Paper short abstract:

This paper provides a critical inquiry into 'homing', with respect to international migrants. Following a revisit of home as a special kind of social relationship with place, homing is advanced as a tool for comparative understanding of people’s potential and opportunities to make themselves (feel) at home.

Paper long abstract:

This paper elaborates on 'homing', primarily with respect to international migrants. Following a revisit of home as a special kind of social relationship with place, homing is advanced as a tool for comparative understanding of people's potential and opportunities to make themselves (feel) at home, given their assets and external environments. In my understanding, homing encompasses the cognitive, emotional and practical processes whereby we try to carve out a particular life domain - ideally imbued with a sense of security, familiarity and control - to be relabelled as "home". Homing stands also for the individuals' life-long attempt to bridge the gap between the actual home experience and the desired/ideal one. In practice, homing is enacted in more or less successful, durable and "multi-located" ways. Home itself is less one bounded space than a tentative, emplaced aspiration. It shifts over the life and migration course, relies on variable material bases and is heavily affected (but not pre-determined) by social and structural factors, to be empirically explored. For international migrants and refugees, homing is uniquely shaped by the spatial and temporal distance between the here-and-now and what used to be "home" before, against limited opportunities for home-like spaces, routines and emotions. How far migrants recreate a sense of home in the present (rather than projecting it into the past or the future), and through which material cultures, relational infrastructures and housing arrangements, are highly innovative questions for the study of migration and home. A variety of ethnographic and biographical case studies can be revisited through this conceptual framework.

Paper short abstract:

Based on interviews with homeless men living in Washington DC, this paper explores the reasons why such individuals deliberately eschew emergency shelters and how they have learned to craft temporary shelters, organize their belongings, and above all to create a sense of home even while homeless.

Paper long abstract:

In January 2016, the annual survey of homelessness in Washington D.C. identified 318 persons who were living outdoors and unsheltered: in parks, under bridges, on sidewalks, in doorways, and other places defined as an irregular or inadequate nighttime residence. In addition, the 2016 survey found 6,259 persons living in emergency shelters and another 1,773 persons living in transitional housing. Most observers admit that the survey seriously undercounts the actual number of homeless individuals. One reason is that many homeless men and women sleeping outdoors do not wish to be seen or counted. They have established their homes in out-of-the-way places, in part to avoid being attacked by thugs who prey on homeless people, and in part to avoid the efforts of social service agencies, no matter how well-meaning those agencies may be.

Based on interviews with homeless men living in Washington, this paper explores some of the reasons why such individuals deliberately eschew the emergency shelters available at no cost to them, and how they have learned to craft temporary shelters out of a variety of materials, to organize their belongings, and above all to create a sense of home even while homeless.

Most people who encounter homeless men and women in Washington neither understand nor appreciate the intelligence and resourcefulness that are needed for their daily struggle for survival on the streets. The processes and routines by which homeless people learn how to create and maintain their homes all are an inherent part of their traditional knowledge and culture.

Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates everyday practices of neighborly sociability and homemaking among asylum seekers and local inhabitants co-living in a rural Danish town, promoting an understanding of migratory issues of inclusion and belonging outside of an urban context, and attending to a local asylum scenario characterized by connectivity and collective efforts of feeling at home.

Paper long abstract:

The issue of co-living and ‘feeling at home together’ across ethnic and cultural backgrounds has been a core topic in migration studies. Nonetheless, the existing literature (e.g. on ‘social cohesion’, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘conviviality’) focuses almost entirely on metropolitan/cosmopolitan urban settings. Yet, the forced geographical dispersal of asylum seekers and refugees to remote areas has become the political norm within numerous European countries, while studies of interethnic co-residency within peripheral settings remain scarce. Against this background, the proposed paper examines everyday practices of neighborliness and homing among asylum seekers and local inhabitants sharing everyday public and institutional space within the small Danish town of Jelling, Southern-Jutland. With its village- sized population of 3,300, the continual number of 400 temporary asylum seekers is a considerable addition to the local, established population. Departing from this local encounter, the paper asks how, on a micro-sociological level, various perceptions of local belonging and “feeling at home in the world” are formed and enacted in daily life, across local time and space. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Jelling, the paper investigates the everyday practice and social skill of “co-homing” within joint space, across ethnicity and socio-legal status, attending to an understanding of belonging and homeliness within a rural, multiethnic site, simultaneously analyzed from migrant and native perspectives. In addition, the paper

attends to particular situations, where the primary objective is not necessarily that of migrants being ‘disconnected’ (lack of access to enter, or interact within, a given territory or community), which features prominently in work on global, postmodern migration schemes. What can we learn about social processes of inclusion/exclusion, belonging and homemaking from particular local migratory scenarios characterized by connectivity and interdependence?

Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnographic inquiry in Beirut, Lebanon, carried out in collaboration with landscape architect Sonja Stockmarr I will present the preliminary findings from our project on infrastructural challenges caused by the massive arrival of refugees fleeing from the civil war in Syria.

Paper long abstract:

The study sets out to explore how refugees read, interpret, and appropriate urban environments. From a phenomenological perspective, being in a state of flight has a radical impact on how space is experienced. Arriving in a new place as a refugee raises a number of questions regarding comfort, accessibility, and not least safety. Where can a tired family sleep? Where can you store your belongings? Where can you relieve yourself? Where do you go from there?

Our hypothesis is that on the one hand, being a refugee is a skill which improves with increased experience. On the other hand, it is also a condition in which resources (mental, physical, and financial) are drained over time. Thus, to the refugee the new environment represents a complex challenge which has to be deciphered and appropriated more or less from scratch, but depending on the refugee's experience this is accomplished according to certain established categories or, as we term them, typologies. Some of these typologies are well-known within studies of dwelling eg.: "the bed", "the toilet", "the roof", "the shade", but our hope is to discover other typologies which can potentially be incorporated in urban design and architectural intervention.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the city flat and country house as transient, ‘pop-up theatres’ for hen parties, where groups of women return to childhood practices and engage in licensed, transgressive behaviour. Pop-up theatres offer a secure place in which to indulge in these practices.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the transformation of temporary accommodation into what I term, 'pop-up theatres', stage sets for the expression of group and individual identity during women's hen night celebrations.

Most hen parties take place away from home, either in city venues or a hotel away from the mundanity of women's everyday lives. Focussing on the two most common types of rental property popular with hen groups (city flat and country house), I will investigate how they become alternative homes for a few days, temporary, liminal spaces that allow for the creation of new identities. I will examine why brides choose to leave home to celebrate, looking particularly at the anonymity of the city flat and the hidden nature of the country house as liminal sites where transgressive behaviour is both accepted and expected. I suggest that these dwellings act not only as temporary dwellings, catering to the physical needs of the party, but also as pop-up theatres, where 'all manner of madness' (Hellspong, 1988) can, and does take place. Here women can return to childhood practices, such as dressing up, eating party food, playing party games, and having sleepovers, but with a twist; costumes and games become subverted (the tiara is adorned with the phallus, Pin-the-Tail on the Donkey becomes Pin-the-Willy on the Man), and sanctioned, transgressive behaviour is fuelled through excessive alcohol consumption. Pop-up theatres create a safe place in which these activities can be indulged, temporary, self-contained worlds in which participants are protected from the outside gaze found in more public hen party settings.