Paper short abstract:

This paper examines, through the lens of the house biography method, how everyday practices of home-making in post-flood displacement (central Mozambique) are transforming motherhood and female roles in terms of temporality, spatiality, materiality, and new social entitlements, relations, claims.

Paper long abstract:

Homes are 'hierarchically structured' spaces of material and moral possibilities. The process of home-making is clearly gendered, as the everyday routines of social and spatial ordering within the home are deeply linked to gender identities.

Under conditions of enforced material, temporal, social and symbolic disruption of the everyday and domestic, such as repeated experiences of severe flooding combined with multifaceted conditions of poverty, home-making and house-building together reveal the complex life trajectories enacted within (and without) them.

In liminal settings of disruption and house re-building, such as resettlement sites, a material and imaginary 'other' is enacted and a more mobile, hermetic and symbolic notion of home emerges.

At the same time, a reimagined life trajectory and a materialised everyday emerge. At the intersection of these statuses, the identities, roles and rights of motherhood, womanhood and kinship are reframed, reenacted and performed within the broader reframing of the altered home-house-place nexus.

This paper, based on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in post-cyclone central Mozambique funded by the Marie Skłodowska Curie Programme, proposes a critical reflection on maternal roles and their material and spatial expression in a highly structured and politicised resettlement site in the Sofala region.

Using the house biographical method, in which orality and materiality of the everyday are explored simultaneously, it focuses on how housing building practices and the everyday materials, sensory experiences and echoes of home are forcibly altering the claims, identities and perceptions of social risk of single women and mothers, and reframing relationships, claims and dependencies.