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Paper short abstract:

By showcasing the home-making efforts of asylum seekers and refugees in Zagreb (Croatia), this paper aims to overcome the representation of refugees as passive and suffering subjects and instead shows the ways in which they are actively anticipating a future worth living.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes asylum seekers' and refugees' home-making efforts in Zagreb (Croatia). While acknowledging the many obstacles and inequalities that people who are put into those categories have to overcome daily, this research tries to move beyond the 'analytic of desperation' (Elliot 2020). It focuses on their futural orientations, especially on Bryant and Knight's concepts of anticipation, expectation, and hope (2019). The paper follows contemporary definitions that conceptualize home as a fluid plurilocal process rather than geographically rooted space (Čapo 2019; Rapport and Overing 2003) and adds onto them by asking not only where but also when is home. Based on the ethnographic research among asylum seekers and refugees mainly from the Global South, who came to Zagreb during and after the "long summer of migration" in 2015, the author aims to show their efforts to renegotiate and reconstruct everyday life, home, and sense of belonging. The paper considers some of the various obstacles refugees face, such as accommodation and housing, or access to education and the labor market, while simultaneously highlighting their struggles to overcome those barriers and secure a future for themselves and their families. In doing so, the paper aims to surmount the representation of refugees as passive and suffering subjects that are simply waiting to return to their supposed homelands and instead shows the ways in which they are actively anticipating the future worth living.