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Accepted Paper:

Dynamic concepts of 'home': immigrant narratives from the north-east of Scotland  
Nicolas Le Bigre (Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen)

Paper short abstract:

Immigrant narratives derived from field interviews reveal the breadth of interpretations of ‘home’. This paper demonstrates the multiple characteristics of ‘home’, and thus diverges from the idea of static ‘homes’ anchored only in physical geography.

Paper long abstract:

Immigrants, both recent and established, interpret the concept of 'home' in myriad ways. Indeed, the notion of 'home' is dynamic, and its understanding depends on time, geography, life experience, relationships, and current context among other things. By basing my analysis on my own one-on-one interviews with immigrants in the North-East of Scotland, I will examine how contributors themselves view and shape their concepts of 'home'.

In listening to these interviews, it becomes clear that the idea of 'home' exists equally in the plural. For many immigrants, different 'homes' co-exist and perform diverse and often symbiotic roles in their everyday lives. These 'homes' may be may be birth-countries; in some cases they are ancestral; for many they include current geography; and for growing numbers of immigrants who have lived in several different regions and countries, they may also include some of these 'in-between' places.

This paper will discuss how first-person narratives reveal contributors' coping strategies and understandings of 'home'. It will also examine contributors' third-person narratives describing how family members emphasise their own understandings of home, and how this affects the contributors' connections to 'homes', old and new.

I will argue that in discussing the realities of work, family and leisure, and the abstractions of memory and identity, these narratives demonstrate that 'home' does not exist as one static idea but as many concurrent places and dynamic concepts. Recognising this multiplicity of 'home' allows for a more comprehensive analysis of immigrant narrative, and gives a nuanced picture of immigrant life.

Panel P01
Behind the border? Memory and narration of diaspora, exile, transnationalism and crossing borders
  Session 1