Undoing and remaking home across places and categories: a comparative exercise
Research Question
What does the experience of forced migrants reveal for the study and experience of home at large? How can a “homing” lens enrich phenomenological research on home beyond migration and refugee studies?
Project Description
I aim to contribute to the NIAS theme-group at three levels:
1. Advancing in my theoretical elaboration of the meanings, experience and implications of home among forcibly displaced people, by writing a dedicated paper. This draws on my extended research in the frame of ERC HOMInG, and on my continuous conversation with colleagues from all over the spectrum of migration, mobility and displacement studies;
2. Advancing a phenomenological reading of people’s transition from “home” as a no longer sustainable place and condition, towards a new (tentative, not necessarily better) “home” ahead of them, in terms of “homing”. In doing so, I aim to connect my work in migration/refugee studies with the parallel one of colleagues in health and community studies, as well as in humanities and art;
3. Insofar as the conditions allow, both re. the COVID pandemic and my own academic commitments, conducting exploratory fieldwork on homemaking in refugee accommodations and housing infrastructures in Amsterdam. This would parallel my fieldwork in Italy and would benefit from my well-established networks of collaboration with colleagues in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands.
Selected Publications
Boccagni P. (2017), Migration and the search for home: Mapping domestic space in migrants’ everyday lives. London: Palgrave.
Boccagni P., Duyvendak J.W. (2021), Homemaking in the public. On the scales and stakes of framing, feeling, and claiming extra-domestic space as “home”, Sociology Compass, 15(6): 1-14.
Boccagni P., Miranda-Nieto A. (2021), Home in question: Uncovering meanings, desires and dilemmas of non-home, European Journal of Cultural Studies, online first.