1.4 Positionality, Refexivity and Our Homes-in-Migration Biographies**

We started our conversation about writing this book as an endeavour to discuss our own understandings of home, in Cork, Ireland, as two women working in academia, one a sociologist, the other a social geographer by background. One of us, Fathi, is a woman of colour, a new migrant to Ireland, and the other, Ní Laoire, is a returned Irish migrant. Although in principle, our lines of thinking are very similar in relation to questions of belonging and the politics of belonging, and how Cork and in general Ireland, as a new destination country, is positioned in our theorisation of migration, we realised that we come to these questions from different situated understandings. We thought it important to lay out our situated positioning here to set in context some of the decisions we have made in relation to what to include in this book and what to leave out.

Our biographical histories, coming from two different worlds, Iran and Ireland, and both subsequently living as migrants (though with very different migrant statuses) in Britain, inform quite a lot of our political understanding of migration. Whilst Fathi, now a British citizen, came to Ireland with rights of entry, living, even voting when she settled in her new home, feelings of estrangement from the surroundings marked her experiences of home-making in Cork. Contrasting to this, on Ní Laoire's much earlier return migration to Ireland from Britain, she found that even though she had to re-settle, fnd new accommodation, navigate different administrative systems, and so on, doors were quite suddenly opened to her after initial feelings of being a complete newcomer, once people realised she was 'one of them'.

More recently, we were collaborating on a project called Youth Home (2019–2020) on young male migrants' home-making practices in Cork. Our extended conversations about what it feels like to interview young (male) migrants about home and being a (female) migrant or resident, shaped much of this understanding: home is intersectional, it is temporal, and it is bound by spatial and legal power relations. Fathi wrote in one of her feldnotes:

I tend to forget that, I, after all have the right to live in Ireland, for an unlimited time due to my Britishness (second citizenship), that puts me on a different scale of migrancy compared to my participants who are refugees and international students on short term visas.

Amongst us, we also experienced Cork differently in relation to our biographical histories. Both of us had arrived from somewhere else, settled in Cork and started working in the university space. Our understanding of Irish society however was shaped by our personal histories of connections to the place, one having a foreign name and accent, one an Irish name and accent, one being seen as a woman of colour, the other a white Irish woman. Ní Laoire's emotional and biographical connection to Cork was rooted in a personal history of growing up in 1970s and 1980s rural county Cork, with strong family connections and memories of being a university student in the city who went '*home*-home'1 at weekends. Fathi's shorter history of inhabiting Cork shaped a different understanding and lived experience of homemaking that was informed by her 'new gaze' at home. Structural possibilities and impossibilities that enabled and prohibited us in making, imagining and feeling Cork as a home were bound by these intersectional biographies. These are the intersectional factors that shape how, as researchers, we understand home as well. We started thinking about personal histories of places, the fresh and accumulated lived experiences of specifc places throughout our biographies which shape how we make sense of our own positioning in place and our narratives of homes. This biographical approach to understanding places is related to the notion of 'emplaced intersectionality' proposed by Sircar (2022), which offers a geographical approach to emplacement that can serve to enrich intersectional analysis within feminist geography and entails attending to felds of power that are contextual and placebased. To summarise, our shared and divergent situated positionalities bring us to understand home epistemologically as a fuid, constantly changing phenomenon that is geographically contingent, intersectional and embodied both for us and for the migrants we write about.

#### **1.5 Overview of the Book**

The rest of the book provides an overview of the sizeable and rich body of scholarship in the social sciences that explores questions of home and migration and that sheds light on the questions raised above. This overview is framed by the conceptual framework outlined here and by our own situated positionalities as migration researchers. Hence, it is not necessarily a complete or comprehensive encyclopaedia of research on home and migration and we acknowledge that there is a wealth of valuable studies that we have been unable to include. However, the intention of this Short Reader is to provide a pathway through the vast body of work that exists.

Taking seriously the claim that home-in-migration is situated and should be analysed with an awareness of, and identifcation with, the dynamics of gendered, classed, aged and racialised relations, three of the chapters focus on these categories

<sup>1</sup>Home-home is a colloquialism, commonly used in Ireland, that distinguishes between two different meanings of home – the home that is the domestic dwelling where I sleep at night (home) and the real home where my family is (home-home).

of power and identity – gender (Chap. 2), age (Chap. 3), migration status, class and race (Chap. 5). Chapter 4 focuses on materiality, as an illuminating lens through which an intersectional analysis of home in migration can be grounded. Within each chapter, particular attention is paid to the ways in which each axis of difference works intersectionally with others. Space does not permit us to devote as much attention to other axes of difference, such as sexuality (but see: Fortier, 2001, 2003; Waitt & Gorman-Murray, 2011). Chapter 6 is a short conclusion to summarise the contribution of this volume to scholarship on home in migration. Across all of these chapters, the discussions pay particular attention to the role of migration regimes and the ways in which they work (intersectionally) to shape structural possibilities and impossibilities of home.

Chapter 2 analyses gender in relation to home-making and home in migration. Gender is an essential factor that shapes home-making in any context. The chapter sets the scene with a brief discussion of the feminist scholarship on home and goes on to draw on existing literature to explore the relationships between gender, mobility and home. Although the discussion shows that traditional gender roles and normative practices can be challenged in migration, there is still much evidence showing that traditional gender roles are conserved and practised through processes of home-making in migration.

Chapter 3 focuses on the importance of age, generation and life-course transitions in the analysis of home in migration. Home is intimately bound up with lived experiences of age and life-course stage – hence the chapter focuses respectively on home in migration in older age, young adulthood and childhood. The existing literature reveals how meanings of home in migration shift across the life-course and how some age-related understandings, such as those associated with childhood, can be overlooked in mainstream migration/home literature.

Chapter 4 discusses the importance of material aspects of home in migration. The scholarship on materiality of migration, in its limited scope, tends to place the role of objects mostly within the context of memory, overlooking their other functions such as their instrumentality and use as objects to facilitate life. Others seem to locate material objects in relation to identity and processes of identifcation and their biographical importance. We draw on these differences to offer an analytical framework that focuses on objects in migrant home-making that are reminiscent of memories of old homes, are used as everyday objects or are of importance to one's identity. This chapter offers a fresh basis for further research into the migrant materialities feld.

Chapter 5 places migration regimes in the foreground, focusing on the role of migrant status and relatedly, of race and social class, as powerful differentiating forces shaping the structural im/possibilities of home in migration. Migrant status is closely bound up with the racism and classism of contemporary migration regimes, and this entanglement is refected in the literature. To attempt to disentangle these then seems counter-productive, so in order to navigate the literature, the chapter deploys the concepts of privilege and precarity, both of which are indicative of how migrant status, class and race intersect to position migrants differentially and to shape their im/possibilities of home.

Chapter 6 concludes that although the feld of home in migration is expanding in recent decades, there is still much to be learned about it in the mobile world in which we are living. Home after all is what we desire to have, to achieve and to aim for, and the possibilities of achieving it seem to be ever more volatile in the current context of mass mobility. This is a rich and vibrant area of scholarship for migration studies and we hope that this book will offer another drop in the ocean of the research being conducted in relation to migration and home and open up new pathways into further focused research.

#### **References**


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## **Chapter 2 Gender and Home in Migration**

#### **2.1 Introduction**

It is now well established that gender and migration are inextricably interlinked (Cresswell & Uteng, 2012; Christou & Kofman, 2022; Yeoh & Ramdas, 2014). Gendered identities and power relations defne and shape spaces and mobilities (Massey, 2013) and thus are pertinent in how processes of home-making and migration are both understood and experienced. Furthermore, gender is acknowledged as a social construct with meanings that can vary from context to context. For example, conventional understandings of migration have constructed it as normatively masculine, that is, emigration and return migration have been seen historically as naturally masculine endeavours. The archetypal conventional 'migration story' is one where men would leave their homes with the hope of fnding success overseas and after a while return to their families, or their families would follow them (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994). Although this type of migration was and still is a common social phenomenon in different societies, this narrowly gendered idea of how migration, gender and family interrelate is one that denies the long history of female migration, child migration and family migration. Since the early 1970s, feminist voices have challenged traditional heteronormative assumptions about migration (Christou & Kofman, 2022; Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). The highly signifcant role played by women in global migration and global labour markets is now widely recognised; furthermore, scholarship agrees that migration is a highly gendered process and is shaped by the intersectionality of gender with race, ethnicity, nationality, class and sexuality (Mahler & Pessar, 2006).

At the same time, the idea of home-making as an unproblematically female practice has also been challenged, as feminist-inspired literature has highlighted the gender inequalities that are re-produced through dominant gendered practices of home-making in particular in the domestic sphere (Young, 2005). Feminist scholarship has highlighted how sites called 'home' are often places of oppression and violence against women (Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Hanmer & Itzin, 2000). In fact, gendered identities and power relations are so deeply embedded in how we understand and do home that they cannot be disentangled. Hence, in this chapter we focus on the formation of gendered identities and their impact on understandings and experiences of home in migration. To clarify, in this chapter we do not aim to impose a binary on gendered identities, but we focus in particular on the categories of masculinity and femininity, refecting the existing literature on home-making and migration. Our aim is to offer a novel reading into gendered practices of homemaking in migration, by focusing on several dimensions of this relationship, given how central gender is to the imagining and doing of home.

Before delving into the literature on gender and home in migration, we present some insights from feminist scholarship that are particularly relevant to understanding the relationship between home and gender. This forms the backdrop to the subsequent section, which explores the shifting relationships between women's mobilities and constructions of home and homeland, before going on to explore how gendered spatial boundaries of home are re-worked and re-produced in contexts of migration. The next section focuses on migrant women's experiences of homemaking and this is followed by a section that highlights emerging literature on changing gender relations and domestic masculinities in migrant homes. Finally, we address temporality, exploring how gendered notions of home in migration are connected to imaginaries of future homes.

#### **2.2 Feminist Thinking on Home**

Feminist scholarship has made a major contribution to how we understand both home and migration. Feminist scholars have been actively writing about home for a long time (Ahmed, 1999; Brah, 1996; Kaplan, 1987; Salih, 2003; Werbner, 1999; Young, 2005) as 'the home' has presented itself as the frst space where gendered identities are shaped since childhood, learned through the process of socialisation and practised, and as a key site in the re/production of gendered power relations.

Feminist scholars (mainly within socialist and Marxist traditions) have criticised the division between the private sphere (associated with femininity and nurturing) and the public sphere (associated with masculinity), pointing to the role played by this division in unequal access to means of production (Fernández-Kelly, 2000). During industrialisation, private space became the sphere of so-called 'natural' practices such as reproduction and sustenance of the family, while the public arena was the site of social, economic and cultural production of capital. One of the most important assertions in feminist approaches is that home is *both* a private and public space where gendered, classed and racialised relationships are enacted and experienced (Longhurst, 2012) and where women are exploited through multiple systems of oppression (Kuhn & Wolpe, 1982; Vogel, 1983). Through socialist feminism the intersections of sexism, class oppression and racism have been illuminated (Joseph, 1981; Naples, 2003). Feminist scholarship across all its disciplines points to how, historically, women's presence in the domestic space not only has been an effect of industrial capitalism but also a cause of their subjugation in relation to legal rights within the home sphere (Ardener, 1981; McDowell, 1999). As Fraser (2021, p. 150) puts it, the family provides 'the social-reproductive conditions for capitalist production'. As such the domestic space earns an important role in the divisions of power based on class, gender and race.

One of the reasons feminist thinking has fourished in research on home is because gender is crucial to lived experiences of home and the practices that help in constructing and maintaining a home. Young (2005) writes about how gender has been fundamental in ownership, claims, boundary reconstruction, and titles relating to land and housing. Whilst men have beneftted from the privilege of being involved in construction and ownership of domestic property, women have been seen as 'cultivating' that space and preserving it through domestic practices, in other words, the real home makers (Young, 2005). McDowell (1999) argues that this powerimbalanced spatial division has shaped and been shaped by other social relations involving indirect control of (female) bodies. In other words, classed and racialised divisions in relation to private and public space are co-constituted with gendered power relations. Marxist and socialist feminism in particular has focused on how classed and gendered divisions in society are reinforced through and within the family (Delphy, 1984; Fraser, 1994). After all, capitalism needs the free care labour to look after society's younger generations for its own survival.

These gendered divisions of labour at the level of the household are refected in gendered international divisions of labour, including the expansion in recent decades of global migration of female labour to meet the demand for low-paid service work (often in sectors related to social reproduction) in countries of the Global North. Enloe (2007) argues that capital relations of gender have made women a docile and cheap workforce that can be manipulated through state, legal and physical coercion. It could be argued that the growth in migration of mostly female care workers for a global care system that attracts cheap labour from Global South to Global North countries, in effect is about making homes comfortable for some, at the expense of others being denied the possibility of having their families at home with them (Parreñas, 2008). These feminist insights have important implications for understandings of home in contexts of migration, drawing attention to the role of microlevel gender power relations within domestic (and transnational) migrant spaces and hence for the meanings of home for migrant households and families (as is explored later in the chapter).

From a different perspective, Black feminism has also been extremely infuential in opening up important questions about family, home and migration. Hooks (1990) has argued that family and home have become an institution where women provide privatised care for children, older and male family members: home is the place where patriarchy and racism are experienced together. These views, alongside Crenshaw's (1991) introduction of the concept of intersectionality, based on the interrelation of race and gender on a macro scale, have forged fresh thinking about home and gender. Hill Collins (2022) argues that the perception of motherhood and women's housework as an unpaid 'duty' compared to male paid occupations outside the home has challenged the traditional view on family, but that this mainly white model was not widespread among African American women. She argues that Black women have used a variety of strategies to undermine the oppressive power of patriarchy at home, and that the home can be seen as a site of empowerment as well as oppression. In particular, Black feminist scholarship has emphasised that for Black women, the home can be a place of refuge from a racist society (hooks, 1990). Furthermore, the recognition that experiences of home and migration are intersectional means acknowledging that migrants experience gendered aspects of home and mobility differently depending on their intersectional social positions in relation to race, class and migration history.

Thus, gender relations of home in migration have to be understood in the context of how they emerge from different histories of migration, colonialism and dis/placement and hence their politics of belonging. Ahmed (1999) for example is critical of the erasure of different histories of migration in narratives of home and migration. Boyce Davies (1994), by looking at the writings of Afro-Caribbean women in the USA, marks out a 'politics of location' in relation to Black women's experiences of displacement and argues that mythical representations of 'home' as a singular origin are undermined by their experiences. She points to the contradictions of the notion of home for those whose 'homes' have been colonised and for those who are regularly asked where they are from even as they are 'at home'. Hence, the meaning of home as an unproblematic place of origin and belonging is brought into question. Similarly, Brah (1996) questions notions of home in migration that assume a simple association between place of origin, identity and belonging, arguing instead that there is no essential connection between these. According to Ahmed et al. (2020 [2003]), there is a need to move beyond notions of home as something one leaves behind or that is fxed prior to migration. Instead, they argue that 'homes are always remade as grounds and conditions of family/work etc.' (p. 9) and home and mobility are seen as intertwined processes. The same geographical space can have different histories and meanings for different groups or individuals, linked to histories of colonisation, displacement and patriarchy (Brah, 1996).

Feminist scholarship from both traditions therefore has made a number of key contributions of value in analysing home and migration. First, it has highlighted how homes can be a site of both repression and empowerment for women. Second, it draws attention to micro-level intersectional gendered politics of home-making as well as situating home within the context of larger socio-political relations, economic structures and colonial histories. Third, it has undermined long-held assumptions about home as a fxed place of origin, and fnally, it demonstrates how experiences of home are not equal for all.

#### **2.3 Women's Mobilities and Home/Land**

Within discussions on mobility and home, there lies an important aspect of home in migration: Who has the power to move? Who is being left behind? How does the gender of mobile and sedentary family members determine such statuses and how are gendered experiences changed by these movements? With the expansion of migratory journeys in the latter part of the twentieth century, the notion of homes for migrant families (both in relation to the home that is made after migration and the home that is left behind) has changed. Traditional perceptions of men being mobile and women being sedentary home-makers were to an extent exacerbated by imperialist impulses towards nation-building. For example, McClintock (1995), from a gendered angle, looks at the formation of the British Empire and particularly focuses on the 'functional' role of women in its formation (see also the classic text by Yuval-Davis, 1997). Both McClintock (1995) and Yuval-Davis (1997) argue that the role of women in building domestic space and reproduction of subsequent generations was paramount to the reproduction of masculinity and nation as a collectivity. Aitken (2009) focuses on the role of domestic space in facilitating colonial homes, arguing that the 'civilised' domestic space of home was an important symbol and means of imperialism. Others have highlighted the role of traditional constructions of womanhood, often linked to motherhood, in dominant ideas of nation as home (Gray, 2004). Women's reproductive ability has been constructed as vital in the process of creating the nation and nurturing younger generations (Yuval-Davis, 1997), an expectation that can work to limit women's mobility.

However, research on female migration has challenged traditional constructs of 'men who migrate, women who wait' (Brettell, 2014) by showing how home, through the migration of women and border-crossings has been reconfgured and transformed (Wilkins, 2017). These contributions reveal how gendered constructions of space and place are challenged by the mobilities of women. For example, Giuffré (2017) has conducted research with Cape Verdean migrant women who leave their homes to go to Europe and North America, in order to support their families on Santa Antão island. The research shows that home for women who leave their children at the hands and mercy of spouses, extended family and even neighbours, at the minimum, contests traditional gendered roles in the construction of the space of home. Where the space of home, Terra Mamaizinha, was the known, domestic, and indoors closed off from the rest of the world as a feminine space, Terra Longe was the sea, the outdoors and outside world of home that was dangerous and where only men ventured to explore (Giuffré, 2017). The more permanent migration of women in these islands, as opposed to the cyclical and short-term migration of men, has made Terra Longe a feminised space. These gendered emigrations and the remittances sent home to pay for expenses of left-behind children bestow relative power to migrant women as heads of families, placing them in 'decision-maker' positions within households. These positions were held by men before the 1970s era of the emigration of women from the islands (Giuffré, 2017). This also meant that due to the involvement of other women as carers within the space of the immediate home or extended homes, women have gradually taken ownership of the process of receiving and managing remittances and nurturing of family members who have stayed put (Giuffré, 2017). What these shifting roles and understandings of gender in the context of spaces of Terra Mamaizinha and Terra Longe show is that within marketised liberal and global caring and migration regimes, gendered roles can change and, accordingly, the notion of home can change based on these shifting positionings. Even on a small island, notions of mobility, home and gender have been transformed drastically based on the power that women gain by becoming the main breadwinners of their families.

The shifts in gendered relations between migrant and homeland that are triggered by women migrants' greater independence as a result of migration are potentially far-reaching. For example, Constable's (1999) research on Filipina migrant women highlights their ambiguous attitudes towards returning to the place they call 'home' (back home). While on the one hand, they feel a strong attachment to this home, they are aware that their fnancial independence would disappear after returning; in other words, their imaginings of home change with migration. This relationship between migrant home-making, gender and homeland is complex. Studies on return migration show that the notion of homeland as a place of belonging depends considerably on the social conditions under which people originally left for other destinations. Sometimes structures such as patriarchal systems or ethnic and religious persecution reduce the tendency to return and minimise attachment to homelands. For example, Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) fnds that Mexican women in the USA are more likely to integrate faster compared to their husbands and have less tendency to return to their homelands. Similarly, Graham and Khosravi (1997) in a study with Iranian migrant men and women in Sweden, fnd that the interest towards returning to their homeland, Iran, is higher among men than women. They attribute this to the patriarchal norms that grant men more freedom and power and place women in inferior positions socially, legally and within families. Yeoh and Willis (2005) also consider return migration as a gendered translocation which improves men's status and reinforces notions of 'masculinity', distinguishing between the experiences of men and women.

Some studies which have looked at gendered relationships with homelands see them from an intersectional lens, analysing geographies of power and positionalities in terms of privilege and precarity. One of these is Wong's (2014) research on Ghanaian skilled migrant women who returned to Ghana at their peak of productivity. She argues that these women migrants' diverse resources and their privileged class positions provided them with networks for recurrent transnational mobility and granted them choice and agency. Therefore, women migrants' positions in relation to their homelands, when considered intersectionally, can be as autonomous as those of male return migrants (Wong, 2014). On the other hand, there are studies that look at migration and transnational gendered practices from the perspective of undocumented migrant women whose transnational mothering and home-making practices are impacted by their precarious and disadvantageous positions (Brandhorst et al., 2020; Carling, 2014; Fresnoza-Flot, 2009; Lourenço & Cachado, 2012; Madianou, 2012; Madianou & Miller, 2011; Pratt, 2012; Ramirez et al., 2007). These scholars explore how transnational families manage physical caring practices in the context of immobility, resorting to different forms of maintaining family relationships such as regular visiting and maintaining intimacy through the use of mobile phones, ICTs and gift giving and sending.

What can be seen from these experiences is that the relationship with home and homeland is a gendered process and needs to be located within the macro politics of home-making in the countries of origin and destination. The gendered relationship one has to a homeland is always impacted by other social locations; for example, to what extent does one have freedom of expression in the country of origin as a female activist or a transgender man? When considering these delicate nuances, we can better understand how making a home is (structurally) possible and impossible in certain contexts and for some people and not for others. It is through a relational treatment of gender that one can understand the complex web of meaning-making in relation to home and notions of homeland among migrants and the families of migrants who stay put in other transnational locations (Salih, 2003; Sandu, 2013; Väänänen et al., 2005).

#### **2.4 Spatial Boundaries and Gender in Migration**

Blunt and Dowling (2006), in their book, *Home*, draw attention to the intimate spaces of home and their interconnection with power and they argue that power relations defne and determine the meanings of home in migration. They differentiate between different contexts of home ('imperial homes and home-making; homeland, nation and nationalist politics; and the politics of indigeneity, home and belonging') and show how home on a domestic scale is bound up with imperial, national and indigenous politics that are articulated through geographies of home (Blunt & Dowling, 2006, p. 142). Their critical geographical perspective on home gives a central role to gendered and racialized constructions and seeks to challenge conventional public-private distinctions; they show how internal politics of home are intimately bound up with 'domestic/national' and imperial politics.

In Marxist feminist analysis of domestic home space, the person who has the economic means is the one who decides over the distribution and the use of that space (Fraser, 2021). Within the private space then, the composition of material entities and symbolic values attached to them set out how a home is structured in relation to ownership, belonging, the right to use the space and so on. One cannot separate this from how power relations in place give to and/or take away 'spatial rights' from residents in a house (Bonfanti, 2021, p. 116). These gendered (and aged) power relations are articulated spatially in terms of boundaries of and in home – boundaries between public and private, inside and outside, ownership and lack of ownership.

Research in migration studies shows how patriarchal relations can be maintained and reproduced through migration, even if they change form (Gilmartin & Migge, 2016). These power relations are manifest spatially through and in the spaces of home after migration – the spaces of migrant households and of cities and neighbourhoods inhabited by migrant groups. Much literature reveals how gendered public-private divisions are actually maintained and even reinforced after migration. For example, Gilmartin and Migge (2016) show how well-educated migrant mothers in Ireland fnd themselves struggling with lack of childcare in a context where family support is crucial and thus defning themselves primarily as mothers and becoming confned to the space of the home.

The maintenance of gendered public-private spatial boundaries is a common feature of migrant communities and households with a greater tendency for migrant women to be more restricted to private home and domestic work spaces than men, who are more likely to inhabit public spaces of work and leisure. This can be related to the gendered nature of migration regimes which reinforce gendered responsibilities of caring and breadwinning after migration. For example, Buckley (1997) writes about the invisibility of Irish women in Britain in the twentieth century, despite their vast numbers, which she relates to the tendency to confne them to 'sheltered' environments such as the private home and hidden sectors of the economy (cleaning, caring, catering). Recent research has pointed to the isolation and loneliness of refugee women in destination societies who are unable to access spaces of employment, education or leisure outside the home (Casimiro et al., 2007; Ghorashi, 2010). Even among more elite female migrants, Yeoh and Khoo (1998, p. 172) found that 'the lines that divide the public world of work from the private world of home in a new environment had hardened, resulting in their relegation to the latter'; so even though they are 'at home', they may not feel at home.

The gendered segregation of intimate private spaces has been particularly evident in many Muslim contexts. In countries where traditionally a strict code of conduct is observed in relation to gender and space, women's presence and mobility are closely guarded and controlled by the male family members, extended family members and even the morality police (Samuri & Hopkins, 2023). *Purdah*, or curtain, that also extends to bodily coverage by a veil, is a practice mostly aimed at protecting a woman's chastity by hiding her physical presence from male strangers' gaze (Mazumdar & Mazumdar, 2001). This is a deeply religious concept that has translated into how homes are compartmentalised into private and public spaces and even dividing the time of the day and night when staying at home is encouraged or enforced to 'protect' women and girls' honours (Guglielmi et al., 2021; Mim, 2020). Relatedly, in contexts of migration, practices that seek to control the mobilities of Muslim young women are evident, for example in the everyday patterns of use of public spaces by second and third-generation young Muslims in Brussels (De Backer, 2020). Macey (1999) shows how in Bradford, in the north of England, young Pakistani girls are banned from certain activities such as going to university, school trips, or sports, due to the community male members maintaining such gendered divisions within and outside their communities, mostly against females' will. Research also shows how young migrant women develop selective strategies to challenge the patriarchal boundaries that they face both within and outside their homes (De Backer, 2020; Ehrkamp, 2013).

#### **2.5 Migrant Women, Home-Making and the Domestic Sphere**

The domestic space of home plays a particularly important role in how gender manifests in any social arena and gendered power relations have historically shaped home-making practices and feelings at the domestic scale. Practices that make a domestic space meaningful and that denote it as 'home' are highly entangled with emotions (Belford & Lahiri-Roy, 2019; Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015; Dyck, 2018) both positive and negative (Brickell, 2012) and are historically embedded within gendered values and expectations. Hence, the domestic scale has been the focus of much research on how the micro-level politics relating to gender relations and the right to space are re-worked after migration, through a particular focus on migrant homes.

Some scholars have written about the importance of practices of cooking and eating as elements of home-making in migration and in the maintenance of transnational ties of belonging (Povrzanović Frykman & Humbracht, 2013). While foodwork and the related space of the kitchen have been recognised as oppressive spaces for women, Meah (2014a) argues that for many migrant and ethnic minority women, these are also spaces of creativity, solidarity, sharing and love, from which they build new homes and develop a sense of place. In this sense, the domestic space of home can be a safe space for migrant women away from the racism of wider society. Longhurst et al. (2009), based on their research with migrant women in New Zealand, argue that for these women, the domestic space was one in which they felt very comfortable and relaxed, and for them cooking was a way of staying connected with past homes while recreating a new home.

This research points to an important argument that relates to the intersectionality of gender, race and ethnicity in migrant home-making experiences, which is that for migrant women who experience racism and denigration of their identities in their host societies, the domestic home space can represent a haven from this, and furthermore, can be a site of resistance to wider processes of home unmaking. Wallace's (2012) research reveals how Muslim women who experience anti-Muslim racism in the UK create the (domestic) home as a safe site of identity affrmation and political engagement, through their religious practice and their role as family educators. Similarly, Walter (2002) writes about the role of the private space of the home as a safe space for expression of Irish identities for Irish migrant households in Britain in the 1970s when anti-Irish hostility was common. Irish women played a crucial role in the maintenance of these homes as sites of negotiation of diasporic identities, through their roles as home-makers. Migrant women also often play a crucial role in migrant communities in host societies, as informal, often unpaid, community workers and key players in the maintenance of social and cultural migrant organisations (Buckley, 1997; Vacchelli & Peyreftte, 2018; Yeoh & Khoo, 1998). Even though such work is often invisible, it is valuable in creating a shared sense of home (beyond the domestic space) among migrant communities (for example, Nititham, 2016).

While much of the literature on reproduction of the politics of home in migration contexts focuses on the role of migrant women and on the domestic space of home, Datta (2008) looks at how Polish men working as builders in London view their work in building homes for others as a validation of their masculine Polish identities and linked to imagined future homes in Poland. Similar to migrant women who leave their homes and children to care for other people's children and make others' homes as migrant workers (Fresnoza-Flot, 2009; Ukwatta, 2010), migrant men also engage actively in building the physical homes of others whilst temporarily live in these building sites or experiencing temporary homelessness. Therefore, practices of home-making in migration are bound up with the reproduction and re-working of both masculine and feminine identities.

#### **2.6 Changing Gender Relations and Masculinities in Migrant Home-Making**

So far, we have discussed how the gendering of home is maintained after migration and how traditional gender roles are reproduced, whether within the space of the domestic home, in migrant communities or at the level of discourses of nation or empire. However, some recent developments in discussions of gender in homemaking processes tell us about how such traditional understandings of the space of a home are often challenged through the migration process (Gorman-Murray & Hopkins, 2014). An important line of enquiry here is scholarship on migrant masculinities, which points to some ways in which hegemonic masculine identities in relation to home are changing (Donaldson et al., 2009; Gallo & Scrinzi, 2016; Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2016; Walsh, 2011; Wojnicka & Nowicka, 2022). This body of scholarship opens up new ways of thinking about gender, home and migration; for example Ye's (2014) research on migrant masculinities and class is an interesting addition to this feld.

Home is a material, spatial, temporal and symbolic process that rewrites itself within historical and cultural contexts, and in addition, social locations of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality need to be understood as fuid and contingent in the process of transnational dislocation, or what Anthias (2008) calls 'translocation'. As such it is important not to presume that masculinity and femininity are fxed identities that only change when people move from one country to another; on the contrary, home as a gendered construct is constantly in process. But there are intricate differences when men and women move as opposed to when they do not, and this change of setting has important implications for their ability to make home. The questions that are raised here in relation to home and its gender, age and class power relations are amplifed when migration experiences are added.

In our earlier research on home and belonging in Cork, the migrant men we interviewed discussed the act of cooking as a marker of their domesticated masculinities (Fathi, 2022). This led us to explore this new shift in relation to home and

gender and the idea of alternative masculinities. Recent studies of masculinities show that the practices and spaces of home cooking, previously considered a female domain, are arguably becoming more connected to men and masculine worlds (Cox, 2014; Gorman-Murray, 2014; Meah, 2014b). Szabo (2014) discusses how hegemonic masculinities become contested when men engage in home cooking as a feminine practice. Their study shows that the act of cooking, set in the kitchen space, is not an act devoid of any home politics. Gendered relationships within the space of home are complex but migration adds a new layer of complexity as new gendered relations can be formed after mobility.

When ethical and political values within a home do not correspond with the hegemonic values prevalent in the host society after migration, the space of home can become a site of contestation. Some studies with different migrant groups in family homes show that within the same family, gendered practices can change as a result of transformations in expectations of gender roles within the wider context of ethical and political values. For example, Shahidian (1999) in his research with Iranian migrants in Canada, argues that gender relations and sexuality change drastically as a result of migration when Iranian families move from Iran to Canada. He fnds that in Iranian families in his study, leaving a misogynist regime, women fnd their public and private lives in many ways transformed in terms of their choices regarding gender roles, family life, occupation, dress code, and sexuality. Shahidian's (1999) fndings are consistent with studies conducted with Iranian families in other countries (Graham & Khosravi, 1997; Fathi, 2017). These studies fnd that women in general can access the labour market more easily compared to men, which in many cases, leaves men to do more of the domestic chores, a position that contrasts with the traditional roles that men perceived for themselves (see also Hamada's 2017 research on Japanese house husbands). Shahidian (1999) argues that Iranian men in his study referred to themselves as *matarsak* (scarecrow), indicating the decline in patriarchal gendered divisions at home and undermining of their masculine identities. Hamada's (2017) research with Japanese migrant men who take on the role of house husbands fnds that most men in her study expressed discomfort with taking up domestic chores that they would not do in Japan and they would not disclose their participation in them after migration.

Another similar study is Charsley's (2005) on Pakistani families living in the UK, where British Pakistani young girls marry young men in Pakistan who migrate to the UK subsequently. The reversal of the traditional roles within homes in such scenarios (the migrant groom being dependent on the wife and her family) is a traumatic experience for migrant men, as the new couple's idea of home is usually tied to traditional gender roles (the man being the sole breadwinner and the woman being a housewife). However, the new groom's dependence on his in-law family, as a result of his inability to fnd a job and thus to live separately from the in-laws, shows a reversal of this ideal home scenario (Charsley, 2005). This is mainly due to the fact that the purchasing of a house or affording to rent a place at the start of such transnational movements is not possible. The term *ghar damad* (meaning imported son-in-law who lives with the wife's family, or what is called house son-in-law) is then used as a term to defne the reversed gender and social positioning roles and specifcally refers to the intersection of gender and home. It describes dependency and lack of individuality and in practice it is a derogatory term that participants in Charsley's (2005) study avoid using to refer to themselves. Yet they still see themselves as controlled heavily by their lack of fnancial and housing independence within restructured gendered household relations of power that redefne their gendered identities and bind them to the home sphere in a negative way (Charsley, 2005).

Hamada's (2017) research with Japanese migrant men in Australia focuses on transnational domestic masculinity and these migrant men use the domestic space, as house husbands, to perform practices such as home cooking that were/are seen as women's work in Japan. However, as Hamada (2017) argues, in post-migration contexts these traditional arrangements change mostly due to the positions that each spouse occupies outside the home and the necessary roles that need to be performed accordingly. Percot (2012) looks at the situation of migrant men from Kerala who emigrate as spouses dependent on their nurse wives or as 'followers' (no page number) to their wives who act as the main migrant applicant. She argues that these men fnd their positions disturbing, not knowing what careers they can pursue when arriving in a western country (in this case, Ireland). "This is not a man's job" explains Matthew, one of the participants who describes how as a family they decided he would look after their toddler child until she goes to school and Matthew can start a 'proper' job (Percot, 2012, no page number). Although we are mainly dealing with questions around socio-economic status and position of the migrant working spouses, at a deeper level, these testimonies tell a lot about how fnancial necessities are providing a new gendered reality to the home-making practices of migrant families.

Changing notions of masculinity and femininity, in relation to home-in-migration pathways are also intersected with global systems of racialisation and class. In the provision of care for families, cheap labour is provided by female migrants who travel to more developed countries to undertake caring positions, contributing to what Hochschild (2000, p. 131) calls 'the global care chain'. In affuent countries privileged women (and men) buy domestic help at low wages to raise their families, a form of employment that Gallo and Scrinzi (2016, p. 1) call 'outsourcing' of domestic/care tasks, mostly employing women in exploitative conditions who migrate transnationally to look after others' elderly, children, or the sick within families. They question the general tendency to view men as 'outsiders' to the domain of home and this matrix of the transnational caring system, and they argue that, despite more men taking up transnational domestic roles, this issue has not been taken up in the scholarship in home and migration.

In fact, migrant men working as domestic workers provide the focus for a notable line of research in relation to issues of gender, home and power. Whilst most of the literature that concentrates on 'hired help' or domestic workers focuses on women (Dodson, 2008; Fresnoza-Flot, 2009; Oishi, 2005), the provision of care for families using the cheap labour of migrant men who travel to more developed countries is also on the rise. Studies on migrant men working in internal spaces of homes as employees, workers, and helpers, reveal that they often do so as undocumented migrants, which facilitates their exploitation and sub-standard work conditions (Gallo & Scrinzi, 2016). The implications for migrant masculinities are revealed in the constructions of gendered roles in relation to home-making. For example, Gallo (2006) in research with Malayali men in Italy fnds that although practices such as cooking and laundry were seen as feminine, performing them was accepted with some unease. For this group of migrant men, who worked as domestic carers, performing jobs that usually belonged to realm of women meant that their gendered positions were seen as complex and ambiguous – on the one hand the men asserted their respectability due to their status as employees but on the other hand their Malayali masculine identities were threatened (Gallo, 2006).

Some have criticised the representation of the domestic space as essentially a feminine space and the view of men in domestic space as 'out of norm' (Gorman-Murray, 2008). It is important not to over-state the transformations in gender relations of the migrant home. Walsh (2011) argues that the site of home in the UK has become more gender egalitarian with a more even division of labour and that this shift is also visible among British 'expats' who live in Dubai. She shows that men in these households engage with housework as part of a practice of home-making, but importantly, even these activities remain limited and minimal.

Gorman-Murray (2008) argues that although feminist scholarship about home has helped a lot in understanding power relations at home, describing it in relation to femininity, it does little to help in understanding other gendered identities being shaped in the home sphere. This is an interesting and valuable reading of home and gender, as bringing masculinities (even as privileged subjects) into the home sphere helps to understand the processes through which marginalised positions are shaped. The shifts in gendered identities within households, especially migrant households, must be understood in the context of the larger social changes that have happened globally. These include women's increased participation in the labour market, their higher rate of solo migration (with families and children left behind), of migrating as the main applicants in migration processes or as sole breadwinners after migration (thus becoming integrated within the social spaces of host countries faster their male spouses – Shahidian, 1999). However, when considering the structural im/ possibilities of home, intersectional understandings of home and gender are important. For example, women in middle-class migrant families have different access to resources compared to those in economically fragile families. Peinhopf (2014) argues that when gender is intersected with class, different roles can be assumed and practised. We also need to be mindful about how other identity categories, such as sexuality, impact gendered experiences of migration (for example see Fortier, 2020 [2003]).

What we see here is that gendered roles are complicated particularly when we consider other identity categories and how they intersect with gender in migration contexts. In host countries, language and employment requirements, pre-migration histories of employment, sexual identities, ability and disability, number of children, language profciency (among others) impact gendered identities and roles. After all, in the post-migration settings dominant and mainstream masculinities and femininities are continuing to exist in their traditional forms alongside new alternative forms because these intersectional identities are never fxed, even in the countries of origin (see Anthias, 2008). As such, gendered practices still conform to 'accepted' and normalised roles for men and women, alongside alternative understandings of gender and home.

#### **2.7 Gender and Future Homes in Migration**

As discussed in Chap. 1, home in migration has a strong temporal element. Some research has pointed to the ways in which the temporality of home is related to certain gendered aspects of the experiences of home. For example, Datta's (2008) research with Polish migrant men working in construction in London reveals how their plans to build houses in the future in Poland are highly signifcant to their constructions of home in migration. Though they have no immediate plans to return to Poland, the planned house is symbolic of a secure future home for either themselves or other family members and is bound up with their masculine identities as builders (Datta, 2008).

In our study with migrant men (international students and refugees) in Cork, Ireland (see Fathi & Ní Laoire, 2023), we realised that these young men had many aspirations towards fulflling their dreams as outcomes of their migrations. All of them had invested a lot fnancially, emotionally and temporally to be in Cork at the time of the study (2019–2020). Some of them had been in the asylum process for almost a decade, others had spent tens of thousands of euros to obtain a degree from a western university to expand their human capital. However, the circumstances of their lives in Cork meant that their quest for a home was not achieved at the present time; they also did not think much of their homelands as homes anymore (they expressed no intention to return) but resorted to presenting their plans for making a home as a future endeavour. As such their active participation in either university or the labour market was viewed as a pathway to obtaining 'reputable' degrees, and/or saving up money to invest in purchasing a house, and ultimately, making a home of their own in the future. The most important aspect of these efforts at making a home, however, was the (gendered and heteronormative) aspiration to form a family with a wife and children (all identifed themselves as heterosexual). Their aspiration to form such a family within a material home (thinking about or attempting at purchasing a house) and their imaginings about how it would look, where it might be (often outside Ireland), could be seen as a bridge towards a future place of belonging. This was envisaged as somewhere that would be different to their experiences of unbelonging and seclusion in Cork in the present time. A considerable number of the participants in this study did not feel a strong sense of belonging to Cork. Although they did not fnd much hostility as migrants, Cork as a city was not seen for them as a place they would call home; it was not homeland, and neither was it seen as cosmopolitan enough to secure a smaller network of likeminded people around them. Instead, as Fathi (2022, p. 1113) argues, for these young migrant men in Cork, the home in the present was only 'a vehicle to achieve a home in future'. She cites from a participant, Ranit, an Afghan refugee who had just become an Irish citizen and whose family lived in Manchester in the UK, as follows:

Ranit: I want to go to Manchester. Me and my brother we want to set up a business. Like I worked here for a few years in a mobile phone shop. I'm good with technical stuff, like computers and—he [his brother] said, 'If you come there, we might open up a shop'. Plus he said, 'I could fnd you a wife there! (Fathi, 2022, p. 1113)

Here Ranit's masculine identity makes a link to this imaginary future home that will revolve around a business venture with his brother but also the possibilities of an arranged marriage there. What is important about Ranit's account is that he did not fnd his present (at the time of the interview) homely, even though structurally he was able to make a home. He was an Irish citizen (with an Irish passport) at the time and had full-time employment in a factory. What was missing in his life was the presence of signifcant others. Their absence impacted his sense of self, but also his masculine identity. The presence of a wife, in Ranit's family and culture is an important indicator of establishing a masculine identity, being a breadwinner and being heterosexual. This example reveals how gendered identity, home and temporality are intimately interwoven in migrant men's aspirations for home in the future: even if some aspects of home exist, there are still other factors needed to make a place feel like a home.

#### **2.8 Conclusion**

When discussing the intersection of gender and home, the politics of home that produce structural im/possibilities of home need to be considered. Home can include a variety of positive and negative meanings, a variety of traditional and alternative practices, and the reinforcement and reformation of gendered identities. This chapter looks at studies that examine changes, continuities and re-workings in traditional ways of understanding home and mobility through a gender lens. We examine how these hegemonic gendered understandings have shifted through the mobilities of men and women and how mobility and exposure to new value systems or new life opportunities have transformed migrants' relationships to home. Furthermore, the literature on migration, home and gender helps us to understand that masculinity is not necessarily equated to mobility or femininity to sedentariness. The processes of displacement and translocation add to the complexities that shape new meanings attached to home, homeland and imaginations of home in future, because they become intersected with systems of patriarchy, racialisation, discrimination and transnational class systems.

To conclude, the home space, traditionally seen as a feminised space, is constantly shifting in response to changing economic and social power relations before and after migration. It is evident from the literature that the economic power of one spouse (gender) can change the meanings of home in light of changing positions within domestic and public space. This gender dynamic is tightly linked to economic power relations, underlying relationships of race and ethnicity, relationships between migrants and their signifcant others and the restrictions as well as opportunities of migration regimes. Thus the structural im/possibilities of home in migration always involve complex entanglements of gender with other power relations.

In examining the literature on home and gender, it is evident that there are several areas that are in need of further research. The frst is how experiences of home among migrant men are impacted by intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality in migration. Our research suggests that single migrant men in their endeavours to make a home often link home-making to their future homes, but how these imaginaries are shaped by class, race and sexuality needs further research. Secondly, given that there is still a dearth of research in relation to LGBTQ+ identities and home in migration, this feld is in desperate need of further research (Thongkrajai, 2022; Fortier, 2001).

The impact of divorce and spousal splitting on migrant men and women in their experiences of home-making is another area that merits further research. Some research suggests for example that there is a link between relationship breakdown, return migration and ideas about home (Ní Laoire, 2008). This area could be explored in relation to pre- and post-migration home-making, relationship breakups and divorces given that many migration regimes necessitate a marriage or offcial civil partnership proof for granting or continuation of different forms of visa and such separations may contribute to structural impossibilities of making a home after migration.

Finally, given the rising number of migrant women and men who leave families behind with the aim of providing for them, the process of making home when one is aging while still separated from families is another area for further research.

#### **References**


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# **Chapter 3 Age and Home in Migration**

#### **3.1 Introduction**

This chapter brings the focus to the importance of age, generation and life-course transitions in understanding migrant home and homing processes. While there is an emerging interest in the ways in which practices and experiences of home in migration are infected by age, generation and life-course transitions, to date this literature has not been integrated into a focused discussion on the implications of an age and life-course perspective for understandings of migrant home. It could be argued that much of the migration and home literature tends to be based on snapshots in time without considering the complexities of life-course transitions or intergenerational dynamics over time; additionally, it is usually based on research with adults without consideration of children's perspectives. We address these lacunae in this chapter by reviewing existing literature to provide an intersectional perspective on how age, life-course and generation shape experiences of home in migration. We focus in particular on the ways in which regimes of citizenship, migration and residency shape homing possibilities for migrants in different ways at different ages and phases of the life-course.

First, we explain how we conceptualise age and life-course before moving on to discuss the ways in which these are bound up with the doing and imagining of home in migration. The subsequent three sections explore respectively, via reviews of existing empirical studies, home in migration through the lenses of ageing/older age, young adulthood and childhood. In each section, we also pay attention to the ways in which age and life-course stage intersect with other axes of difference, in particular gender, class and migrant status, in shaping structural im/possibilities of home in migration. Through this review, we develop an argument about how migration regimes open up and close off possibilities of making and feeling at home for migrants depending on their age, generational and life-course positions.

#### **3.2 Conceptualising Age, Generation and Life-Course**

While it has long been recognised that age is a key factor in understanding migration experiences, there has been a shift in recent decades away from viewing migration as an 'age-specifc' phenomenon and towards a life-course perspective to understand the relationships between migration and age or ageing (Ní Laoire & Stockdale, 2016). The life-course perspective emphasises the idea of a continuum of phases and transitions that occur over a lifetime. Key to this approach is the recognition that while life-course phases are shaped by socially constructed normative expectations and institutional forces regarding when and how key life events occur, life-courses do not necessarily conform to expectations and are both fuid and geographically and historically contingent (Elder, 1994; Heinz & Kruger, 2001; Konietzka & Kreyenfeld, 2021). A life-course perspective emphasises how people make sense of the socio-structural contexts in which their life-courses unfold and in which age-*related* life events take place. Therefore, our analysis of home is organised around migration experiences linked to specifc age-related life-course phases and transitions that we understand as both socially constructed and socially embedded organizing principles through which people's biographies can be understood.

Taking a life-course perspective on migration is particularly valuable to understanding meanings of home as it recognises the temporal, biographical and relational dimensions to migration (Halfacree & Boyle, 1993; Kilkey & Ryan, 2021). It draws attention to the ways in which migrations and mobilities may be triggered by life-course transitions such as those related to the labour market or family formation, and how migration experiences are shaped by factors specifc to different lifecourse stages (Gardner, 2009; Kobayashi & Preston, 2007). A life-course perspective can also enable a longitudinal and intergenerational perspective on migration, which is valuable in understanding how homing in migration contexts is a life-long process that is ongoing and never complete. Indeed, homing can be viewed as a search for temporal or biographical continuity in contexts of discontinuity (Boccagni, 2017). Expected life-course transitions and events can be interrupted by migration and the bordering practices of migration regimes, thus limiting the possibilities of making home and requiring adaptations and negotiations. Furthermore, migration and mobility can be strategies for fnding or making home as people respond to changing circumstances associated with transitions through the life-course.

Closely connected to life-course and biographical perspectives on migration are the related concepts of generation and intergenerationality. Family relations play a crucial role in life-course and migration trajectories, and family is also intimately bound up with ideas of home (whether in positive, negative or ambiguous ways). Relations between different generations within the same family form a key part of the landscape of emotions, ties, imaginations and practices through which home-inmigration is constructed; hence a generational, or intergenerational, lens can shed further light on these processes, especially as they relate to age and life-course transitions. We pay particular attention to this aspect in our consideration of how young adults construct home in contexts of migration and im/mobility.

The next section focuses on ageing and older age, while the subsequent sections focus frst on young adulthood and then childhood. Selecting these particular lifecourse stages is not intended to imply that others, such as middle adulthood stages, are not important or worthy of exploration in terms of their implications for constructions of home in migration. Indeed, there is scope for more migration/home research that pays attention to the role of age and life-course in middle-adulthood stages. However, here we focus on older age and youth as useful lenses through which to tease out the ways in which age and life-course transitions intersect with migration-related social structures and other power relations in framing the structural im/possibilities of home in migration.

#### **3.3 Ageing and Home in Migration**

The phase, or phases, of life called 'old age', 'older age', 'ageing' or 'later life' relate to a wide range of life-course transitions involving physical ageing as well as changing relationships to work, family and wider society, although it is recognised that 'older age' is a very fuid and broad category that can be defned in many different ways (King et al., 2017). We do not attempt a defnition of it here but instead draw on the meanings given to it in studies which explore migration and home. Older migrants have become a focus of attention in policy and literature, in recent decades, in particular as the large cohorts of labour migrants who settled in expanding industrial economies of the West in the latter half of the twentieth century have aged and transitioned from temporary migrants to more long-term and settled residents in their host societies.1 In addition, as transnational migration fows have become more complex, migrating *in* older age is becoming a signifcant phenomenon, in the form of, for example, retirement migration, return migration and 'familyjoining' migration (King et al., 2017; Walsh & Näre, 2016). It is recognised that migrants have changing needs and priorities as they age, and there is particular emphasis by policy-makers and researchers on the importance of social policy in supporting older migrants (Wang & Zhan, 2021). However, there is somewhat less emphasis on the emotional and subjective aspects of life, such as feeling at home, for migrants in older age.

Some of the literature on older transnational migrants explores their intentions in relation to staying in their host societies or returning to countries of origin once they reach retirement age (Bolzman et al., 2006), this question itself pointing to normative expectations around the relationship between age/life-course and place (see also Ní Laoire, 2008). This question is fundamentally about the construction of

<sup>1</sup>The use of the term 'migrants' to refer to people who may have been settled for a long time in their host society is questionable, but in the absence of an alternative term to refer to people who are living outside their country of origin, we use it in this chapter, with the caveat that we recognise it is not ideal.

home – where and what is home for people who have lived outside their countries of origin for a long time or people who migrate in older age? How do migrants make home in the context of ageing? Walsh and Näre (2016) point out that there has been little research on the concept of home from the perspective of transnational migrants in older age; their edited collection makes a signifcant contribution to flling this gap, along with a growing number of other studies exploring home and migration in older age, which are discussed in this section.

Popular discourses tend to associate older age with nostalgia (May, 2017) and sedentarism (King et al., 2017), suggesting that home for older migrants must be either 'back home' in the country of origin, or, to be found in an unchanging present location. However, many studies conducted with older transnational migrants challenge these popular presumptions. Instead, the research points to a number of key themes in older migrants' narratives of home, which suggest that as they age, and life circumstances change, their idea of home shifts and changes also. These key themes in narratives of home among older migrants, around which this section is structured, are: temporality and home; deepening home roots in place; transnational home; and fnally, ambiguous attachments to homeland.

#### *3.3.1 Temporality and Home-Making Among Older Migrants*

Temporality and the passage of time are key to understanding processes of homing and home-making for older migrants, both those who have lived a large part of their lives as migrants and those who migrate in older age. The passage of time means that relationships, attachments, circumstances and priorities shift and change with time, but time also allows for accumulation of capital (social, economic) as well as formal rights and entitlements, and the establishment of emotional connections, relationships and families, that may increasingly tie one to a particular place or places, or provide the impetus to move in order to deepen one's place-based ties, that is, that allow one to strengthen a sense of home for older age.

Returning to the imagined 'homeland' or country of origin is one type of strategy undertaken by older migrants to secure home. However, this is often associated with a diffcult process of re-making home and studies reveal ambivalent experiences of this process (Walsh, 2018). For some, the sense of loss for what they have left behind in their 'migrant' lives can be more pronounced than anticipated (Walsh, 2016). Ramji (2006) provides a more optimistic perspective. She shows that while Gujarati return-migrant retirees in India (from London) face disappointments and challenges on return, with time, they adjust and develop a sense of home that is located physically in Gujarat but also connected to London. They re-create home by holding on to aspects of their London lives, and continuously re-making their relationship to their 'homeland' (Ramji, 2006). Thus, home-making in older age is revealed as a continuous process of connecting past, present and future.

Deepening a sense of home that is emplaced within the host society is a strategy that is more feasible than return migration for most older migrants. Often, despite the strength of the dream of returning 'home', as time moves on this dream is relinquished due to the realities of weakening ties to past homes, together with the growing realisation that one's social and instrumental attachments are to the current place of residence (for example, Leavey et al., 2004). It seems that locality/place takes on more importance to older migrants' everyday lives, as they accumulate place-based ties over time and transition out of the labour force. As Ryan et al. (2021), point out, this does not mean that a sense of belonging in place is a given; on the contrary, it is constantly worked at through a process they term 'embedding', or developing attachments and belongings over time. Liu et al.'s (2021) study with older Chinese migrants in Australia, for example, explores the role of locality in their home-making processes, highlighting everyday routines in neighbourhoods, as well as the ways in which older migrants make houses and gardens meaningful as repositories of memory and expressions of ethnic identity, but also ways of becoming rooted in the new place. Their research illuminates how these spaces of gardens, homes and local neighbourhoods provide opportunities for older migrants to make home in ways that are frmly rooted in the 'here and now' but also connected temporally to other places and times. We explore this phenomenon of deepening home roots in the current place of residence in the next sub-section.

#### *3.3.2 Deepening Home Roots in Place Among Older Migrants*

The 'here and now' of home-making for older migrants is bound up with the nature of their ties and attachments to the current place of residence, which, as migrants age, comes increasingly to mean home to them. This can be related to a number of factors, which we explore here. One of the most important is proximity to family. The importance of living close to grown-up children (and grandchildren) is a recurrent theme discussed by older migrants (those who have children) with regard to their decisions to either move to, or remain in, their host societies (for example, Buffel, 2017; Gardner, 1999; Ryan et al., 2021; Wang & Zhan, 2021). In other words, living close enough to immediate family members so that they are part of their everyday lives is a key element of feeling at home in that place, and, for many older migrants, home is simply where their children and grandchildren are. Co-presence enables older migrants to provide care to their children and grandchildren and to construct a shared sense of home in place, in an ongoing process of meaning-making with their family members (Liu et al., 2021). Home in this sense is about the familial relationships that structure and give meaning to everyday life, and the importance of co-presence to this. Co-presence is, of course, integrally bound up with migration/staying possibilities, as the possibility of living close to one's family is tied up with *freedom* to move or stay or to be joined by family members. This points to the crucial role of immigration status and social class as intersectional power relations that produce differential access to transnational mobility and family reunifcation.

A second rationale commonly presented by older migrants for deciding to stay in the host society and make their home there is access to social security, welfare and healthcare services (Buffel, 2017). For example, Hunter's (2016) research highlights the key role played by access to healthcare and welfare in France for retired labour migrants, many of whom use instrumental narratives of home when explaining their decisions not to return permanently to countries of origin. Hunter (2016) distinguishes between these instrumental narratives of home (related to access to services) and the more emotional narratives of home used by participants when referring to family and community ties to countries of origin. However, Wang and Zhan (2021), in their research with older Chinese migrants in the US, bring the instrumental and the emotional together. They propose that instrumental decisions are also about *feeling* at home in the place where one's needs can be met – in other words, pragmatic considerations are important not just for meeting health and welfare needs, but because of the sense of security and belonging that comes from knowing these needs are being and will be met in the future. In this way, the work of both Hunter (2016) and Wang and Zhan (2021) highlights how home for older migrants needs to be understood in relation to the structural possibilities of material realities related to legal status, economic security and accumulation of statutory entitlements that become particularly important in later life. Such entitlements can accumulate over time for ageing migrants who, during the life-course, can become more settled in a host society, thus enabling structural possibilities of feeling secure, safe and cared-for, and hence of feeling at home. This gives added emphasis to the notion of spatial security being at the heart of homing in migration, connecting the emotional to the legal/instrumental aspects of feeling a secure sense of belonging in place.

Local co-ethnic communities are also a key aspect of feeling at home in the place of residence for older migrants (Ballantyne & Burke, 2017; Buffel & Phillipson, 2016; Meijering & Lager, 2014). While studies that access migrant participants through ethnic community organisations are likely to fnd that these communities are signifcant to their participants, and it is important not to generalise from these, their insights are nevertheless valuable and suggest that the connections within local ethnic communities that migrants actively foster can be central to the process of making home in the here and now. In fact, local demographic shifts which change the ethnic composition of neighbourhoods, leading to the disintegration of former ethnic communities, can be experienced by long-term migrant residents as a loss, undermining their sense of local belonging and contributing to a sense of dislocation, as found by Ryan et al. (2021) in their research with older migrants in England.

However, the lived experiences of migrant community life can be very different for men and women, pointing to gender as a differentiating factor intersecting with age and migration in shaping the im/possibilities of home for migrants and their family members. Gardner (1999) found that experiences of life in London were very different for the older Bengali men and women who were participants in her research. The female participants, who had arrived later than their male counterparts and who worked mostly in the home, were more affected by a sense of loss of the community-oriented life they had left behind in Bangladesh. Gender therefore was a key factor shaping the structural possibilities of feeling at home in London; for many older Bengali women, their role as 'home-makers' (in the conventional sense) meant that their lives were to some extent marked by isolation and the un-homeliness of the structures of family life and immigrant housing in London (Gardner, 1999). Similarly, Buffel's (2017) research with older Turkish migrants in Brussels points to the role of gender in shaping the possibilities of doing home for older migrants, in a context where men tend to have more access to neighbourhood public spaces than women and, hence, more possibilities for placemaking and developing the local attachments that are important to home-making for older migrants.

#### *3.3.3 Transnational Home and Older Migrants*

While ties in the place of residence (relating to family, neighbourhood, community and services) are key to feeling at home for older migrants, transnational dynamics and mobilities are also part of ongoing constructions of home for this group. Developing transnational living arrangements can be a strategy for meeting social, emotional and instrumental needs that are important for feeling at home, that change as one ages and that cannot be met in one place. For many people, retirement and related life changes can provide opportunities to live more transnational lives, whether that is in the form of retirement 'lifestyle' migration (often seasonal), seasonal migration to join family members who have migrated, or for existing migrants, more frequent and regular trips to the country of origin, or a more permanent return (Ciobanu & Hunter, 2017; Gustafson, 2008). For example, Tiaynen-Qadir (2016) refers to 'transnational grandmothers' who are key actors in transnational homemaking among families living between Russian Karelia and Finland, through their frequent cross-border movements and practices to sustain their families and for whom 'home' can be understood in transnational and mobile terms.

However, an overview of studies with older migrants who develop transnational mobilities in later life demonstrates the very different circumstances and levels of resources that distinguish different migration types and highlights the role of intersectional power relations and migration regimes in shaping the possibilities of transnational home-making. For example, there are important differences, rooted in migration regimes, between the circumstances of affuent older lifestyle migrants maintaining dual homes and those older migrants for whom transnational living arrangements are a manifestation of a precarity that continues into later life and that limits the possibilities of feeling at home.

For example, middle-class retirees moving from northern to southern Europe can often afford to maintain homes (and hence social and emotional ties) in two countries (Gustafson, 2008; Huber & O'Reilly, 2004). According to Huber and O'Reilly (2004), for British and Swiss retirement migrants in Spain, who often spend part of the year back in the country of origin, the ability to maintain these social and family connections to their countries of origin is a key factor in feeling at home in Spain. In a different context, Chi-Yan Sun's (2016) research with Taiwanese ageing return migrants shows that the predominantly middle-class backgrounds of the participants had enabled them to retire comfortably to Taiwan while continuing to visit their children in the US regularly, thus enabling a comfortable sense of home through ongoing transnational mobility.

On the other hand, a number of studies seem to suggest that for ageing migrants from working-class or low-income backgrounds, while return migration or seasonal circulation might be desired, it is often not considered to be feasible due to lack of economic resources or reliance on social security entitlements that tie one to one place of residence (Hunter, 2016; Leavey et al., 2004). In these circumstances of spatial immobility, the structural possibilities of home may be more restricted, requiring more work to create a sense of home. Some studies refer to the sense of security that ageing migrants gain from having lived in the same place for a long time (Buffel & Phillipson, 2016; Leavey et al., 2004), key aspects of feeling at home. This may be particularly signifcant to ageing migrants of limited means, for whom a transnational move would be a risky strategy. In this way, older migrants of limited means may experience immobility and have fewer (structural) possibilities of constructing a continuous sense of home that is connected to a place of origin. Thus, the role played by social class and its intersection with ageing and migration regimes cannot be overlooked.

#### *3.3.4 Attachments to 'Homeland' in Older Age*

For economic, personal or family reasons, many older transnational migrants decide not to return, or do not even consider returning, to their country of origin. A realisation that return is not feasible is highlighted in some studies as part of the process of ongoing home-making in the place of current residence – returning 'there' is unlikely and as a result there is more emotional investment in making 'here' home (Buffel, 2017). However, this in itself may require a process of adjustment for older migrants, reassessing relationships to place of origin and place of residence and managing the tensions between their attachments to both as they work at homemaking in later life. For example, in Ballantyne and Burke's (2017) research with older Irish migrants in Australia, participants expressed both a sense of instrumental attachment to Australia and symbolic or emotional connection to Ireland, articulated in an expressed but not-realised longing to return 'home' to Ireland.

Gardner (2002) is particularly illuminating on the important symbolic role of narratives of attachment to 'homeland' for older migrants who remain in the host society. She shows how older Bengali migrants in the UK maintain a narrative of longing for the homeland, even though their personal or social connections to the country of origin may be quite weak, given the length of time since their original migration, and return is no longer a realistic possibility. Gardner (2002) argues further that the shared narrative of longing for the homeland plays a crucial role in identity construction in the present, bound up with being part of a Bengali community in London and as a way of connecting to cultural memory and expressing dissatisfaction with aspects of life in the UK.

Buffel's (2017) research, with Turkish migrants in Brussels, fnds that the maintenance of ties both to co-ethnic communities in the host society and to country of origin are very important to older migrants. A strong sense of localised social (and familial) capital in Brussels as well as a persistent connection to Turkey enable the older migrants to feel at home in Brussels while also maintaining a transnational sense of home. The latter is facilitated by the ease of transnational mobility in their case. Paradoxically, it is this ability to travel and keep in touch frequently that enables them to make their lives and homes in Brussels. Therefore, in very different ways and contexts, both Gardner's (2002) and Buffel's (2017) studies point to the importance having a relationship of some kind with the 'homeland' or country of origin as an integral element of making one's home in the host society, a suggestion which also fnds resonance in research with transnational retirement migrants (Huber & O'Reilly, 2004).

This point is supported by Liu et al. (2021) in their study with older Chinese migrants in Australia, in which they argue that being able to integrate aspects of their old and new lives is a central aspect of making home in the new context. The enduring connection to 'there' makes it possible to make one's home 'here'. However, while this bifocal dynamic is a way of negotiating tensions between here and there and fnding a sense of home, it can also be a constant reminder of unfulflled longing to return for some (Ballantyne & Burke, 2017). As the bifocal dynamic is not equally available to all, older migrants of more limited means, who are by necessity tied to a less mobile lifestyle, have fewer (structural) possibilities of constructing a continuous sense of home that is tied to a place of origin. Pérez Murcia (2023) poignantly demonstrates how a sense of home is profoundly disrupted for people ageing in transnational families when geographical distance and migration circumstances make it impossible to ensure co-presence for end-of-life and deathrelated family obligations and expectations to be fulflled.

Maintaining transnational ties in older age is also a gendered, as well as classed, phenomenon. Fesenmayr's (2016) research with older Kenyan female migrants in London points to normative gendered expectations regarding their responsibilities towards family and kin in the place of origin – meaning that return is deferred or avoided. This means that life is constantly on hold as they do not view London as home, though they are also reluctant to return to where 'home' is (Fesenmayr, 2016). Thus, intergenerational and gendered tensions in transnational families regarding fnancial and caring responsibilities shape structural possibilities of home for older migrants.

#### *3.3.5 Summary: Structural and Intersectional Im/Possibilities of Home for Older Migrants*

This review of literature points to the importance of connections and capital, relating to family, locality, community, the state and the transnational dimension, in enabling a sense of spatial security for older migrants in their host societies. Having a sense of material security while being close to, and having everyday connections with, family and others within the local neighbourhood, including co-ethnic communities, and while not losing important transnational connections, together play a key part in feeling at home in the place of residence. For some, this sense of spatial security is further bolstered by the ability to maintain more than one home and to move frequently between them. Regardless of the circumstances, as Walsh and Näre (2016) argue, home is very much about social relationships, whether these are localised or transnational, and for older migrants, the nature of these relationships and connections may shift as they age. Contrary to popular discourses that associate older age with stasis, the literature on older migrants demonstrates the ongoing and dynamic nature of homing in later life. Hence home-making, especially for older migrants, is an ongoing process of rethinking and negotiating identities and relationships.

Feeling at home is realised through a sense of belonging linked to personal histories in place/s as well as the legal and socio-economic status that permits the imagining of future lives in that place. Most of the empirical studies discussed above have been conducted with older migrants who have some kind of citizenship or legal status in their place of residence. This is likely to be a function of the passage of time, as migrants accumulate rights and entitlements over the life-course, though may also refect a gap in the literature in relation to meanings of home for older migrants with precarious legal status. The security afforded by legal status in older age is clearly an important aspect of being able to create a sense of home in migration. For example, although not focused on the notion of home, research by Benson (2020) reveals the implications of legal insecurity for older migrants, using the case of the post-Brexit situation of British migrants in France, pointing out that some have the resources with which to navigate the uncertainties while others do not and are left in precarious situations – indicating that there is potential for further research which explores how older migrants in situations of legal/rights insecurity construct home.

Finally, the possibilities of feeling at home in migration in older age are integrally bound up with socio-spatial structures relating to age, gender, social class, race/ethnicity and residence status, as these variably open up or close down possibilities in places of residence for feeling safe and secure, for co-presence with families and social networks and for maintaining valuable transnational and transcultural ties. Changing circumstances in older age can limit the possibilities of feeling at home as not all older migrants have the same access to capital and resources with which to manage emerging tensions surrounding 'home'. Therefore, home as a

sense of spatial belonging and security is not equally available to all older migrants; instead, it can be elusive or problematic, and should be understood within the context of intersectional power relations and migration regimes.

#### **3.4 Home, Migration and Young Adulthood**

Powerful assumptions about what home is, and where it is located, are closely bound up with questions of 'the right time' in one's life to be mobile or not. While western normative ideas tend to seek to fx the very young and very old in place, young adults are expected to be on the move and free of place-based ties. Of course, the social meanings of 'childhood', 'young adulthood' and 'older age' vary signifcantly from context to context, and transitions associated with these life stages are geographically, socially and historically contingent, diverse, and much more complex in reality than the norms and expectations that surround them (for example Harris et al., 2020). The rest of this chapter draws on existing literature to challenge normative ideas about home and migration in both childhood and young adulthood, by exploring how home is understood, constructed and experienced by young people living in contexts of transnational migration, focusing frstly on young adulthood before moving on in the next section to childhood.

#### *3.4.1 Youth, Mobility and Home*

As Thomson and Taylor (2005) articulate, young people navigate questions about home and leaving/staying while they are also navigating the journey towards the kinds of adults they want to be and becoming gendered and classed selves – processes of identity formation that are often bound up with questions of place attachment, belonging and im/mobility. Young adulthood is also a time of societal expectation, as societies impose their ideals of future full adulthood on young people, who are expected to orient towards becoming their future selves, in a sense putting the 'here and now' in a liminal state and putting certain human needs on hold.

In western contexts, it can be argued that 'youth' has become normatively constructed as a life-stage associated with mobility (King, 2018). The future achievement of personal and career success has become constructed, through neoliberal discourse, in terms that are associated with the idealisation of a kind of hypermobility, linked to normative constructions of 'youth' or young adulthood (Yoon, 2014). This neoliberal construct has been critiqued in studies which have explored how young people actually navigate and experience the competing tensions and pressures in their lives as they contemplate or undertake migration. In particular, these critiques highlight the need to foreground the important role of social relations, emotions, place belonging and place embeddedness in young people's lives (Allen & Hollingworth, 2013; Cheung Judge et al., 2020; Ní Laoire, 2020). In other words, young adults are not 'unmoored' beings who can bounce from place to place accumulating experiences, but social beings who have ties and relationships to people and places, in the form of resources which they carry with them and with which they carve out a sense of home as they move (Botterill, 2014; Harris et al., 2020). We discuss this theme further here, engaging with studies that explore how young adults create a sense of home both in and against mobility. We explore the diverse meanings of home and migration in young adulthood, recognising it as a period when questions of home, migration and im/mobility take on particular signifcance, focusing frst on the concept of 'leaving home' and secondly on 'home in mobility'.

#### *3.4.2 Young Adulthood and 'Leaving Home'*

Decisions about migration/staying are often triggered by aspects of transitions to adulthood, such as decision-making in relation to transitions to the labour market, higher education or family formation, or by wider questions of identity and belonging. As young people navigate these signifcant life transitions (for example, as they transition out of the school system) they consider where home is, what home means, and whether or not to migrate from 'home'. Here we discuss this literature, focusing on the pre-migration phase as one that brings questions of migration and home into sharp focus in a particular way.

Literature on migration/staying decisions often focuses on young people growing up in economically disadvantaged, geographically peripheral or rural areas in the Global North, where there may be a 'mobility imperative' (Corbett, 2007) or economic/social pressures to migrate (Bjarnason & Thorlindsson, 2006). Another area of literature focuses on a broader mobility imperative associated with discourses of cosmopolitanism and neoliberal competition in which 'migration experience' is idealised as a qualifcation for entry into successful professional adulthood for all young people (Holdsworth, 2017; Ungruhe, 2010). Both of these sets of pressures bring the question of 'home' into sharp relief for young people as they consider whether to 'leave home' or where their homes in the future might be located. Such dilemmas are often conceptualised in terms of a tension between social/spatial mobility aspirations on the one hand and attachments to place/home, on the other (Cairns, 2013; Thomson & Taylor, 2005). For example, Cairns' (2013) research demonstrates the tensions in young people's narratives of the future between imaginaries of modest homes 'in place' and imagined futures that take them elsewhere. Studies such as those by Stockdale and Haartsen (2018) and Forsberg (2017) highlight the agency involved in electing to stay, to make and sustain homes in contexts where leaving is associated with success. It can be said then that these types of tensions frame the contexts in which young people develop narratives of home and belonging and within which they make decisions about, or enact, trajectories of mobility and immobility.

What emerges most potently from the body of research with young adults facing 'leave or stay' choices are the emotional struggles inherent in this dilemma, in which young adults fnd themselves at the coalface of contradictions embedded in their life-worlds, contradictions refected in different visions of what and where 'home' is now, was in the past, or will be in the future. At the heart of these dilemmas are questions about identity and social relations; home is not just about where one belongs, but 'who I am', a negotiation that is infuenced by prevalent local and global discourses of youth, gender, social class, sexuality and other social and cultural identities, and is navigated in the context of social relations such gender and social class in which young people are involved.

Allen and Hollingworth (2013, p. 513) draw on the concept of place-based and classed habitus, referring to the structural conditions that shape the possibilities of aspiration and desire, to demonstrate how 'localised sets of material, social and imagined relations are central in producing young people's sense of place in the world and their possibilities of mobility'. Their concept of the 'sticky effect' of social class illustrates how young people's dispositions and desires relating to home and mobility cannot be easily disentangled from the (im)possibilities thrown up by their localised social class positions. Indeed, research suggests that there is a strong association between staying and working-class or low-income status (Corbett, 2007), and some studies point to the role of factors such as the safety of home or family obligations in this. In other words, there is a sense in which electing migration/mobility is potentially too risky and costly for those with limited mobility capital, and therefore they hold onto, and invest in, the sense of home that already exists, or that is more secure, by not migrating (Ní Laoire, 2020). Migration/leaving can produce or increase precarity; this risk is not universal but is highly classed and is intimately connected to meanings of home. In addition, contrary to popular constructs of young people as independent of family ties, the sense of home that is 'at risk' is usually relational – it is formed through ties of care, love and obligation that young people have to family members, ties that are place-based, gendered, and cannot easily be stretched across space in contexts of limited resources.

Young people growing up in *migrant* families, or with familial migration histories, occupy a very particular position in this dynamic of im/mobility and homemaking. For these young 1.5, second or even third generation adults, whose parents or grandparents were migrants, the experience can be one of growing up in one place ('home') and simultaneously having a sense that the familial home is elsewhere. In other words, intergenerational and transnational relations form a key part of the landscape of homing and home-making. For example, Nikielska-Sekula's (2021) research with Norwegian Turkish second-generation youth in Norway fnds that in different ways, they identify with 'home' in both Norway and Turkey; she develops the idea of *transdimensional home* to capture how different dimensions of home are more or less intense in the different places deemed to be 'home'. She argues that this transdimensional and transnational way of constructing home is not about connecting past and present lives (as it is for frst-generation migrants) but about different dimensions or aspects of what makes home being experienced in relation to here and there simultaneously (Nikielska-Sekula, 2021).

For some young descendants of immigrants, who are navigating the emotional and complex landscape of home between the place in which they grew up and their parental or ancestral 'homeland', their life journeys may even involve a 'return' migration to the parental/ancestral 'homeland' in an effort to make their home there. A rich body of research has explored this phenomenon, labelled second-generation return migration or ancestral return migration, or even 'homecomings' (King & Christou, 2011; Tsuda, 2009). What is striking about this phenomenon is its foregrounding of the desire for home, a home that might be physically distant from where one grew up but is emotionally, symbolically and perhaps socially and culturally felt to be very close. 'Returning' to an ancestral homeland can be viewed as an expression of enduring connections across generations within families. In fact, Ní Laoire (2023) argues that we need to pay more attention to intergenerational im/ mobility legacies in transnational families. Meanings of home are made, passed on and transformed between different generations in transnational families; young adults in such families form their own attachments and home journeys but do so against the backdrop of family migration histories, transnational family entanglements and the lived experiences of growing up in im/migrant households.

In other words, social class, geography, migration regime, generation and gender all play a role in shaping the meanings and structural possibilities of home, vis-à-vis im/mobility, for young adults contemplating migration or staying 'at home' or constructing home in contexts of family migration histories. And importantly, by focussing on the meanings of home for young adults, our attention is drawn to the material, social and emotional dimensions of their lives, challenging prevailing discourses that construct young people as detached, free-foating, fexible workers and consumers. Young people are of course also agentic in mobilising the resources available to them, as classed and gendered beings, in working towards shaping and fnding their sense of home in the world. This can be by staying 'at home' geographically while being mobile in different ways – for example, commuting, travelling, forging new global and local connections or identifying with cosmopolitan identities (Thomson & Taylor, 2005; Yeh, 2014). For many more young adults, a sense of home is sought through migration (either by leaving the childhood home, seeking another home, returning home, remembering home or by home-making on the move) which we explore in the next section.

#### *3.4.3 Young Migrants and Home in Mobility*

Given the globally interconnected nature of the world in which transnational youth migration occurs, conventional notions of 'leaving home' are no longer adequate to capture how home is understood and constructed by young migrants on the move. Cheung Judge et al. (2020) draw our attention to the under-recognised role of emotion in young people's mobilities and the complex entanglements of emotion, relating to both past and present, that characterise the lives of young transnational migrants. The concept of home can help to illuminate young migrants' emotional

worlds, drawing attention to the less visible relational and affective dimensions of youth migration. While youth mobilities often disrupt and complicate normative assumptions that associate home with settlement and immobility, a signifcant body of research points to the importance of different, sometimes unexpected, ways of feeling and doing home among young migrants on the move, challenging conventional understandings of home.

For example, youth migration can disrupt expected life-course transitions relating to home-making. According to Harris et al. (2020), mobility complicates notions of the right time and right place to settle, form a family and make a home. Contemporary transnational migration is characterised not so much by linear trajectories of youthful mobility followed by settlement, but by fragmented and diverse transitions tied up with more complex migration journeys (King, 2018). This can often mean that gendered heteronormative expectations are not easily fulflled as young migrants face challenges in establishing and maintaining social and intimate relationship across borders and long distances and in contexts of transience and uncertainty. In this context, Harris et al. (2020) argue that young transnational migrants' engagements with places may not be about long-term integration in specifc places, but about wider networks of relationships that are developed and maintained across and through places. This idea coheres with conceptualisations of home as a transnational or mobile construct, suggesting that for many young migrants, home may be 'made' in mobility, as they move, often alongside peers, maintaining meaningful ties to, and through, different places, often virtually, and constructing a feeling of home that is not about place embeddedness in the sense of deeply rooted local lives, but about dynamic transnational *and* local relationships.

Ahmed (1999) draws attention to the complexities of the migration-home nexus, highlighting the ways in which migration can be a movement towards home, or a way of being at home that is not fxed or rooted, in contrast to normative notions of migration as leaving home. In this sense, while home as a concept denotes feelings of belonging, security and familiarity, these qualities are not necessarily found through fxed rootedness in place. For example, Parutis (2011) conducted research with Polish and Lithuanian migrants aged 18–40 in Britain, and argues that, unlike families with children, these young migrants do not look for stability or physical comfort in the present and do not attach great value to the material culture of home. They value the freedom of their mobile lives. However, even though they avoid settlement in one particular place, according to Parutis (2011), they still fnd ways of making unhomely temporary accommodation more homely, such as through developing friendships with fatmates. This points to the importance of interpersonal relationships as well as a sense of freedom in cultivating a feeling of home. 'Freedom' in this sense refers to the ability to change life decisions as circumstances change (Parutis, 2011) and indicates the value young migrants place on agency and autonomy. Similarly, Damery (2021), in her research with young adults from migrant families in Brussels, points to the young people's agency in homemaking: importantly, she argues that the young people were not always willing to accept the choices that were being made for them by others that in effect would have limited their possibilities of feeling at home. The young people created spaces of belonging and family-like relationships for themselves despite the lack of stability of their migrant and family statuses (Damery, 2021). Home for young migrants like those in Parutis' (2011) and Damery's (2021) research then can be understood in terms of a meaningful space in which they can develop interpersonal relationships and make life decisions on their own terms.

However, forming intimate relationships and making home in transnational mobility is not easy and requires resources and mobility capital that are not equally available to all young migrants. The task of home-making can be challenging, elusive and uncertain. Fathi's (2022) research exploring constructions of home among young migrant men (aged 18–35) in Ireland fnds that, for many, home is something that is 'on hold' due to the temporary and transitory nature of their migrant status and socio-economic positions in the host society. Particularly in the case of young men who have refugee status, their life-course transitions have been interrupted and disrupted by an asylum process which puts their lives on hold for a long time. This means that 'home' is something that does not exist in a meaningful way in the present but instead is an ideal to strive for in the future. Similarly, Sirriyeh's (2016, p. 13) research with young refugee women in Britain (aged 16–25) explores the intersections of life-course transitions (related to young adulthood) and forced migration experiences, highlighting how life-course time becomes 'stretched, contracted and otherwise constructed in the migration process'. Her research shows how the young women work to create homely spaces even in contexts of disruption and instability but also draws attention to the costs of this disruption.

These costs can be understood through the lens of structural im/possibilities of home, intersectionality and disrupted life-course transitions. Being a young adult while going through the disruption and uncertainty of an asylum process can mean that expected life-course events such as fnding a life partner, settling down and forming a family are postponed, while simultaneously ties to families of origin may be severed. Moreover, these family and life-course disruptions can continue after achieving refugee/settled status due to the legacy of the asylum process in terms of its disembedding and isolating effects (Howlett-Southgate, 2021). Gendered heteronormative expectations are not fulflled and home is often envisaged as something in the future, that is, it represents a hope and an ideal rather than something that exists in the here and now. Kim and Smets' (2020) research with young-adult Syrian refugees in a housing project in the Netherlands points to the importance to them of the private domestic space for creating a sense of home that is origin-oriented, by enabling them to recreate familiar surroundings and practices. However, although this sense of home is transnationally connected to other Syrians, it does not seem to extend to wider Dutch society (Kim & Smets, 2020). Similarly, in our research in Ireland, young migrant men experienced a paucity of opportunities for meaningful connections to others locally and for spaces of care that could provide them with the spatial security that could make a sense of home in the city and wider society possible (Fathi & Ní Laoire, 2023). These impossibilities of home must be understood in the context of migration histories that have temporally disrupted lives and intimate relationships during crucial youthful life-course transitions as well as the racialised exclusion and segregation of refugees in European cities. In this way, states seek to control migration through strategies of temporality, disrupting young migrants' expected life-course transitions, denying them spatial security in the present and delaying future home. Thus, the structural im/possibilities of home for young migrants are closely linked to intersections of migration regime, age and race.

The ways in which migration regimes intersect with structures of class, gender, race and age to circumscribe the possibilities of home differently for different groups of young migrants are complex. However, some studies provide further glimpses of how these complexities manifest. For example, in their research on international students' constructions of home, Wu and Wilkes (2017) fnd that for some students, the host society cannot feel like home because of their experiences of racism and cultural dislocation there, while for others, home is felt to be wherever in the world they want it to be, an outlook that indicates a degree of privilege and freedom not available to all young migrants. The signifcance of meaningful local and city-scale feelings of attachment among young-adult migrants, particularly those in privileged positions, contrasts sharply with the young refugees in Kim and Smets' (2020) research above. For example, Prazeres' (2018) research with Canadian international students in Global South cities reveals how they form a sense of home in their host societies through their attachments to local neighbourhoods and the city itself. Prazeres (2018) clearly positions this urban/local sense of home as a function of these young people's privilege as white western international students in being able to comfortably feel at home in a new place.

#### *3.4.4 Summary*

Bringing the focus onto young-adult migrants in the discussion of migration and home is valuable as it draws our attention to the multiple meanings of home and its fuid and shifting nature. It also reveals how particular ideas about home can become normative, in ways that are bound up with expectations about young adulthood, mobility and migration. These norms and expectations form an integral element of the structural im/possibilities of home in migration. Migration regimes seek to facilitate the hypermobility of young people, as part of neoliberal regimes, and supported by assumptions about young adulthood being a life-stage when home is not a priority. Thus, the temporalities of migration regimes are revealed, frstly in the ways in which they are imbricated with biographical time and secondly, how many young migrants become caught in protracted waiting in migration, that is, immobility in migration, thus delaying their possibilities of home-making.

The literature reveals how certain aspects of what makes home become particularly signifcant in the context of youth migration, such as, the importance of autonomy over one's life choices and the maintenance of interpersonal relationships across long distances while on the move. Research with young migrants themselves shows how they challenge some of the normative assumptions about youth, mobility and home/homing. Young migrants in very different contexts, through their practices, challenge expectations of what home should be – whether that is by leaving childhood homes, or choosing to stay despite pressures to leave, or choosing between family and asylum status (Damery, 2021), making homes in situations of uncertainty, maintaining familial relationships virtually, or in the emphasis they place on emotional over material qualities of home.

#### **3.5 Childhood, Migration and Home**

Holloway and Valentine (2000), over two decades ago, pointed out that normative Western constructions of childhood have contributed to powerful assumptions that the best place for children is 'at home' (understood as a domestic familial space) and that the existence of mobile, nomadic or homeless children has often resulted in moral panics. Inherent in this construct is the notion that the ideal childhood is one that is marked by immobility and rootedness in place through a singular domestic home. However, this notion has been challenged by research that has emerged over the past two decades to bring child-centred and social constructivist perspectives to bear, drawing also on the mobilities and transnational turns in social science, to understandings of childhood, home, mobilities and migration (Dobson, 2009; Knörr, 2005; Moskal, 2023; Ní Laoire et al., 2010; Tyrrell & Kallis, 2017; White et al., 2011). Some of this literature demonstrates the many ways in which 'normal' childhoods are marked by mobility and migrancy and reveals how children construct complex and fuid notions of home in these contexts. In doing so, this body of literature highlights the importance of taking a child-centred perspective in any study of home and migration. Children are social beings who are active agents in shaping their own social worlds and constructing their own sense of home, in ways that are often different to those of adults. However, despite this, most literature on home and migration is based on research conducted with adults (Moskal, 2015; Damery, 2021). Because of the nature of childhood itself, children's worlds are not easily entered or grasped by adult researchers or stakeholders. Therefore, to avoid an adult-centric view of home and migration, we need to look to studies that have attempted to engage with children on their own terms if we are to understand what home means to children who have migrated or whose worlds are marked by migrancy and transnational mobility.

#### *3.5.1 Children and Home-Making in Migration: Agency and the Everyday*

Over the pasts two decades, many researchers have engaged directly with children who have experienced migration or mobility, to explore their constructions of home and belonging (for example, Ní Laoire et al., 2011; Tyrrell et al., 2019). A key insight of this body of research is, frst, to highlight the creativity and agency of

migrant children's complex constructions of home and belonging. Thus, the active nature of home-in-migration as an ongoing process for children is emphasised – children do not simply inherit or absorb a given sense of home but they actively construct it, and they do so in contexts of different structural im/possibilities of which they are more aware than they are given credit for. Second, many authors also agree that everyday social and familial relations and materiality are central to how home is constructed and experienced by children in contexts of migration/mobilities. As argued by Ní Laoire et al. (2010, p. 159), "'home' emerges as a concrete site of social relations and practices, involving familial and other social relations, daily practices and materiality, often conducted and experienced across territorial boundaries". We explore both of these insights further by looking at three importance themes in relation to how children construct home in the context of different migration-related structural im/possibilities: family, materiality and the everyday/ small-scale.

First, across numerous studies, and perhaps unsurprisingly, family is emphasised as a particularly important site of belonging at the very heart of what home means to children (for example, McGovern & Devine, 2016). For children who migrate with family members, family may replace 'home' as the main pillar of identity after migration. Christopoulou and de Leeuw (2005) point to the role of family as the main mediator between past and present, between old and new worlds, as migrant children negotiate shifting meanings of home. This highlights the particular diffculties experienced by migrant children living in contexts of enforced family separations. However, children can and do develop strategies to cope with such ruptures. For example, Zhang's (2015) research with children in China who are separated by internal migration from family members points to the children's resourcefulness in constructing a sense of home on the move, for example, through their work to maintain family ties despite physical separations or to create new family-like connections**.** According to Zhang (2015), the emotional importance of a sense of home to these children cannot be overstated; even though the household structure may be broken, the children maintain a feeling of home through new and different spaces and practices of familial belonging.

Second, the importance of material objects (see also Chap. 4) takes on a particular signifcance to constructions of home among children who have experienced sharp ruptures in their lives due to migration. The importance of keeping and displaying family photographs as a way of maintaining happy memories of past lives and of distant family members is highlighted in some research with migrant children (Christopoulou & de Leeuw, 2005). Often there is an understandable reluctance to talk about the past among refugee families (Chase, 2010). Christopoulou and de Leeuw's (2005) research shows that photos are a way for children of keeping it alive (even while being silent); they write about what they term an 'economy of memories' (p. 120) where only those memories of past lives that are useful in the present are remembered. In other words, contrary to popular belief, children are often very aware of the structural im/possibilities of home as shaped by the migration realities of their lives, and they adjust their constructions of home accordingly. Hatfeld's (2010) research with children in elite migrant families reveals that they do

not invest a lot of emotion in physical places but in more portable objects and practices that make home on the move. In these ways, the children adjust their understanding of home in response to the knowledge that their place of residence is temporary and that future places of residence may also be temporary, and in doing so, demonstrate their capacity to grasp the material (structural) possibilities and impossibilities of their lives as children in migrant families.

Finally, Hatfeld (2010) makes a particular case for recognising the importance of the everyday and small-scale for understanding what home means in the social worlds of children who move. She argues that the small-scale, mobile and transient nature of home-making among children means that adult-centred ways of understanding home-in-migration cannot suffce for theorising about children's worlds. She pays particular attention to the ways in which the migrant children use material objects and domestic practices to make and transport home (Hatfeld, 2010). She fnds that children are active participants in home-making and that they use material objects (such as soft toys) and domestic practices (such as eating together as a family) that are easily transportable from one home to another as they migrate as a family. In this way, these small-scale material objects and practices enable them to maintain an element of continuity between homes while also adapting to the changes brought about by migrating (Hatfeld, 2010). Focusing on the materialities and everyday social practices through which home comes into being for children draws our attention to the immediate surroundings, the daily routines and the social connections that make home/s even as they are stretched across space (Mand, 2010). In other words, the every-day of migrant children's social worlds in their contextspecifcity, their child-ness and their materiality, even though such worlds are often transient, provide the material with which they construct home, and they do so on the basis of their competence as social agents who have an understanding of the structural im/possibilities of home for them as children in mobile transnational families.

#### *3.5.2 Multi-scalarity and the Politics of Home in Migrant Childhoods*

Therefore, even though children's constructions of home are often grounded in the small-scale and the everyday, this does not mean that children's home-making processes are insignifcant, or local-only, or limited to the micro-scale; on the contrary, they refect at a micro scale the macro-scale processes that are shaping migrant childhoods and being shaped by them. Indeed, homing in migrant childhoods is recognised as a multi-scalar and complex process, in which children's constructions of home and belonging involve complex navigations at the domestic, local, national and transnational scales (Den Besten, 2010; Mand, 2010).

The small-scale and everyday relations and practices that make home for children are intimately interconnected with wider local, national and transnational frames of reference, and this is particularly the case for children who grow up in contexts of transnational migrations and families. This understanding also challenges the hegemonic Western tendency to tie notions of childhood home to the domestic sphere only and highlights the different sites and scales of belonging that are meaningful to children. For example, in different contexts, both Ní Laoire et al. (2011) and Vathi and King (2021) explore how children in return-migrant families navigate and disrupt hegemonic *national* constructs of return migration as 'homecoming', which are contradicted by their everyday experiences of more ambivalent belongings at *local* level in the presumed 'homeland'. Other studies illustrate how migrant children actively draw on frames of belonging at different scales. For example, White (in Ní Laoire et al., 2011) illustrates how African/Irish children blend domestic, local and transnational spaces in the making of a home-space that connects them into transnational family networks. Mand (2010) similarly sheds light on the complexities and multiscalarity of children's constructions of home in a transnational context. Her research with children in transnational Bengali families between London and Bangladesh illustrates the translocal nature of home for the children, as they locate their homes as being in *both* London *and* in their family's village in Sylhet, and as such, linked to familial ties and relationships that are lived out through concrete social practices in both places. Their constructions of home refect their own age-specifc and generation-specifc attachments to London as home, though these may be different from those of their parents, while simultaneously maintaining familial connections to a home elsewhere (Mand, 2010). In other words, they form complex constructions of home that refect the realities of their translocal lives and that do not conform to normative (or parental) expectations of a singular homeplace or homeland.

In this way, children-centred research draws attention to children's small-scale negotiations of, and resistances to, normative, adultist or hegemonic constructs of home and emphasises how they respond to the ways in which migration regimes seek to limit their possibilities of home. Even in apparently unhomely and precarious living conditions, children are active players in doing and making home. Beazley's (2000) research with street children in Indonesia shows how these children challenge national/state ideals of home and family by leaving and often rejecting their family homes, which are often experienced by them as oppressive. Instead they construct multiple homes on the move, including spaces attached to streetchild subcultures where they have strong and meaningful connections and investments. In this way, they make home in very diffcult and dangerous circumstances, and according to Beazley (2000), in doing so they subvert dominant state and familial ideological constructions of the ideal childhood home. Research such as this highlights children's agency and creativity in shaping home and at the same time resisting narratives of what a home should be, in particular resisting narratives that marginalise them. McDonnell (2021) makes a further valuable contribution here. Based on her research with migrant children in Ireland, she argues that while their home-making narratives and practices may appear on the surface to be small-scale and unimportant, they can also be a site of everyday politics and negotiation of possibilities of belonging. Through a case-study of one child living in the Direct Provision system in Ireland, that is, in an apparently and intentionally unhomely institution (see also Howlett-Southgate, 2021), she shows how he makes home through forging connections and attachments that are meaningful to him, in this way, challenging practices of spatial exclusion that seek to limit his possibilities of making a home (McDonnell, 2021).

#### *3.5.3 Summary*

Emerging literature on migrant childhoods presents an important challenge to scholarship on migration and home. That challenge is: how can the existing scholarship move beyond adult-centrism and take children's migration worlds seriously? We argue that this is both essential and possible. Engaging with children's social and cultural worlds sheds a different light on how home is constructed, experienced and done in migration. It draws attention to the everyday and small-scale nature of how home gets done, in its materiality, its apparent banality and its interpersonal nature. But this does not mean that home from this perspective is only banal or small-scale – it is through these practices and connections that the wider structural im/possibilities of home in migration are lived and experienced by migrants, children and families. Migrant children actively challenge exclusionary migration regimes and adult expectations by forging and sustaining the ties and connections that mean home to them. Therefore, they are key players in the doing of home in migration and the specifcities of their homing and home-making experiences need to be acknowledged.

#### **3.6 Conclusions**

Drawing on the existing literature from across the different life-courses stages discussed in this chapter (older age, young adulthood and childhood), a number of key points can be made about the relationships between age, home and migration. The frst is that it is clear that both the emotional/subjective and the material/practical are important aspects of home for all migrants – however, each one takes on different signifcance, and in different ways, at different stages of the life-course and migrant journey. Second, feeling at home in migration is a constant process. It is through a life-course perspective that this processual and life-long aspect of home in migration becomes clear – it is never fnished but is constantly worked at through childhood and into older age, usually involving a negotiation of tensions between the emotional, the social and the material/practical aspects. Third, the possibilities of feeling at home in migration are integrally bound up with age and life-course as socio-spatial structures. In addition, the ways in which these intersect with gender, social class, race/ethnicity and residence status means that the possibilities of home in migration are contingent on migrants' complex social positioning, of which age and life course are crucial components that should not be overlooked.

These im/possibilities of home are also bound up with migration regimes; migration regimes treat migrants differently depending on age, and in turn are experienced differently at different life-stages. These dynamics open up and close down possibilities of feeling and doing home, whether through, for example, the im/possibilities of maintaining multiple transnational homes in older age, or of building a future home during young adulthood, or for children of re-constructing a sense of home in the face of disruptions. Therefore, home as a sense of spatial belonging and security is not equally available to all migrants who may share a social positioning in terms of age; instead, it can be elusive or problematic for many, and should be understood within the context of age-related intersectional power relations and migration regimes.

The overview of literature suggests a few areas for further research. While much migration research tends to focus on adult migrants in middling age groups and lifecourse stages, this research does not always consider the role of age/life-course in their experiences of home. Therefore there is space for research that explores how norms and expectations of middle-adulthood life-stages are tied up with the structural im/possibilities of home in migration. Secondly, more research is needed on home in migration that incorporates children's perspectives, but without siloing them. In other words, we have much to learn from children's perspectives when conceptualising home in migration. Finally, intergenerational perspectives that span long time-periods within families or migrant communities or networks could add considerably to existing understandings of how home is constructed and reconstructed in migration over time and across generations.

#### **References**


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# **Chapter 4 Materialities of Home in Migration**

#### **4.1 Introduction**

Contemporary debates on home in migration have taken a new exciting path towards understanding the material aspects of home, although the intersection of migration studies and material culture studies requires further research. Basu and Coleman (2008) argue that objects form an important part of migratory journeys. Here we focus on understanding the materiality of migrant homes and the relationship between objects and migration as a personal as well as a social process. Understanding the importance of objects, particularly for migrants who have limited means to physically move objects with them across transnational borders (such as refugees and undocumented migrants), is important and there is much room for exploration here (Neumark, 2013; Giorgi & Fasulo, 2013).

It is important to stress that a home is not just about its material and structural boundaries (as this book overall attempts to demonstrate), but, acknowledging the deeper meanings in relation to home, we focus here on the physical facets of home that present themselves as vital in relation to its social and symbolic components. By doing this, the intention is not to isolate the space of home in migration from its wider social order or structures of im/possibilities; instead, the chapter considers how material aspects of home have meaning in relation to memory and nostalgia, everyday life and identity categories of gender, age and race, among others and in relation to social and emotional structures of migrants' lives. Materialisation here means the process of translating meaning into objects and structures and, vice versa, using objects by attributing to them signifcant underlying meanings beyond their immediate physical and instrumental use. This chapter presents a discussion of the existing scholarship on materiality of migrant home, frst highlighting the importance of objects in migration narratives before moving on to present a categorisation of objects in migrant home-making around which the rest of the chapter is structured.

#### **4.2 Importance of Objects in Migrants' Lives**

Woodward (2001, p. 132) argues that 'the aspiration people have for their home, and their ideal ways of presenting and talking about their home and the objects inside it, are just as important as how they might actually live in their home'. The reason this relationship (between the notion of home and objects) is important is because the structure of a dwelling or other physical space where practices of home-making take place cannot be conceived of without the objects that occupy and constitute the space and, if we are interested in the spatial meanings of a home, then objects play a vital role in this interplay. Miller (1998) argues that our social worlds are constituted through materiality. As we live with an array of objects, and at some stages, we decide what to do with things that surround us, we are making decisions to re/construct our homes that impact our sense of who we are. Miller (1998) argues that practices of decoration, using ornaments or specifc items to transform an inhospitable dwelling into a meaningful place, can have deep impacts on our core beings and sense of belonging that are central to identities and the sense of who we are.

We understand materiality to refer to a variety of tools, aesthetic objects, ornaments and everyday goods such as food that can sustain routine life, give meaning and provide comfort (both mental and physical) to a person. This chapter offers a discussion about the materiality of migrants' lives and its signifcance in understanding home in the contexts of mobility and resettlements.

Pérez Murcia and Boccagni (2022, p. 590) recently endeavoured to present four functions that objects have in a migrants' home: '1) embodying collective backgrounds and identities, 2) affording migrants to feel at home, 3) encapsulating their biographical memories and ties, 4) eliciting connections with settings and events that meant 'home' over their life course'. This categorisation, based on their feldwork with Ecuadorian migrants in Italy, although useful in understanding the different functions that objects can have, particularly when migrants settle in host societies, remains somewhat limited in scope. There are many similarities across the different categories. For example, categories one and four are very similar and it is not clear how collective backgrounds and identities can be separated from events and settings that have been shared with others.

It is clear from the literature on materiality in home that the use of objects is linked to three major and overarching factors. Firstly, the majority of the literature in this area links past lives including biographies to larger cultural and social contexts of past homes and argues in depth that these relationships are encapsulated in objects. The second aspect is that objects that are taken with migrants have an everyday use aspect. They are functional and instrumental in the everyday lives and home-making practices of migrants. In this sense the signifcance of objects in the migrant home lies in their practicality and their role in facilitating everyday life as a migrant. Finally objects that are related to individualised identities such as class and gender are used as vehicles of identifcation and recognition.

We all like to defne spatial territories around us to designate what belongs to us and not to others, demarcating the boundaries of home and outside. An important aspect of what marks these spaces as one's own are the physical markers through activities as well as use and repurposing of tools and objects that allow us to 'use' but also to 'control' our environments. This territorial interpretation of home (Després, 1991) is directly linked to the sense of satisfaction from owning a space. Additionally, the desire to modify a place that seems 'out of character' or empty, by giving meanings to specifc aesthetic properties around the home is a universal experience. This is what Becker (1977) calls 'personalization'. Personalisation as a practice of ownership (Wells, 2000) and attachment is a gendered act, particularly in turning non-home environments into some form of home (see Dinç, 2009). This phenomenon is discussed later in the chapter in relation to refugee camps and the empty and soul-less spaces of shelters and other migrant accommodations. Here we focus on another type of object personalisation, that is, the role of materiality in mobile life.

Tolia-Kelly (2004) in her research with South Asian women shows that material culture is important in shaping diasporic homes by evoking pre-migration memories and the status associated with lives before displacement. By talking about photos, and meaningful objects that moved with Indian women migrants in the UK, she shows how identities of self and other were constructed through materiality and 'lifestyle' (Tolia-Kelly, 2004). Here materiality in mobile lives refers to how different forms of objects are used in the structures of homes as part of everyday life. In what follows, we present a framework for understanding the role of materiality in migrants' home lives.

Whilst much of the current literature discusses the importance of objects of the past (Christou & Janta, 2019; Edwards, 2010; Fathi, 2020; Golovina, 2018), there is still much to be learned about the material traces migrants leave behind and what they take and carry with them along their journeys to be used in their immediate and future lives. Objects can serve an instrumental purpose as well as having deeper meanings and can convey messages about the collectivities and individual lives of which they have been part. The following categorisation by no means aims to place each study into one of the three overarching categories we identify above but instead to elucidate the distinct signifcance of each one. As such the rest of this chapter is divided into three sections:


#### **4.3 Objects, Memories and Nostalgia**

The frst category refers to objects that capture symbolic historical meanings. Several scholars show that artefacts can evoke strong emotions (Navaro-Yashin, 2009; Svašek, 2008). Objects of memory refer here to those items that are not used on an everyday basis, but on refection, they mean more than a mere tool or an ornament and there is a particular biographical history attached to that object. They evoke a variety of feelings, that are remembered, cherished and refected upon with the work of memory. As such these objects are always imbued with emotional attachments that are associated with a particular event, ceremony, relationships or person(s) from the past. These objects could evoke individual or collective memories fuelled by refective nostalgia, glorifying the past homes. Emotions generate knowledge about oneself and one's surroundings (society) (Svašek, 2012), which can establish, sustain or challenge power relations, infuencing one's subjectivity. As such objects of memory, due to their emotional load, are very important in the process of home-making after displacement.

Encapsulating memories of past lives, and in particular of relationships with 'dear ones', we try to keep creating links to what makes us feel wanted, belonged, warm and emplaced, such as to objects that remind us of these connotations. This is particularly true for forcedly displaced people for whom longing and belonging become an everyday emotional experience. These warm feelings can be individual or collective. Turan (2010) focuses on the signifcance of objects for the Palestinian diaspora from a psychological and material perspective. She discusses how objects help to form collective identity and memory. Turan (2010) calls these objects (that bring a sense of collectivity) 'objects of legacy' and argues that they provide a form of 'transition' between homeland and the lives of migrants of frst generation, but turn into 'objects of legacy' for the following generations as the direct link between the migrant and homeland does not exist in younger generations, but objects remain an important part of this legacy (Turan, 2004).

So, some objects provide a 'sheltering and nurturing' environment in diaspora groups (Turan, 2010, p. 53), but we need to remember that not all memories of home are as positive and nurturing due to past events that can bring a sense of loss, detachment and sorrow. However, what people tend to 'keep' as a method of survival are those objects that bestow a happy feeling, a positive attribution and those that create a strong sense of attachment to important people such as the mother, what Winnicott (2001) called transitional objects: transitioning from one mode of attachment to another, replacing their primary care giver with an object of comfort. Here, objects of memory facilitate the environment by helping the transition from one home to another. As such this frst category is related to those material tools that elicit and create emotional connections between us and places, settings, as well as collectivities and signifcant others that give a feeling of home to one's life. It is noteworthy that the literature, in discussing materialities of migration, tends to focus on objects of memory that link migrants' lives strongly to their past homes, homeland and transit spaces. One of the areas that needs fresh investigation is how objects of the present shine a light on the current lives of migrants.

Objects and material structures act as bridges between the home now and the home in the past. The bridge is the work of memory. In relation to how cities retain elements of past systems such as colonisation, Ley (2004, p. 155) argues that memories of home are recharged through preservation of such material felds but at the same time they transfer home into 'unfamiliar and distant territory'. We also argue

that memory objects have the capacity to open space for people to adapt to their surroundings; in other words, their main application is a facilitation of the present home. This happens through shared memories that lead to collective narratives and discussions around how material structures and objects are used and understood. These similarities in the practice and acts of remembering are what brings people of the present time closer to each other as well as to their shared past. So, objects of memory act horizontally in time and rhizomatically in their social networks. Equally, shared memories make stronger and more frequent transnational connections to others easier within the contemporary digital world. Pérez Murcia and Boccagni (2022) argue that objects can create emotional connections to past homes and contribute to 'home reproductions' or make a positive connection to their current life environments as a form of 'home making' (p. 589). It can also be added that it is through this bridging to the past, and past homes, that one can make a home in the present time (Povrzanović Frykman, 2016; Povrzanović Frykman & Humbracht, 2013).

The place that is called home includes objects and things that facilitate the process of living, increase the sense of comfort, and fnally facilitate emotional attachments to places. The 'feeling at home', which is usually associated with safety, security and control (Ahmed, 1999; Boccagni, 2017) is often conveyed through how we create these attachments to spaces, people and to times. Much of the literature on material cultures and migration focuses on objects' roles in recreations of homecountry homes: either creating a material house in the home country (country of origin) or using objects from there in the migrant home in the host society. For example, in an ethnography by Boccagni (2013) and Boccagni and Pérez Murcia (2021) about Ecuadorian migrants living in the north of Italy, it is evident that migrants engage actively in a process of sending remittances to their home country of Ecuador. They do this in order to create a home over 'there' by building 'better' houses that would differentiate them from other Ecuadorians who stayed put. The study also shows that they persist in constructing their modest homes in Italy in order to resemble 'home in Ecuador' (Boccagni, 2013) as this resemblance acts as a form of memory card to connect them across the two worlds. Boccagni and Pérez Murcia (2021) argue that 'remittance houses' (Lopez, 2010) (houses that are rebuilt materially using remittances), negotiate class, status and belonging and act as 'agents' of social change in their own right.

The narratives that give life to these connections are of course important as they shape the stories that provide 'cultural continuity' between the host country and the home and over a long period of time for displaced people (Turan, 2010, p. 45). As Woodward (2001, p. 132) argues, narratives about objects are 'carefully constructed texts' that are 'embedded within a wider discourse about taste, the home and the family, which serve to make accountable everyday aspect of people's reality'. Thus, the meanings and intentions that are attached to material components of making a home are fundamental to understanding home in migration. In the above example, sending remittances is done in order to create an image of a life that distinguishes the migrant character from those who did not migrate. Here the object of *everyday use* (the house) becomes an object of *identity* (class and consumption). It must be noted that these categorisations are never clearly divided and are co-constitutive of each other, but their individual meanings are uniquely distinct.

The relationship between objects and migration experiences is nuanced and complex. Fox (2016) notes that there is a common assumption of a difference in the meaning of objects for those who live sedentary and nomadic lives. The former tends to accumulate objects throughout their lives (even those that are not instrumental) whilst the latter group tend not to have possessions (carrying only objects necessary for survival). He argues that this is a misunderstanding of how we live with materiality whilst on the move. As we study materialities within migration, we need to move past objects as 'necessary' for survival and look more carefully at how survival is intersected with other necessities of our human condition such as 'biographical continuity' (Alonso Rey, 2016). This line of thinking has been taken up in studying photographs in mobile lives and how they act as 'multi-sensory objects' (Edwards, 2010) in creating a sense of stability in migrants' lives as well as using them as a method of narrating migration stories (Edwards, 2012; Kuhn, 2007; Pink, 2001; Rose, 2003; Yefmova et al., 2015 to name a few). In studying photographs that were sent between Ukrainian migrant mothers in Italy and their transnational families, Fedyuk (2012) shows that photographs can illuminate the emotional labour within transnational families mostly done by mothers living far away from their families. Tolia-Kelly (2004) argues that photographs symbolise relationships with colonial landscapes in South Asia and East Africa and connect South Asian migrant women in Britain to their past homes, nature and family life, connecting premigration life to post migration life. Smith and Pitt (2009) and Chuck et al. (2005) argue that there is a strong link between mental/physical wellbeing and personalisation of living- and work-spaces and photographs are one of the main tools to transform these spaces. Closely related, White and Beaudry (2009) and Rechavi (2009) argue that objects such as photographs can be used as a marker of identity and refection on past decision making.

As we see, objects represent a much wider world in relation to what migrants lose by leaving homes behind and gain through setting up new homes. Objects' roles in this way need to be regarded in relation to identity expressions and cultural survival (Trabert, 2020). Ballinger (2003, p. 220) in her research with Italians living in post-Yugoslavia argues that in her participants' opinion, they had a sense of 'interior displacement, an exile of the heart and mind, if not the body'. These Italian migrants took with them a variety of objects and images, such as fragments of a home's foundations or vials of seawater to stay connected with those physical structures that they were forced to leave.

Most of the literature discussed here argues that migrants use material possessions, objects, food, within the structures of their dwellings as these materialities can create links between personal biographies of migrants and those of their signifcant others set within larger social, historical and cultural contexts within which they make new homes. Material homes as such offer novel spaces that create a link between biography and macro structure (Miller, 1987). For example, Tolia-Kelly (2004) shows how nation is linked to objects as mundane as photographs. Objects from homeland gain signifcance within a new context that accentuates their role in home-making and conveys a sense of belonging and attachment to the past life and homes. Whilst 'bridging' these two life worlds (homeland and host) is facilitated through objects (Povrzanović Frykman & Humbracht, 2013), by refecting on how objects can evoke memories, we can understand the larger contexts around materialities. Svašek (2012) argues that materialities from homeland can trigger a sense of belongingness. Objects help migrants to preserve and negotiate bonds in their native country and the country in which they now reside. The socio-economic status of migrants also infuences such negotiation and preservation. The reason for this is that migratory circumstances can vary greatly; political and economic hardships often prevent poorer migrants or refugees from carrying excessive possessions and lack of time impacts their engagement with objects and images, while affuent migrants are less likely to be subjected to these situations, often allowing continuous movement between homeland and new residential location. Thus, materiality in migration is closely bound up with migration regimes and the structural im/possibilities of home.

#### **4.4 Instrumentality and Everyday Life**

Migrants, on one hand, have complex biographies due to the transnational movements and different spaces they call home. Moving from one context to another means going through diffcult pathways and transiting through various countries, making the process of taking and maintaining physical objects between homes more diffcult than when one is sedentary. So, a lot of investment and energy is demanded on the part of migrants to physically move home and the objects within it, so that decision-making about objects is a more rigorous process than in a sedentary house. On the other hand, migrants' lives are no different to non-migrants' in terms of the importance of memory objects, the necessity of having objects to facilitate everyday life, to connect one to the surrounding and to express ethnic, classed and gendered identities. In order to feel at home, one needs to be living the everyday, which relates to another categorisation of material life, that is, the instrumentality of objects in migrants' lives.

One line of inquiry in relation to materiality of home and instrumentality of objects in everyday life explores the role of food in migration. Povrzanović Frykman (2018) draws attention to food-related objects as everyday but important tools that can facilitate continuity in migrants' lives. She refers to the signifcance of a coffee pot from Italy for an Italian migrant in Sweden and argues that objects of this sort help create 'continuity in transnational lives' (p. 41) whilst at the same time, the use of some objects from home is more conditioned towards a routine practice and becomes part of the everyday life of a migrant. She argues that if we focus on the individuals and journeys, we enable understanding of how belonging can turn into 'ways of being'. It means that although we tend to attach meanings to objects that are symbolic in relation to the wider socio-cultural contexts within which they are produced and consumed, their use and role in facilitating our everyday life becomes part of our simple being.

Food production and consumption in migration and displacement may be seen as a form of expression of gender, ethnic, cultural or national identity but studies that have focused on this topic show that the importance of food lies also in everyday and quotidian practices (Christou & Janta, 2019; Gregory, 1999) as a 'normal' and routine practice rather than an extraordinary ethnic experience (Kershen, 2017). At the same time, we need to remember that food as an essential object and cooking as an everyday practice, can have deeper meanings (as we mention, these categories do overlap) (see Law, 2001). But we argue that in large part food production/consumption does remain a simple act of everyday home-making when it is done as a form of sustenance other than anything else and this dual representation of food remains quite strongly in some studies. For example Mata-Codesal and Abranches (2019) in studying food production, consumption and transportation among migrants argues that these practices evoke sensorial re-creations of home but on an everyday platform. It means that although items transported across borders have specifc meanings, they are consumed with the purposes of a quotidian aim. Brown and Paszkiewicz (2017, p. 62) focusing on British Poles who bring food from their homeland to Britain describe through the words of their participants that this act of transportation is like 'bringing back a little bit of paradise'. Sending and receiving food parcels containing industrially produced material and home-made edibles is a typical migrant homemaking process (Povrzanović Frykman (2019) and way of making intimate transnational connections (Mata-Codesal & Abranches, 2018). These narratives about the particularity of food as a piece of the past or left-behind homes as well as an essential everyday item for life, can place food in the category of everyday objects.

Rabikowska (2010) for example shows that food contains emotional and mnemonic signifcance that can facilitate that sense of belonging whilst helping with the routinised life of a migrant. Walsh (2006) on a similar terrain focuses on everyday and mundane objects such as the role of an 'orange plastic bowl' in the life of Susan, a British 'expatriate' living in Dubai. Susan argues:

I bought [sic] a plastic container with me, the awful orange one at the back that I had when I frst got married. I very rarely use it. I should chuck it away and get a new one I suppose, but it was a set. (Walsh, 2006, p. 134)

Later Walsh (2006) argues that the bowl contributes to Susan's sense of identity and how she sees herself as a 'kitchen person' and provider of food for the family. In a more recent study and through exploring different home activities with a group of Italian families, Arcidiacono and Pontecorvo (2019) argue that a family's identity can be studied through their everyday interactions with each other and with the materiality of their home. The experiences of those living together in a space are entangled with connections they make to objects within those spaces. In migrants' lives, similarly, Povrzanović Frykman (2016) argues that it is not true that migrants keep using only objects that remind them of their homeland. When migrants use objects other than those brought from their home country, they can continue their lived experiences across time and space (transnational social felds) by making new objects part of their own familiar array of objects. The continuation of those practices helps migrants to exercise their very being regardless of geographical location, which ultimately enhances their sense of belonging. The sense of belonging must be understood, not in the context of cultural representation (like feeling that you belong as an ethnic minority), but as more of a belonging to the routinised life surrounding one or what Christou and Janta (2019, p. 657) refer to as 'material consciousness' or 'embodied, emotional, performative and narrated accounts central to the notion of practice in everyday migrant lives'. However, because the things we do on an everyday basis unconsciously enable us to continue our habitus without interruptions, we feel 'normal' because we do things as normal. Everyday simple materialities such as a plastic bowl or a coffee pot here provide deeper meanings whilst being used as everyday items. But it is their everyday functionality that is at the heart of why those objects are important.

What is important is that whilst it is tempting to give deeper meanings to everyday materialities, in the end, many objects in a migrant home are functioning instruments as they would be in any home setting. Scholliers (2001, p. 4) questions whether stuff like food would be the 'sole factor of identifcation of a group or an entire nation?' The answer is no. We cannot add symbolic meanings all the time to objects that are simply instrumental in facilitating everyday life. But at the same time, we need to remember that instrumentality is not a shallow reading of objects; it is central to an everyday sense of belongingness to our material worlds. We need to 'use' the objects we buy or are given as gifts. And thinking about the different functions of an object will help to understand and categorise objects better if we want to realise the true potential of material possessions and the worlds of migrants.

Personalising the interiors of the domestic spaces, as well as its practical and utilitarian elements, has the function of increasing or improving the wellbeing of migrants. The use of personalised items helps migrants to feel attached to the surroundings, even if they have instrumental usage (Hadjiyanni, 2019). A noteworthy example of this is Seo and Mazumdar's (2011) research with Korean older migrants in California, who changed the interiors of their housing structures to increase their wellbeing through heating a part of the room's foor to symbolise a traditional Korean concept of 'hearth'. The participants narrated how a warm spot in the room would evoke feelings of childhood as they had a spot in Korean houses that is meant to be taken as a hearth. A similar point is made in Fathi's (2023) research with an Iranian asylum seeker in Germany who used plants, photos and traditional Iranian artefacts to change the 'empty' dynamics of his room in a *heim* (refugee camp). He (the participant), who actively wrote and thought about the materiality of his surroundings, argued that the emptiness or lack of material details in the housing structure in *heims* where he lived in Germany was intended (in his opinion) to detach the resident from the structures of the house to increase their sense of alienation from where they live (Fathi, 2023). That is, the life of a resident asylum seeker is inseparable from the empty structures of their surroundings whilst at the same time it becomes estranged and detached from this architecture. This duality turns home-making into an impossible act in this setting. In order to tackle this, he used some plants, which he called 'his children' in the room, to have another live element in the room. These small and everyday efforts by the asylum seeker in an attempt to replace what he has lost in the process of displacement and constant movement is reminiscent of Taylor's (2013) argument about 'botanica', belongings of Cypriot refugees in London. As Taylor (2013, p. 150) argues in relation to trees, crops and plants in the lives of Cypriot refugees in London, 'the loss of the material home is rarely recognized in the assessment of the fnancial, cultural and social impoverishment of the refugee'.

What is evident here is that deeper meanings of everyday objects and their uses are refected upon when actors are asked about them. In fact, meanings become enmeshed in the everyday contexts of lives and form part of the life and being but are often not articulated as such. This shows the importance of interdisciplinary projects within sociological, psychological and anthropological research and the need for further research in the feld of material culture studies to refect upon the importance but also the instrumentality of objects in displacement.

#### **4.5 Objects and Social Identity**

Home can be an important symbol of individuals' identities; particularly the interior of a house or a dwelling can be very telling about people's occupations, personalities and lifestyles. Després (1991) writes about the link between the interior of a home (here a dwelling) and identity from a social psychology perspective. She says the home:

[…] plays a crucial role in people's defnition of their self-identity, acting as a dialogue between them and the larger community. As a container for the material possessions that are meaningful to each household member, the home provides the information necessary to the development of their self-identity, these objects being concrete embodiments of different aspects of their personality (Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981). Acting up and modifying their dwelling through the selection and manipulation of its external appearance, individuals acquire and communicate knowledge about their personal self. (Després, 1991, p. 101)

Fox (2016) argues that since we are born, we accumulate objects that we use to selfidentify. These objects usually mark a certain zone, or an 'intimate domain of our being' (p. 71). In this last section, the focus is on research on those objects that convey a form of identity in migration, a sense of self in terms of who we are and who we are not, both on an individual and collective level. Amongst these studies, there are scholars who point to different forms of identifcation processes. The focus here is on those relating to class, gender and national identity as these identity categories emerge as the most important ones in research examining migrants' lives from an intersectional perspective.

Savaş (2014) in research with Turkish migrants in Vienna discusses how a collective taste about materialities of home is achieved through consumption of the same or similar objects imported from Turkey such as tea glasses and saucers. Savaş (2014) argues that this contributes to a form of belonging to Vienna as a Turkish person. The mass migration of objects from Turkey to Austria produces a form of

collective national identity and taste among Turkish migrants who plan to permanently make Vienna their home. This combination of national and classed identity is an interesting take by Savaş (2014) as it reveals how class can be reproduced in migration through the consumption of certain material stuff from a collective source (homeland). Similarly, Fathi's (2017) research with Iranian women migrants in the UK shows how classed and national identities can be represented through objects that migrants take with them. For example, certain objects have class and status connotations such as Persian carpets, which are transported by Iranian migrants as a common practice (Fathi, 2020). Fathi (2020) argues that carpets have a deep and historical symbolic meaning in the Persian culture. As they are given as an essential item of a girl's dowry in Iran at the time of marriage, they seem to serve a particularly important function in circumstances of migration. They are objects with both national identity and classed status due to their monetary value, rarity and unaffordability for many families. These characteristics make the carpet a valuable identity object and a narrative around its signifcance is used effectively by migrants to showcase the 'superior' interiors of their homes to other Iranian migrants as well as non-Iranian visitors (Fathi, 2020).

In this way objects reproduce various meanings of home in a complex way through value systems and status compositions (Noble, 2012). Noble (2012, p. 435) argues that 'through consumption, people participate in the production of cultural meaning, because they re-signify these objects in ways which appropriate, personalise, and individualise them'. He suggests that by reappropriating objects from the realm of the public domain to the domestic space, people actively assign individualised meanings to objects and make them their own, both 'symbolically and physically' (Noble, 2012, p. 435). As such, objects can offer pathways into individuality. They distinguish their owners from others, an important aspect of class and consumption that has been taken up by sociologists of consumption (Warde, 2015). As concepts of social class, prestige and status are wider than the meanings associated only with socio-economic position (Bourdieu, 1984), the role of objects and patterns of consumption remains highly subjective and complex (Fathi, 2017) and can tell us a lot about how materiality, which is bound up with intersectional power relations, can have symbolic meanings in the lives and homing projects of migrants.

Furthermore, objects that are used to convey a particular form of identity (national, classed, gendered) maintain individuality and a sense of integration within the social arena whilst they are also important for improving mental wellbeing. For example, Smith (2007, p. 417) states that the 'handling of familiar or nostalgic objects whose worth is enhanced for the individual through idiosyncratic memory' is how migrants maintain personal identity and mental wellbeing. Keeping, using and consuming objects at home is a way to demonstrate who they are/not.

In consumption and class scholarship, many consumption practices take place within the private spheres of home. Indeed personalisation of interiors of a house or a dwelling can be a visual expression of the resident's identity and lifestyle as has been found in different contexts and among various age groups (Rechavi, 2009; Shin, 2014). Shin (2014) in studying older residents of care homes, argues that room

personalisation by using ornaments, objects made in arts and crafts activities or lifelong collections of china sets transforms their rooms of residence into their 'homes'. The use of objects in relation to identity is also a topic that has been taken up by scholars writing about refugee camps and shelters. Nabil et al. (2018) argue that in Za'atari refugee camp, the residents use art works and private and public areas of the camp to help them retain their lost identity and heritage. They argue that practices of 'crafting' and 'making', learning DIY techniques and tools can enhance their living conditions, bringing them closer to what can be called or felt like home.

#### **4.6 Conclusion**

In an era in which we are more connected (physically and virtually) and people move faster and perhaps more easily, the role of objects in the process of homemaking along migration routes needs fresh attention. Movement across borders is a physical act that includes movements of subjects as well as certain objects. The material objects, even those that are discarded and left behind, as mundane as a water bottle, or ragged clothes, tell a lot about people's migration and settlement journeys (De León, 2013, 2015). People's possessions remain an important aspect of migrant homing, but to describe, discuss and narrate them, requires refective action. Studies in the different felds of anthropology, psychology and sociology have delved into how home-migration journeys are affected by what is taken, left, kept dearly or discarded. Migrants continually adapt to their new spaces and to the structural im/possibilities of home, whilst at the same time they change the same space to ft their new lifestyles (Alt, 2006). These residential changes are facilitated in large part by objects that they bring from their homeland, the ones they purchase and acquire and the ones that they discard. Through objects, people on the move reproduce their new lives.

In the frst section of this chapter, which focuses on memory and nostalgia, we drew on studies on the importance of personal artifacts and family objects such as pieces of houses in homelands and photographs to show how they can reveal personal attachments. These studies attest to an important fact, which is that although there is much overlap between the three themes relating to objects of migrant home, that is, the memories associated with them, their everyday use and the sense of identity they give to the owner, they are an inseparable part of home in migration and their contribution to the formation of home needs to be considered through the role they play in the personal and wider worlds of migrants. The second part discusses objects that may carry deeper levels of meanings, but their functionality remains with their purpose of acting as an everyday instrument to facilitate life. Some refer to how objects of belonging can facilitate ways of being (Povraznović Frykman, 2011). The fnal part focuses on objects that would bestow a form of identity that connects migrants to the outside world, placing them as actors that could tell others who they are through consumption of objects. This last group, directly related to intersectionality, then provides avenues through which migrants can reproduce national, classed and gendered identity affliations. This offers a worthy route of investigation into new avenues within migration studies.

To conclude, we argue that material components of migration trajectories are important elements in reinstating memories of past homes, the present life and identities that often seem to be lost in the process of forced displacement, asylum seeking, in-between time zones, transit contexts and all other unsettling situations. Material home is perhaps seen as the last issue that migrants who are dealing with unstable situations need to be concerned about. This kind of thinking is refected in how accommodations and shelters are soulless and empty spaces, but a look at the current state of the art in this area shows how vital objects are in structurally making it possible to call a space home or not.

#### **References**


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# **Chapter 5 Migration Status, Class, Race and Home**

#### **5.1 Introduction**

For many, the concept of home is very simple. It's a place where no one questions your right to be; a place of belonging that points to your history, your past, an archive of sorts that metaphorically documents a lineage that marks you as nonalien. (Silva, 2009, p. 694)

Silva's (2009) concept of home is one that denotes the privilege of being able to claim a place as home in an unproblematic way, a privilege that is historically deeply rooted. At the same time, it suggests that for many others, home is not so straightforward – it is elusive, it is a place of not-belonging, or is a place either left-behind or imagined as being elsewhere. What Silva (2009) points to in these observations is the deeply political nature of home as an expression of the bordering processes that separate the ones who belong, without question, from those whose presence is constantly questioned.

These bordering processes must be understood in the context of historical legacies of possession, dispossession, colonization and exclusion. Complex geopolitical and socio-spatial power relations underlie the processes by which one's visible and invisible lineages (racialised and classed) mark one out as alien or not. Contemporary migration regimes, moreover, reproduce these power relations, producing migrant statuses that are bound up with economic and racial inequalities that structure the possibilities and impossibilities of home in migration.

Therefore, this chapter places migrant status in the foreground, focusing on the role of migrant status and relatedly, of race and class, as powerful differentiating forces shaping the structural im/possibilities of home in migration. In other words, we explore the role of (racializing) migration regimes as powerful forces that allow or deny individuals, in different ways, the possibilities of feeling at home, imagining home or doing home. It is critical also to acknowledge how migrant status, class and race intersect not only with each other but with gender, age, and other power relations in structuring these im/possibilities.

In the next section, the focus is placed on 'privileged' positioning in migration, exploring the ways in which privilege, whiteness and coloniality overlap in notions of home. Privilege is intersectionally related to classed and racialised systems. It produces and is produced through migration status and the politics of class, race and ethnicity within migration and settlement regimes. In this regard we review some studies that focus on privileged forms of migration, such as lifestyle migration and so-called high-skill and 'expat' migration. We explore how migrant groups who have positions of privilege can draw on their available capital (and privilege) to reproduce comfortable notions of home in migration, and the ways in which different migration regimes enable this.

The subsequent section focuses on the phenomenon of enforcement, precarity and stuckness in migration, as a lens through which to explore how migration regimes intersect with social class and race to limit the possibilities of feeling at home for other migrant groups, and importantly, how they navigate these limitations and borders in seeking to fnd and make home in the world. Precarity is particularly related to temporal migration regimes so this section draws on the notion of temporality as an important component of home-making in migration processes. The fnal section presents a critical discussion of how the concepts of privilege and precarity help in understanding im/possibilities of home and migration in relation to migration status, class and race.

#### **5.2 Privilege and Home in Migration**

In this section, the concept of 'privilege' is deployed to shed further light on the structural im/possibilities of home in migration. Including privileged forms of migration in the discussion is essential if we are to understand the dynamics of structural *possibilities* of home. Privilege is understood here as the oft invisible benefts conferred on those who are advantaged by systems of inequality and we argue that it is crucial to focus on privilege in seeking to understand the workings of uneven power relations and structures in society. The concept of privilege has become particularly valuable in migration studies in recent years, being utilised in analysing forms of migration associated with a high degree of control over one's own mobility and the reproduction of high social status, such as those labelled lifestyle migration, high-skill labour mobility and student migration (Benson, 2019; Croucher, 2012; Duplan & Cranston, 2023). Many agree that privileged migration is that which is undertaken by relatively privileged individuals, usually from relatively rich countries and characterised by ease of crossing international borders (Benson & O'Reilly, 2018; Croucher, 2012). Some consider student migration as a form of temporary migration that is privileged, even sometimes being labelled as 'academic tourism', in particular when students originate from a wealthy country (Breen, 2012).

Robertson and Roberts (2022) argue that middle-class cultures of migration are expanding, with mobility aspiration becoming increasingly normative in the lifetrajectories of middle-class migrants. Benson and O'Reilly (2018) argue further that privileged migration is integrally bound up with the global power dynamics of both neoliberalism and postcolonialism, both of which perpetuate relations of economic inequality that enable highly voluntary migration for some while imposing enforced im/mobilities on others. Thus, although privilege in migration can be related to a range of social distinctions (including gender), we focus here in particular on class privilege, whiteness and western-ness as indicators of privilege in global migration dynamics, particularly in relation to the role of neoliberalism and postcolonialism.

As argued in Chap. 1, home is always socially situated, and the ways in which it is lived, experienced and understood are shaped in myriad ways by the intersecting power relations that underpin one's social positioning and situated imagination. Home in this way is also bound up with global power structures that make it more or less possible for people to feel at home in the world. Traditional understandings of home have tended to construct home in terms of an unproblematic, even natural, connection between a person, place and community, a safe and still place to leave and return (Dawson & Rapport, 2021) connecting to discourses of romantic nationalism, which construct the nation as home. However, critics of this idea argue that the ability to feel a close, secure, safe and unproblematic emotional connection to one's dwelling-place, or place of origin, is a privilege afforded to the few (Ahmed et al., 2003). The traditional discourse of home also denies the reality that very often the ability of one group to feel at home in place is only possible because of the displacement, dispossession or oppression of others. Whether historically through the role of colonialism, or more recently through far-right claims to exclusive placebased rights to belong, the ability to claim a home and to feel at home cannot be separated from wider power relations of privilege, marginalisation and politics of belonging.

Literature focusing on forms of migration such as lifestyle migration, student migration, high-skill migration and so-called 'expat'1 migrants is insightful in this respect. Some of this literature is reviewed here, exploring how migrant groups with positions of privilege can draw on their available capital to (re)produce a comfortable sense of home in migration, which in turn itself can contribute to reproducing privilege. The literature points to three specifc ways in which this process manifests: frst, the ability to feel at home in a host society; second, the idea of temporary home/s as a privilege; and third, the ability to maintain an ideal of the homeland as home. Cutting across these three aspects, we argue here, is one central unifying feature of much (though not all) privileged migration, which is the constant possibility of returning 'home' or moving onwards to re-make home. This is

<sup>1</sup>The term 'expat' is highly contested as it tends to be used to describe white Western people, often elites, who live outside their country of origin, with the result of placing them in a different category to all other migrants, thus reinforcing the Western othering of those deemed to be 'migrants'. We use the term here only when discussing studies that use it.

something that makes the lived experience of home-making in migration very different to that of less privileged and more precarious migrants who do not see this as a feasible option. These processes are also contextualised within the wider global and postcolonial power dynamics that produce, and are reproduced through, the imagination and making of homes in migration.

#### *5.2.1 Feeling at Home in the Host Society as Privilege*

Much literature attests to the structural diffculties of making a home in a new society, referring to barriers such as those related to one's migrant or citizenship status, age, gender, income level and family status (as outlined in previous chapters). This implies that privileged social positioning, on the other hand, can ease the process of settlement, familiarisation and inhabitance that is central to feeling at home in a new place, whether through the right to stay, the right to work, the ability to secure decent housing, the ability to be accompanied by family members, to forge new meaningful social connections, or to maintain transnational ties, or having the cultural capital to express one's identity in a place without fear of censure. In other words, a sense of spatial security is possible.

For example, Green (2023) reveals how white and western privilege enables later-life lifestyle migrants in Bali to comfortably make their homes in the host society, not least because of their purchasing power in terms of securing good quality housing and being able to maintain a very good quality of life, including the ability to hire domestic servants. Green (2023) elaborates on how these migrants construct a strong sense of home in the new place through the materiality of their houses, through which they nurture a sense of belonging and emotional attachment to the locality in Bali. They mobilise notions of authenticity and localness to construct and express identities through material aspects of their physical homes, but as Green (2023) points out, do so in ways that deny the unequal power relations, both locally and globally, that make it possible for them to have access to the type of housing and lifestyle with which to do so. His study fnds echoes in Zhang and Su's (2020) research with lifestyle migrants in China who, they fnd, express strong place attachments to their places of residence, which they tend to construct as 'ideal homes', but simultaneously distance themselves from locals and often feel alienated.

Prazeres (2018), in her research with Canadian international students in Global South cities, suggests that her participants' privileged status as white western international students in these cities is a key factor in their ability to feel at home there. She relates this to their status as temporary and voluntary migrants for whom processes of local embedding are much less fraught than for other migrants. Moreover, Prazeres (2018) argues that the ease with which the students claim feelings of belonging and at-homeness in these cities is in itself a source of social distinction and cultural capital which they mobilise to enhance their social status as global citizens after they leave. Her study illuminates how they 'collect' homes throughout

their lives as they travel from place to place, as a way of accumulating cultural capital. In this way, the ability to comfortably feel at home in different places further enhances the privileged status of those who have access to this lifestyle, and further reinforcing uneven power relations shaping home in migration.

We cannot fully understand the forms of privilege enjoyed by the participants in Green's (2023) and Prazeres' (2018) studies without situating them, as they both do, in the context of global power dynamics, and acknowledging that constructions of home in migration are variously tied up with the legacies of colonialism and the uneven articulations of globalisation (see also Ahmed et al., 2003 and for an example of African migration, Ndlovu, 2010). For example, Green (2023) refers to the continuing salience of colonial 'place-myths', associated with the Dutch colonial legacy in Bali, which are mobilised by western lifestyle immigrants in their constructions of local belonging. Elsewhere, Moreton-Robinson (2003) provides a powerful critique of white migrants' constructs of home in Australia, linking these constructs to the history of colonization and dispossession of Indigenous people. She argues that the ability to claim that one 'belongs' in Australia, especially as a white person, is built on the historical racialized dispossession of Indigenous people and the continued hegemony of whiteness. Ahmed (1999, p. 335) intriguingly suggests that for the privileged migrant, 'the world is already constituted as their home', pointing perhaps to a certain quality of ease, comfort and sense of entitlement that accompanies the privileged (white, western, socio-economically advantaged) migrant on their travels and allows a sense of home to be both claimed and felt anywhere. Thus, Ahmed (1999) criticises scholarship that neglects the power inequalities that impact on how migrants come to feel and to claim a sense of belonging and home in their host societies.

#### *5.2.2 Temporary/Mobile Home in Privileged Migration*

The privilege of claiming to feel at home 'anywhere' implies that home for the privileged migrant may also have a mobile and somewhat free-foating character. A number of studies point to the idea of 'temporary' or 'mobile' home as a feature of the hypermobile lifestyles of privileged transnational migrants (for example, Butcher, 2010; Walsh, 2011). In this construct, home is not tied to one place but is constructed as fuid or portable, located in transnational space, or in multiple places. The ability to construct home in these terms could be understood as a characteristic of privilege. Inherent in the migration regimes that enable privileged forms of migration is the constant possibility of returning to a stable home or choosing to move on to re-make home elsewhere – in other words, a high degree of choice/ control and global-movement possibilities because of factors such as citizenship status, income levels and valuable social and cultural capital. In these contexts, one can surmise that it may be possible to invest in home-making in different places, or to form feeting attachments to different places, while maintaining one or more primary homes, or to construct a sense of home that is more tied to a type of lifestyle than a concrete place. This is possible because the risks of these 'investments' (emotional, fnancial, social) are mitigated by the safety-net of the possibility of home being elsewhere.

For example, Cai and Su (2021), based on their research with 'expat' migrants in Guangzhou, China (their term, referring here to business and professional elite migrants) adopt the concept of 'temporary home'. They argue that 'the making of temporary home exemplifes the ways in which Western 'expats' undertake and experience a privileged mode of mobility' (p. 2815). They draw on Clifford's (1997) concept of 'dwelling-in-travelling' to articulate the idea of home as existing between mobility and immobility, not tied to one place but neither detached from place. Their study participants expressed a strong attachment to Guangzhou and their lives there, where they felt at home, but generally viewed themselves as visitors who would one day return 'home' or move on elsewhere (Cai & Su, 2021). Importantly, Cai and Su (2021) do not imply that 'temporary home' in mobility is a universal possibility for migrants. They characterise their participants' ability to feel at home in Guangzhou, while also remaining somewhat detached and planning to leave, as a form of privileged mobility, exemplifed in the notion of temporary home, but made possible through favourable residency regulations and the global career opportunities of business and professional migrants in China. These circumstances are of course bound up with global neoliberal economic power relations that facilitate the easy mobility of some while imposing enforced im/mobilities on others.

However, it is important to point out that studies of constructions of home among privileged migrants do not usually extend to claiming that privileged migrants are completely free to create home on-the-move in accordance with their personal desires. Zhang and Su (2020) show how lifestyle migrants in China fnd themselves 'unmaking' home as they struggle with local social and economic circumstances that limit their ability to fulfl their image of their idealised home. Butcher (2010) draws on her research with Australian professionals in Singapore to emphasise that while 'expats' possess the cultural capital to re-make home on the move, they often feel destabilised or uncomfortable in unfamiliar environments and thus turn to more secure and familiar notions of home (such as 'expat bubbles' or nostalgia for a familiar place). Ullah et al. (2021) also fnd that privileged migrants originating from wealthy countries in Asia, Europe and North America who reside in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Brunei often fnd themselves positioned as 'outsiders' in their adopted homes. Very often, although the host environment and culture are celebrated by 'expat' migrants as part of the communication of a cosmopolitan sense of home, this is done in a way that others and exoticises through an external gaze, while maintaining their strongest social ties to other (class- and raceprivileged) expats and transnational networks (see for example, Benson & O'Reilly, 2018). In other words, home is by its nature bound up with emotion/affect, with place, and with (classed and racialised) habitus. As Butcher (2010) argues, despite claims of the mobility and fexibility of home for highly mobile professionals, home still needs to feel like a space of culture ft and familiarity.

#### *5.2.3 Privileged Migration and Homeland*

This quest for 'cultural ft and familiarity' (Butcher, 2010) means that the idea of a 'homeland' can continue to hold symbolic and material signifcance within privileged forms of migration. Firstly, the continuing connection to a homeland can be evident through home-making practices which involve transporting, displaying and using material belongings in the home that represent an emotional connection to the place of origin. This is particularly evident in Walsh's (2006) research with British 'expat' migrants in Dubai, in which she details how the emotional connection to the past home in Britain is part and parcel of creating a new home in Dubai. This occurs through the re-creation of a sense of continuity between the materiality of the current dwelling and past dwellings in Britain, and also through using British cultural products as part of building networks with other British (and Western Englishspeaking middle-class) migrants in Dubai. Similarly, Benson and O'Reilly's (2018) research with privileged British migrants in Malaysia and Americans in Panama reveals the importance of co-ethnic 'expat' networks and organisations as familiar spaces of belonging.

The ability to transport goods such as furniture and paintings between places of residence around the world, in order to re-create one's home, is of course a privilege, one that is not available to most transnational migrants. Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that Western 'expat' communities in host societies are 'classed and racialised formations' (Benson & O'Reilly, 2018, p. 217) that are made possible through deep social and cultural inequalities within host societies and globally. Thus the performance of national, racial or class belonging must be seen as a key element of processes of home-making that work to maintain valuable cultural and material connections to a globally powerful homeland identity.

Secondly, the place of origin, or homeland, can become the object of feelings of nostalgia and homesickness especially when migrants struggle to feel a sense of comfortable belonging in the host society. This is, of course, a common feature of transnational migration, but we argue that privileged migrant status is particularly associated with the construction of place of origin as home, or homeland, because the possibility of returning there exists (see the literature on remittance houses such as Boccagni & Erdal, 2021; Mand, 2010). This is evident in Wiles' (2008) research with New Zealanders in London. For her participants, return is a constant possibility; most see their migration as temporary and view New Zealand as home. They are relatively privileged migrants who choose to migrate and are facilitated in doing so by the preferential visa arrangements in the UK for young Commonwealth citizens (Wiles, 2008). In this context, a collective imaginary of New Zealand as home is constructed and reproduced among New Zealanders living in London. This is maintained through the ease of travelling back and forth between the two. The feasibility of holding a stable sense of one's homeland and staying connected to it through transnational connections points to the role of privilege (migrant status and economic means) in facilitating a comfortable sense of home in migration.

This contrasts with the relationship to country of origin among some refugees or other forced migrants for whom a return to homeland is not possible (Korac, 2009). As Pérez Murcia (2019) shows, for some the place left behind no longer constitutes a home. However, the idea of homeland as home is often maintained in a symbolic sense among migrant groups – more as a collective meaning rather than a private sense of home, a useful distinction made by Povrzanović Frykman (2002), denoting that while the homeland may be idealised as the symbolic/sacred/true home, it is necessarily not considered as a possible real home in which to live. Its symbolic importance is great, and it may even be imagined as a future home, but there are no moves to actually return. This is evident among Povrzanović Frykman's (2002) Croatian diaspora in Sweden, for whom Croatia is revered as the sacred homeland even though they may never have lived there, but its importance is central to their identities as exiled Croats. It contrasts with Wiles' (2008) New Zealand migrants, for whom the sense of New Zealand as home is very real, because it is highly possible to return there. The circumstances of the migration shape the relationship to the homeland, refecting these differential structural im/possibilities of home in migration.

#### *5.2.4 Summary*

This review of existing literature reveals the many ways in which classed, racialised and western privilege eases the path to fnding a comfortable sense of home in migration, whether through making a new home in the host society, creating temporary or mobile home, or maintaining a sense of homeland as home. Feeling at home in migration is made possible through the economic, social and political resources that a privileged migrant can deploy in controlling their own im/mobility, of which one key resource is the constant *possibility* of returning 'home' or moving on elsewhere. Returning 'home' is possible due to factors such as economic and political stability and personal resources in the place of origin, while moving on is facilitated by the mobility capital associated with Western citizenship and economic resources. In other words, the structural possibilities of home are bound up with the structural possibilities of privileged mobility. Understanding privilege in migration in this way provides a different perspective on the concept of 'spatial security' (see Chap. 1), that is, the security associated with feeling a sense of attachment to place *and* having the legal and formal documentation allowing one to live and stay in a place, which is what enables home in migration (Fathi & Ní Laoire, 2023). As we argue in Fathi and Ní Laoire (2023), place attachment can be to a non-local sense of place, an imagined past or future place, that allows one to construct home in migration (even if that home is not precisely in the current place of residence). However, for spatial security to exist, place attachment needs to be accompanied by legal rights. Ironically, as much literature attests, having the legal right to stay or settle in a place is what enables one to leave that place, because of the possibility of returning to it (Lundström, 2014). Privileged migration is associated with the legal right to stay (even if not permanently) in the host society, alongside the ability to return to one's place of origin. This, we argue, produces what could be called *transnational spatial security*, understood as the feeling and opportunity of secure inhabitance in multiple places at once. This concept helps us to understand how the structural possibilities of home in migration are integrally bound up with a complex range of processes from differential citizenship/residency rights to economic inequalities and the accumulation of cultural and social capital. As understanding privilege necessitates understanding oppression (Pease, 2010), and also precarity in migration status, the next section brings the focus to a different perspective on the intersection of migration status, class, race and home.

#### **5.3 Precarity and Home**

Having discussed how privilege can enhance the possibilities of home in migration, this section shows that migrants who do not enjoy the same privileges that are afforded to others, as a result of their social positionality in terms of migrant status, social class and racialised identities, face more *im*possibilities in relation to feeling at home in migration. Many migrants such as those who are in irregular situations, seasonal, undocumented, asylum seeking and those who live in temporary situations in transit and border zones, deal with precarity of work, income, housing, residence status and citizenship on a daily basis and fnd the possibilities of making a home in migration very limited.

In this section the focus is placed on the concept of precarity as a lens through which to explore structural impossibilities of home in migration. As Lewis et al. (2015) argue, precarity is a condition that is increasingly associated with contemporary global migration, referring to lack of security in relation to livelihoods, along with the vulnerability to exploitation, violence and exclusion that comes with that. Precarity is closely connected to the idea of spatial security that is essential to feeling at home in place; insecure and uncertain migrant and residency status, insecurity of income or vulnerability to practices such as eviction or job loss, inevitably prevent a sense of spatial security. In particular, inadequate housing intersects with temporal limitations for migrants in circumstances of precarity. One aspect of this is that multifaceted systems of marginalisation (where migration regimes and other axes of difference intersect) often make sedentariness, through enforced immobility in migration, the only option for such migrants, adding to their sense of nonbelonging and dissatisfaction with their surroundings.

#### *5.3.1 Refugee Accommodation and the Structural Impossibilities of Home*

Over 60% of the world's refugee population (19.5 million) resides in urban areas (UNHCR, 2017) and Brun and Fábos (2015) argue that nearly two-thirds of the world's refugees are in a seemingly never-ending exile with an average length of waiting reaching 20 years. In the EU, cities offer opportunities in terms of the labour market (Van Liempt et al., 2015) and networking with other migrants, but at the same time, urban space also offers harsh conditions of settlement due to the lack of competency of cities to offer basic services (Van Liempt & Miellet, 2021). States also employ various policies to spatially segregate the communal housing arrangements often put in place for migrants or asylum-seekers to designated areas within or outside the spaces of towns and cities across Europe (Van Liempt & Miellet, 2021). These temporary accommodation structures, such as shelters, hostels and 'direct provision' (DP) accommodation centres, are normally devoid of any signs of what would suggest the notion of home (Thorshaug & Brun, 2019). In fact, what these 'empty' spaces (Fathi, 2023) show is displacement more than home (Van Liempt, 2023).

Beeckmans et al. (2022) in a recent edited collection, identify four types of socio-spatial contexts for home in displacement – camp, shelter, city and house. They show that the ways in which camps and shelters, as institutionalised forms of housing, are regulated by states means that they prove to be ineffective in giving a sense of home. Brun and Fábos (2015, p. 11), in another edited collection, discuss similarly how encampments and detention centres, or indeed any other precarious and temporary living conditions, emerge from 'policies of limbo', that is, a limbo 'created materially, discursively, and politically by the refugee regime' and which has profound implications for migrants' home-making. Fathi (2023) draws on the concept of unhome to refer to refugee accommodation centres, which are marked by solitude and exclusion unlike a home that is set within a community and is entangled with a social life. She argues that the soulless and empty housing structures of refugee accommodation or homeless shelters produce a sense of non-belonging as a way of reducing the time spent there by the residents. A considerable body of research demonstrates how reception centres cannot provide the basic elements of home, despite the fact that they are places where many people live for extended periods of time (Thorshaug & Brun, 2019) where their experiences of forced migration can be considered to become experiences of 'forced arrival', that is, of enforced conditions of living after arrival (Kreichauf, 2018). Studies point to the role of constant surveillance, lack of autonomy, cramped living conditions, lack of privacy, inability to prepare their own food and boredom as factors that militate against enabling a sense of home (Grønseth & Thorshaug, 2022; Howlett-Southgate, 2021; Van der Horst, 2004). As O'Reilly (2020) shows, these accommodation policies, by producing insecurity, fear and lack of autonomy, deny residents the basic attributes of home and function as mechanisms of social and spatial exclusion.

However, it is important to recognise the different social positionalities of residents of refugee accommodation. For example, research with children living in these kinds of arrangements suggests that they can experience them differently to adults. White (2012) illustrates the many ways in which children living in Direct Provision (DP) centres in Ireland, who participated in his research, were able to develop meaningful place attachments and social connections, despite the apparently isolated and unhomely nature of DP. He relates this to the ways in which spaces and daily interactions of communal living offered the children opportunities

for cultivating peer friendships with other children living in the centre and also offered access to informal spaces for playing. This insight points to the importance of incorporating children-centred perspectives in discussions of home in migration.

The development of informal makeshift accommodation for migrants in transit shows how home-like spaces can emerge in the gaps left by the inadequacies of state provision of migrant accommodation, though these are highly vulnerable to removal or destruction by authorities. A well-known example of such temporary makeshift housing compounds was the Jungle, in Calais, France, located at the fnal stop for many migrants before reaching the UK. The Jungle was destroyed in October 2016. Migrants in Calais' Jungle resisted several attempts of expulsion and destruction of the camp by the French authorities. In February 2016, they were given a week to evacuate the premises, to which they appealed basing their argument on the right to respect for private and family life as well as on the right to respect for a home (Slingenburg & Bonneau, 2017). The Jungle was eventually destroyed only to push the residents who were stuck at the borders of France and the UK to other parts of France. As Van Liempt (2023, p. 991) argues, the destruction of these kinds of housing structures and social spaces is not limited to the destruction of materialities; it is as much about destroying 'a notion of rights and recognition, or even existential legitimacy'. Similarly, Massa (2022) writes about an incident of forced eviction, by law enforcement operators, of African migrants from a squat in Rome as not just the removal of their physical dwelling but of the feelings and values bound up with a sense of home.

#### *5.3.2 Protracted Displacement and Precarity*

Precarious livelihoods, lack of access to formal or legal representation or protection of those transnationally displaced or of millions of IDPs (Internally Displaced People) results in long waiting times, at times more than two decades, for settlement. The majority of the world's protracted refugees are settled (or better to say are stationary) in developing countries (for example sub-Saharans in Tunisia and Algeria, South Americans in Mexico, Rohingya in Bangladesh and Afghans in Iran). This approach to managing the resettlement of displaced people has been termed 'warehousing' of human beings (Smith, 2004); rather than offering a 'durable solution' to refugee displacement, many of these policies that still continue to this date are based on the unrealistic and inhumane premise of simply ensuring migrants' survival until they return home.

Brun (2015), referring to the case of IDPs from Abkhazia who resided for more than 20 years in temporary housing near Tbilisi in the Western side of Georgia, argues that the only durable solution that is perceived by various stakeholders is their return. In this case, the next durable solution to the thousands of displaced people was a scheme to accommodate the displaced residents of the camps in housing cottages built outside cities. This strategy in effect did not change the precarity of their living conditions. Brun (2015) proposes the two concepts of immanence and transcendence to shed further light on the effects of this. According to Brun (2015) transcendence refers to 'a mode of temporality in that the living subject is future oriented' whilst immanence refers to the act of sustaining life, as repetitive and cyclical. She argues that when transcendence is not available, individuals cannot fulfl their subjectivity. They have feelings of stuckness, being trapped in time with no foreseeable future oriented life, because according to Brun (2015, p. 47), 'future lies too far ahead'. What is important and relevant to our discussion in Brun's (2015) argument is that when we are talking about precarity of home-making, we deal with regimes of temporality that go hand-in-hand with policies and political processes that hold individuals in the present time and impose on them immanence without transcendence.

The translation of Brun's (2015) argument can be witnessed in the precarity of home for millions of marginalised forced migrants, which is embedded within their lack of legal rights, and leads to such protracted and long-lasting in-between situations. In other words, the temporality regimes have profound implications for how migrants can envisage a future life that includes everyday practices of education, work and leisure in making home. Their situations also remind us that perhaps the territorial aspect of a home is not as important as the emotional and relational, as according to Brun and Fábos (2015), drawing on Eastmond (2006), after so many years of being displaced, home as a fxed location, either in the place of origin or location of current residence, loses its meaning. Home, as a place where 'a normal life can be lived […] with economic security, social context and […] a sense of belonging', instead, they argue, lies in multiple places, or a 'trans-local' space where each locality becomes part of a new home (Brun & Fábos, 2015, p. 8; Eastmond, 2006). In fact, perhaps it is out of necessity, in order to feel ontologically secure, that many migrants relate home to mobile elements such as practices, materialities and relationships, as opposed to geographies and placed-based attachments. Massa (2022) suggests that it is more productive to talk about home as a set of practices through which migrants in situations of extreme precarity and vulnerability deal with the situations in which they fnd themselves and work at making and re-making home, than as a static concept.

#### *5.3.3 Intersectionality, Selectivity and Everyday Bordering of Home*

Precarity has become embedded in the living situations of migrants in many different types of circumstances and is bound up with the proliferation of different types of migrant status including forms of temporary migrant status and those falling within what Menjívar (2006, p. 999) calls 'liminal legality' as well as with precarious labour regimes and gendered vulnerabilities. Inequalities, especially in relation to housing for migrants, are produced not just by government policies but also by the actions of key players in housing markets, such as the fnancial sector and the

labour market. Housing inequalities are also integrally bound up with less tangible social, cultural and legal factors that differentiate between who can make a home and who cannot.

Within this complex picture, there are policies that determine which migrants 'deserve' to be housed (in destination countries) or relocated (from transit contexts) based on constant assessments in terms of their eligibility for housing or refugee status (Dhaliwal & Forkert, 2015). Similarly, increasingly neoliberal approaches to migration are based on the benefts migration brings to host societies, a model that sifts through migrants and applies a selectivity based on factors such as age, social class or education level. For example, Theresa May (Former British Prime Minister and Home Secretary) said in 2010:2

Let me deal with a myth that has arisen in recent months. We can reduce net migration without damaging our economy. We can increase the number of high value migrants: the entrepreneurs, the investors, the research scientists – at the same time as we reduce the total number of people coming to Britain through the economic routes. We can attract more of the brightest and the best at the same time as we reduce the overall number.

Such policies are not limited to the UK. Across many countries in the Global North, we are witnessing how structurally it is impossible for certain groups of migrants to make a home, as preferential treatments, and systems of everyday bordering that treat migrants differentially, are in place before they arrive in destination countries. These preferential arrangements, both before and after arrival, reveal how migration policy regimes are integrally bound up with intersectional power relations, such as those relating to social class, age and race, and in this way, shaping the structural im/possibilities of home in migration for different social groups.

Situations of precarity that limit the possibilities of feeling at home manifest in different ways for different migrant groups. For example, Wilkins' (2019) research with Vietnamese migrants on temporary visas in London shows how practices of border regulation impact on their ability to feel a sense of home and belonging in London. She relates this to the geopolitics of immigration in the UK, which has shifted towards a selective points-based system which gives preferential treatment based on factors such as skill levels, language fuency, age or health. As a result of the uncertainties of their temporary status, together with their vulnerability to poor housing and working conditions, many migrants in Wilkins' (2019) research live with a sense of being unable to create a long-term home.

What Wilkins' (2019) research demonstrates is that precarity and related feelings of insecurity and un-belonging are not just about legal status. Even in situations of legal status, the uncertainties attached to some forms of status have a profound effect on the possibilities of home in migration. Furthermore, precarity as a condition can have effects on a person's life that persist even when legal status becomes more secure. For example, Howlett-Southgate (2021) demonstrates the complexities of home-making for people who have achieved refugee status in Ireland, because

<sup>2</sup> https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/immigration-home-secretarys-speech-of-5-november-2010.

of the ongoing effects of having spent long periods of time in the asylum system along with broader processes of exclusion experienced by refugees. Kox and Van Liempt (2022) make a similar argument based on their research with refugees in the Netherlands. Howlett-Southgate (2021) argues that problems in accessing housing and work, together with experiences of racism, and separation from family members, mean that creating a new sense of home for refugees in Ireland is extremely challenging.

Wimark's (2021) research with queer refugees in the Swedish countryside reinforces this point. He fnds that even when queer refugees move out of state-controlled spaces, they fnd it diffcult to feel at home in 'normative' spaces. He suggests that this 'blurs the border of a specifc timeframe of leaving/losing a home (country) and creating a new home since many queer refugees fnd it diffcult to fnd belonging that fully embraces them' (p. 649) and he points to the importance of moving beyond state-controlled spaces to the norms that govern home-making (Wimark, 2021).

#### *5.3.4 Making Home in Displacement and Precarity*

Despite living in situations of precarity and displacement, existing research shows how migrants in such circumstances continue to work at making home, fnding home or re-creating home. Strategies to fnd a sense of home can include making current living conditions more home-like, fnding home-like everyday spaces, maintaining ties to former homes or imagining future homes. Brun and Fábos (2015) provide a detailed framework of the process of 'making homes in limbo' among individuals in protracted displacement. Their concept of 'constellations of home' refers to the diverse and complex ways in which migrants living in protracted displacement continue to 'make home' through their present practices and hopes for the future, despite the many ways in which their current circumstances are marked by hardship and uncertainty (Brun & Fábos, 2015). They caution, however, that even when home-making practices occur in a location like a refugee camp, this does not necessarily mean that the place becomes a home.

Research has explored how residents of asylum-seeker accommodation centres manage to make home even in such unhomely spaces. For example, Boccagni (2022) points to four different types of home-making practices through which residents of asylum reception centres seek to shape their environments to make them more familiar, normal and personal. These are: ways of improving space, ways of enabling cultural reproduction and biographical continuity, ways of privatising space and ways of beautifcation. Others point to strategies of inhabitance such as restoring short-term temporal predictability through establishing daily routines (Gil Everaert, 2021). Going outside the institutional accommodation centres to fnd home-like spaces elsewhere, for example, outdoor green spaces (Van Liempt & Staring, 2021), is a strategy that is important for some. However, Gil Everaert (2021) argues that even as residents of such centres enact home-making practices, they do so as a way of 'inhabiting the meanwhile', that is, of building temporary homes without letting go of their future plans for a more permanent home elsewhere.

Some scholars have looked at how precarious housing is intersected with materiality, how objects of signifcance are used for personalisation and how small-scale acts attempt to give new meanings to spaces of non-home (Boer, 2015; Neumark, 2013; Trapp, 2015). Motasim and Heynen (2011) show that IDPs in Sudan design their own space, establishing it as a mode of resistance against the forceful urban environment of Khartoum (the capital city) which is different to the lands they have had to fee from. By doing this, they make home into a mobile form of habitat that allows them to take it with them where they go. In other contexts, migrants living in precarity create a sense of home through practices that build a diasporic identity or create 'intimate bubbles of homeliness', for example, through sharing food (Vandevoordt, 2017, p. 606) or participating in social, cultural or religious rituals with other migrants (Nititham, 2017).

#### *5.3.5 Summary*

The multiple ways in which precarity limits the structural possibilities of home are outlined in this section. We pay particular attention to migrants in situations of extreme vulnerability and protracted displacement, highlighting the impossibilities of home in such circumstances. However, the literature also reveals the complexities of home for migrants in different types of precarious situations, and reveals that circumstances that reduce spatial security (both in terms of legal status as well as wider possibilities of place belonging) provide an ongoing challenge to efforts to making home in migration. Despite these challenges, migrants continue to work to make home in different ways.

In light of this, we point to Brun and Fábos' (2015) proposal for a dynamic political understanding of home in migration which recognises that even in conditions of liminality (as opposed to 'limbo'), people continue to work to make home, improve their current living circumstances and imagine a better future home. They argue that binary 'here-there' or 'past-future' understandings of home fail to capture the realities of what home comes to mean in such conditions and instead it is important to recognise home as existing between places and in the active doing of home. This point is reinforced by others, such as Pérez-Murcia (2019) and Boccagni (2022), who argue for the need to conceptualise home in displacement in nonessentialised ways.

#### **5.4 Conclusion**

Understanding home and migration in relation to migrants' status draws the attention to a politics of home and migration that informs one's conditions of mobility and settlement. The underlying forces, including policies and political acts, that enable some groups and disable others from entering, remaining, leaving or even feeing a context mean that governments and nation-states play an important role in

the structural im/possibilities of home-making. Immigration status impacts migrants' access to housing, labour market, and ability to create a sense of belonging. Bloch et al. (2014) argue that young undocumented migrants are very likely to stay in their countries of residence for good or a long time. This means that a form of 'legal precariousness', if they are children or young migrants, can add to their limbo situation and defer their feeling at home and belonging. Others transition into precarity from some form of 'legal' status such as visitor visas and student visas and overstay and breach the terms of their entry (Koser, 2005, cited in Bloch et al., 2014). What is noteworthy though is that conditions of privilege and precarity can change, as life circumstances change.

A relational understanding of privilege and precarity will help then to address these nuances. For example, how do migrants move from one position to the other? How do their privileged positions turn into precarity and vice versa? Drawing boundaries between the two is diffcult as social locations of migrants are not static, as policies change, locations and onward mobilities happen and aspirations and life situations alter all the time and, perhaps most importantly, due to factors such as changing technologies and labour markets and climate change, new forms of migratory journeys and settlement strategies take place.

As such, people who, at some point in time, experience privilege in one aspects of their lives but not in others, might see their position as precarious. Fathi (2017) in her research with Iranian migrant doctors and dentists in the UK, shows that before registering as medics with the British medical and dental councils, these skilled migrants experience extreme precariousness and they may resort to work in nonrelated positions. However, once they pass that hurdle, become more privileged migrants, with many spatial rights and security, they use consumption practices to place themselves in their 'correct' places as middle-class citizens rather than migrants. In her research with Vietnamese migrants in East London, Wilkins (2019) notes that housing precarity for these migrants led to some form of more established conditions after decades. Some long-established migrants managed to buy accommodation that had been allocated to them through housing associations, whilst renting was the only viable option for more recent migrants (in the last decade) (Wilkins, 2019). We see here that the duration of residence in a country but also the era of entry are important factors that can lead to more security or precarity. Sometimes, renting is considered to provide more fexibility but as Wilkins (2019) argues, drawing on Parutis (2011), renting can also be an acceptable option for those who see their time in the country as temporary and who plan to make their future homes elsewhere.

Research by Soudy (2017) with middle-class Egyptian migrants in Qatar and with 1.5 and 2nd generation Egyptian-Americans in the US sheds further light on the complexities of structural im/possibilities of home. According to Soudy (2017), for Egyptian-Americans in the US, their permanent residency status was a key factor in their seeing the US as their home due to the sense of security it bestowed. In comparison, Egyptians in Qatar, though they felt an everyday sense of home there, did not feel it was their long-term home, which Soudy (2017) attributes to their second-class citizenship status there. She argues that citizenship regimes shape

migrants' relationships to their host society in terms of their willingness to invest in that society and their feelings of belonging. However, the research also reveals that Egyptian-Americans experience feelings of outsider-ness in the US due to racism and Islamophobia. In other words, citizenship status intersects with racism to complicate privileged status in migration. Even though Soudy's (2017) participants are middle-class and largely professional, with permanent residency status in the US, their spatial security in the US is undermined by the prevalence of racism and Islamophobia there.

This chapter has considered a very important player in possibilities of home making. Migration status is the category that is defned by states, large institutions and socio-economic systems such as labour markets, which control what kind of capital migrants have access to and whether these forms of capital are transnationally accepted. Lewis et al. (2015) argue that precarity, which is an effect of not having access to those resources and capitals to which privileged migrants do, is associated with neoliberal globalised systems that value certain capitals over others. When considering privilege and precarity together we realise that states and their tools such as migration policies, borders and time limitations placed on entries and settlements make them the key players in structural possibilities of home. Furthermore, it is important to note that focusing only on policies on migration and settlement in relation to privilege and precarity also increases the risk of assuming methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Glick-Schiller, 2002). Although methodological nationalism, or the role of nation states in understanding migration and home-making experiences, is important, privilege and precarity are two concepts whose meanings are not bound only to this but capture the interrelationality of structural and personal elements that is so important in understanding home in migration.

#### **References**


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Chapter 6 Conclusion**

#### **6.1 Introduction**

At some point in life, people call a place, or multiple places, home. In fact, we may inhabit many types of spaces, but they are not home until we ascribe meanings of home to them. What makes a space a home, or home-like, is the emotional meaning it carries, which is bound up with the social relations and material things that comprise it. For migrants who experience departure from one home and the process of making another in a different country, having crossed borders, home becomes a complicated matter. In this book we have tried to offer an opening into what home in migration means, considering the different identity categories and positions one may have and the different types of spaces that can become home/s, or like home/s, in migration. We discuss how gender, age, generation, objects, class, race and migration status can have long-lasting impacts on how home is understood and experienced.

The aim of this book was to offer frstly an understanding of home in migration from the perspective of a micro and macro level of analysis, by looking at how 'structural im/possibilities' impede or facilitate the processes of homing and homemaking. In other words, we look at home from a structural perspective, taking account of the role of migration regimes, gendered politics of home, age and the life-course, material cultures and migration status, in how people can think of a place as a home or not. Secondly, the book seeks to do this from an intersectional perspective by not simply looking at these questions as if structural aspects of home were experienced in the same way by all migrants, but by organising the analysis around different social positionalities in relation to structural im/possibilities of home. Lastly, this small volume aimed to further expand the ways in which each area of research on home in migration could be expanded and how boundaries could be pushed further in order to provide a more sophisticated perspective on home in migration, home-making and homing.

#### **6.2 Home in Migration at a Glance**

The frst chapter outlines a theoretical framework of structural im/possibilities of home in migration, referring to the social and political structures that frame homemaking by individuals. These structures incorporate migration regimes and intersectional social relations. Migration policies, political decisions, systems of bordering and population control and politics of belonging, all of which bestow settlement rights on some and push out those who are deemed outsiders, frame the structural possibilities of home through different types of migration regimes. These increasingly volatile and changeable migration regimes together provide unstable and temporal larger infrastructures that make it possible for some migrants to make a home or to feel at home while making it impossible for others. We argue, throughout this book, that what makes having a home, making a home and feeling at home possible is not simply an individual or personal matter. It is always contextual and embedded within a set of power relations that inform and facilitate such possibilities and impossibilities. For example, the deportation of hundreds of asylum-seekers from European countries by force each month to a variety of Global South countries, where their return poses serious threats to their lives, is an example of how structurally making a home becomes impossible. Another example is the extent to which a migrant student can make a decision to remain and make a home after their study is completed, navigating their residency journey through a myriad of bureaucratic processes to facilitate the possibilities of making home. We argue that home as a place of safety, security and control needs to be about both legal rights *and* feelings of belonging, the combination of which can be called 'spatial security', an essential element of feeling at home in migration. The intention here is to emphasise how certain groups of migrants have the capital in its different forms, and to different degrees, that makes home-making in migration possible, whilst others do not. Further, different groups of migrants may have access to different types of homemaking capital and these capitals are not just contingent on migration status but are racialised, gendered, classed, abled and aged (among others). This framework as such emphasises how the intersectionality of home combines with transnational migration regimes to shape im/possibilities of home. The relationship between these, although manifest in most migration scholarship, needs to be foregrounded more in analysis of home in migration.

Chapter 2 addresses the importance of gender in understanding home in migration. Drawing on feminist scholarship on home, the chapter shows how the gendered construction of space, based on economic, racial and patriarchal power relations, is essential to understanding the meanings of home in migration. The chapter shows how the association of femininity with private spaces of home can be both challenged and reinforced by women's mobilities and by migrant bordercrossings. Whilst much of the existing literature looks at experiences of women migrants in relation to domestic spaces of home, the chapter also shines a light on emerging research on migrant masculinities and home. However, although studies point to new and alternative femininities and masculinities, there is much evidence that traditional gender roles at home before, during and after migration, still persist.

The next chapter, Chap. 3, highlights the signifcance of an age and life-course perspective in understanding of migrant home. In particular more attention needs to be paid to children's perspectives on home in migration. Through a focus on three distinct life-course stages of childhood, young adulthood and older age, the chapter provides an in-depth discussion of the ways in which the structural im/possibilities of home in migration present different types of challenges and opportunities for migrants at different life-course stages. This age-related focus also illuminates the ways in which home is integrally about family and other social relations, even as these can be ruptured and created through migration. The role of age in migrant homing then is a rather complex matter, being bound up with temporalities, biographies and relationalities, and as such merits greater attention.

Chapter 4 turns to materialities in migrant home by analysing objects in migrants' lives as not only facilitators of their home-making practices but also as tools for invigorating their memories and reinstating their identities. In order to better understand the role of objects in migration, the chapter proposes a framework for analysing the scholarship on materialities of migration by distinguishing between objects of memory, objects of use and objects of identity. This framework is useful in capturing the nuances in the growing scholarship in this area, particularly in terms of avoiding the temptation to ascribe meaning 'beyond' their immediate use to all kinds of objects in migrants' homes. In this way it is important not to construct migrants' lives as extraordinary and unusual in relation to home-making. After all, home-making is about living what one views as a normal life, where one is happy and feels belonging, but objects can play a key role in this process and can help in creating a nest where people feel comfortable with their surroundings.

Finally, Chap. 5 focuses on migration status, class and race as interconnected factors shaping the structural im/possibilities of home in migration. Nation-states are still key players in creating unequal positions for migrants by encouraging, facilitating, limiting and banning certain groups, nationalities, and communities. Systems of bordering (such as immigration and citizenship policies, and how these are classed and racialised) position some who move as privileged while others who move do so in precarious conditions where making a home becomes impossible. For example, shelters, refugee camps, and communal living arrangements for temporary migrants for short or long periods become places of unhome that add to the feelings of being in limbo. Examining how migrants make home in circumstances of privilege and precarity illuminates the complex ways in which these circumstances are bound up with migrant status, class and race.

The feld of migration studies has expanded rapidly in the last two decades (Levy et al., 2020) and it is important to critically analyse how knowledge has been, and continues to be, produced within this feld. The sub-feld of 'home and migration' is a rich one, with potential for further development in the future, and hence it is important to take stock of where we are now in terms of what is known and how it is known. We hope this Short Reader helps to achieve this goal by taking a journey through the current social-scientifc knowledge on home in migration. We look forward to seeing how this feld emerges as one of the key sub-disciplines of migration studies.

#### **Reference**

Levy, N., Pisarevskaya, A., & Scholten, P. (2020). Between fragmentation and institutionalisation: The rise of migration studies as a research feld. *Comparative Migration Studies, 8*(1), 1–24.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.