Paper short abstract:

How do Congolese UN-quota refugees manage to cook familiar meals in materially unfamiliar homes upon arrival to Denmark? Drawing on Ahmed (2000), we show how everyday practices of cooking and sharing familiar meals create moments of ‘sensory continuity’ through well-known smells and tastes.

Paper long abstract:

In refugee and migration studies, radical rupture or estrangement (Ahmed 2000) – social, material, and temporal - related to the migration experience are often given central attention. Attempting to nuance this focus, this paper highlights how, despite radical rupture, recently resettled refugees manage to create moments of ‘sensory continuity’ through cooking familiar meals (see also Verdasco 2022; Povrzanović Frykman 2017). The paper hence unpacks a seeming paradox: How do Congolese UN-quota refugees manage to cook familiar meals in the materially unfamiliar accommodations and kitchens they are referred to live in upon arrival to Denmark? Upon their arrival, their new homes are already equipped with basic furniture and kitchen tools, reflecting Danish norms and notions of “home”. Technologies, which have not previously been part of the families’ everyday lives now take up central space in the kitchens: Electric stoves, refrigerators, and ovens.

To these families, inhabiting their new homes, including a Danish kitchen, thus entail a radical material rupture and a disorienting experience (Ahmed 2006).

Thinking along the lines of Sara Ahmed (2000), we consider the sensory world of everyday experience a central aspect of feeling at home in the world. Thus, by zooming in on everyday practices of cooking and sharing familiar meals, we show how the families create moments of ‘sensory continuity’ in their new accommodations through well-known smells, tastes, and textures. This, we suggest, provides an important counterweight to a life situation marked by rupture, disorientation.