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Accepted Paper:

Constructions of "home" between places: young Afghani asylum seekers imagining "home" while transiting Greece  
Eleni Bolieraki (EHESS)

Paper short abstract:

This paper is an attempt of explaining young Afghani asylum seekers’ strategies of survival and of constructing a sense of belonging while transiting Greece and while negotiating new identities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a case study about young Afghani asylum seekers temporarily residing in Thessaloniki, Northern Greece. It is an attempt to elucidate the process of imagining "home" as a strategic subversion of fear and anxiety in transit, and its effect on new forms of communities.

On hold for indefinite periods of time while transiting inevitably Greece in their passage from Asia to Europe, young Afghani asylum seekers try to re-invent their Selves under uncertain circumstances. While facing discrimination, social exclusion and stigmatisation, their strategies of self-affirmation and empowerment waver between invisibility and visibility in everyday life. Alongside with the negotiation of new identities, this social group aspires to construct a feeling of being "at home", a feeling so allegedly desired and missed in exile, as temporary as that might be given the fact that Greece is not the final destination for its majority. Bound in time and space and in this precarious situation, the subjects of this research share a feeling of "home" through everyday practices, rituals, routines and emotions and not through space. Social interactions and bonding, creative representations of the group's uniqueness, narrations and transitional objects: these are some of the means exploited to reach some kind of embracement of the new reality they are faced with and through these the group seeks "home" in solidarity. Close relationships based on trust and mutual understanding allow the substitution of long lost family bonds identified as "home" in the subjects' consensus, thus modifying the perception and experience of home beyond borders.

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