Home, a simple and complex notion which seems to be constitutive of the human experience, is a noun. Homing, instead, is a verb – pointing to the social process of sensing, constructing and making home as a critical source of insight into human mobility, space appropriation...
Home, a simple and complex notion which seems to be constitutive of the human experience, is a noun. Homing, instead, is a verb – pointing to the social process of sensing, constructing and making home as a critical source of insight into human mobility, space appropriation and inter-group relations.
While home is the apparently natural basis of everyday life, ERC-StG HOMInG unpacks it through a systematic analysis of the ways of constructing, emplacing and circulating home under the influence of extended mobility and societal diversity. Home is to be understood, here, both as a bounded place – hence a matter of living and housing conditions, affected by structural variables and inequalities; and as a meaningful and emotionalized kind of relationship with place – an experience that should be based on an emplaced sense of security, familiarity and control. In this sense, home is the critical but neglected basis of migrant integration, or of how they negotiate their belonging, membership and inclusion across societies. How at home, if at all, migrants feel (to belong) in a given place/community is a key indicator of their attitudes and long-term attachment to it. This is equally critical to the living experience of their counterparts, whether natives and long-term residents in the countries of settlement or non-migrant stayers in the countries of origin.
Empirically speaking, HOMInG aims to achieve a large-scale but ethnographically based understanding of migrants’ evolving home experience, in terms of ways of constructing, emplacing and circulating home. This is based on comparative and collaborative research, involving individual and teamwork, through in-depth interviews, life history collection, participant observation and exploratory surveys, among other techniques. Relevant research sites include a variety of urban locations in Italy, Spain, UK, Netherlands and Sweden, on the side of “receiving†countries; urban and semi-rural areas in Ecuador, Peru, Eritrea and India, on the side of countries of origin. The target population includes labour migrants and refugees, with a diverse composition by age, length of stay and family condition, from six different national backgrounds.
The core research questions of HOMInG are three:
1. How is it, and depending on what, that home is searched for – and possibly recovered, reproduced or re-enacted – by those who physically leave it behind, such as international migrants and refugees?
2. How do mobility and ethnicity affect the sense and practice of home, individually and collectively, compared with other key variables, given the resources available to social actors and their external structure of opportunities?
3. What of the home experience is portable, i.e. detached from one’s material background and reproduced elsewhere, and what does the home experience in multi-ethnic contexts show about the interaction between views, cultures and practices of home, across societal backgrounds and along the life course?
Building on the concept of homing, at the intersection of home, mobility and diversity studies, this project aims to a novel understanding of the home experience and of its determinants along several comparative axes: migrant categories and household profiles; migration corridors; ethno-cultural backgrounds; countries, local contexts and spatial backgrounds of origin, transit and settlement.
Methodologically, HOMInG is based on a stepwise mixed-method research design, including exploratory interviews, ethnography of domestic and home-like milieus, life stories and a large-scale survey. This will make for an original connection between micro- and macro-levels of analysis in the study of home and migration.
Theoretically, HOMInG aims to build a systematic framework of the interactions between emotion and materiality, and between mobility and immobility, as constitutive of the home experience across groups, categories and contexts. It also paves the way for a comp
All of the key activities envisaged by the project proposal have so far been implemented consistently with the expected timelines, aside from a minor delay in the designing and implementation process of the transnational survey.
1. START-UP (November 2016 – January 2017). The first step of the project, as per initial plans, has been the development of a dedicate institutional space, at three levels: regarding working facilities (a separate office and suitable technological devices within the Host institutions), professional collaboration (negotiating the support of administrative staff and research assistants within the HI) and ICT infrastructures (website and social media). This has been paralleled by further literature review and theoretical elaboration by the PI.
2. RECRUITMENT AND TEAM-BUILDING (December 2016-May 2017; November 2017-April 2018). In two separate steps, as per project proposal, the research team has been built out of six postdoctoral researchers (3+3) to collaborate with the PI. In the first recruitment round the selection committee has appointed sociologist Alejandro Miranda and anthropologists Sara Bonfanti and Aurora Massa. At a later stage, and on a different research mandate, another recruitment round has been done, resulting in the selection of three more postdoctoral researchers: sociologists Milena Belloni and Ilka Vari-Lavoisier, and economist Luis E. Pérez Murcia. All postdocs have an autonomous working station within two shared offices at the Dpt. of Sociology, University of Trento. As of early 2017, moreover, a Scientific committee has been set up and then systematically updated with new invited experts (https://homing.soc.unitn.it/friends-of-homing/). In July 2017 the PI has appointed prof. Nicholas Harney (University of Windsor) as Ethics Advisor of HOMInG. The recruitment of yet another postdoctoral researcher, in spring 2019, has failed due to the lack of suitable candidates, after a public call for position. This will be redressed with more calls for positions to take place in early autumn 2019.
3. FIELDWORK (June 2017-onwards).
The PI and the postdoctoral researchers have been systematically involved in fieldwork activities, all of them – in this early part of the project – via qualitative techniques. HOMInG’s researchers have worked in parallel, related to their specific target groups (i.e. migrants from Ecuador/Peru, Eritrea/Somalia, India/Pakistan), via in-depth interviews, life history collection and participant observation. More specifically, Bonfanti has done fieldwork in Italy (Milan, Brescia), UK (London – part of it with Boccagni – and Birmingham), and the Netherlands; Miranda has done fieldwork in Italy (Milan), Spain (Madrid – part of it with Boccagni), and the Netherlands; Massa has done fieldwork in Italy (Rome – part of it with Belloni), the UK, and Sweden (part of it with Boccagni); Belloni has done fieldwork in Italy (Rome – part of it with Massa), the Netherlands, and Eritrea; Pérez Murcia has done fieldwork in the UK (Manchester and London), Madrid and Ecuador and Peru (part of it with Boccagni). Boccagni himself, besides coordinating the whole research design and implementation, has so far done fieldwork in Italy, Spain (Madrid), UK (London), Ecuador and Peru, and to a lesser extent in Sweden.
As of April 2019, the collection of exploratory “opening interviews†has been completed all over the selected research sites in Italy, Spain, UK, the Netherlands and Sweden. The same has occurred with life histories with international migrants in the same sites. Most of the ethnographic fieldwork has also been done, consistent with the initial project aims, in Italy, Spain and UK, as much as in the Netherlands and Sweden. Parallel to this, and adding up to HOMInG’s initial plans, all researchers have conducted “homing interviews†with key informants and experts (see the complete list on https://homing.soc.unitn.it/homing-interviews/).
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The preliminary findings of HOMInG can be appreciated as “progressâ€, relative to the pre-existing research on home and migration, in at least five key respects. All of them are the fruit of the project’s original approach: they go beyond the state of the art in a qualitative sense, rather than being merely the output of an economy of scale, i.e. the breadth of HOMInG’s research scope, in a field mostly made of single case studies.
1. Approaching home in a dialectic perspective. HOMInG’s research has already clearly illustrated that, whatever the population target, the social experience of home cannot be fruitfully approached as a stand-alone condition. Instead, it needs to be appreciated through the experiential interplay interplay with its opposites – homelessness, displacement, estrangement and, more broadly, the “unhomelyâ€. Unless one narrows down the focus on domesticity (which is not the case here), questions like What home means to people, What conditions enable or constrain it and How “successful†its achievement can be better understood from the outside, from the margins or from afar, rather than from the inside experience of those who do have a home and feel at home. This is one of the reasons that make the migrant (or refugee) case a specially relevant one. As HOMInG’s fieldwork shows, the everyday experience of home is less a monolithic entity than an ongoing matter of thresholds and degrees. It can be fully appreciated only in a dialectic relation with individual and social circumstances of not-being-at-home.
2. Conceiving home as an ongoing relational tentative achievement. Consistent with the seminal notion of homing, the project has shown the merit of a conceptual transition from home as a thing, however defined, to home as a tentative relational achievement. The focus is then not only on the sense people make of home, but also on the ways in which they produce home, on the resources and constraints that affect this process, on the sustainability and consequences of its production. Central to the production of home, as HOMInG research reveals, is the possibility to attach to one’s environment a sense of familiarity – not an obvious achievement, under circumstances of migration or displacement. This has to do with the possibility for people to cultivate some predictability, intimacy and knowledgeability through their everyday activities, against certain material backgrounds. In this sense, familiarity is contingent on the available infrastructures (more critically, an adequate accommodation), but also on individual and group relational resources and, as important, on temporality. Making oneself at home entails marking time (no less than space) in distinctive and meaningful ways. The production of home is in itself a time-dependent process.
3. Home in qualitative research methodology: an end point, more than a starting one. The enactment of HOMInG’s in-depth interviews and life histories has produced a counter-intuitive and innovative finding. Contrary to the prevalent view of interviews as a straightforward way into the subjective meanings of home, we realized that what home means, and how this is played out in an interview setting, calls for specific attention. Explorations of respondents’ views, feelings and practices of home (or of the equivalent notion across languages) work differently and produce different forms of knowledge at different stages of the interview process. If questions of home are explicitly addressed from the outset of an interview – sometimes by necessity, due to strong time constraints – the reference to home generally performs two functions: eliciting a mental association with the place people live in, or the countries they come from (whether “home-like†or not); and pushing participants to align themselves along strong and exclusivistic identity lines (home, dualistically, as a matter of here vs there, my place vs your place, or us vs them).
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More info: https://homing.soc.unitn.it/.