Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores how experiences of migration and political rupture among Egyptian revolutionaries are lived and navigated through affective practices of homemaking. Focusing on everyday practices and emotions, the paper examines how belonging is negotiated across distance, memory, and movement.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines migration in the context of counterrevolutionary survival, foregrounding affect, embodiment, and the everyday practices of belonging. Based on long-term ethnographic research with Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo and the diaspora, particularly in Berlin, the paper conceptualizes "home" as an affective infrastructure—a relational and processual formation through which mobility, political rupture, and belonging are experienced, and made meaningful.

Instead of approaching migration as a linear movement from origin to destination, the paper traces the oscillations between attachment and estrangement, presence and absence, and return and postponement. This shows how home and belonging are continuously negotiated across time and place. Focusing on domestic spaces, such as living rooms and empty apartments left behind, as well as material and sensory practices, including music, revolutionary memorabilia, and shared rituals of care, the paper argues that emotions are constitutive of migration, not secondary to it. Homesickness, nostalgia, exhaustion, hope, and political attachment influence decisions to leave, stay, or remain suspended. These affects are collectively produced and sustained through everyday interactions, transforming homes into sites where political life is processed, remembered, and sometimes reactivated.

By attending to how revolutionaries inhabit homes during and after moments of upheaval, the paper highlights the entanglement of mobility with emotional labor, memory work, and embodied practices of belonging. It shows how domestic spaces function simultaneously as refuges, sites of political debate, and laboratories of affective endurance, mediating both revolutionary possibility and counterrevolutionary defeat. Ultimately, it proposes understanding home as fragmented, contested, and generative.