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- Convenors:
-
Eleonora Narvselius
(Lund University)
Nada Al-Hudaid (Lund University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussants:
-
Lisa Gilman
(George Mason University)
Jessica Enevold Duncan (Lund University)
- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
We invite papers exploring intersections of magic and migration to understand how migrants "unwrite" narratives of loss and dislocation by creating empowering spaces in new environments. Contributions exploring how connective magical practices facilitate adaptation to new environments are welcome.
Long Abstract:
This panel invites papers that explore the intersection of magic and migration, focusing on how migrants use connective practices of home-making as forms of magic. Here, "magic" refers to everyday rituals, imagery, and sensory practices that transform spaces into places and objects into meaningful things, shedding light on the experience of belonging amidst displacement. Our aim is to understand how migrants "unwrite" narratives of loss and dislocation by crafting familiar and empowering environments in their new settings.
By encouraging a multidisciplinary discussion of material from various countries, we aim to explore how migrants use spaces, everyday objects, plants, religious artifacts, and rituals to "unwrite" the foreignness of their surroundings, transforming them into places of continuity and comfort. These acts of "unwriting" involve reclaiming spaces, imbuing them with personal and cultural significance, and fostering integration that is grounded in sensory and emotional experiences rather than simply economic or linguistic assimilation.
We invite contributions that examine how these "magical" practices express cultural continuity, shape identity, and support adaptation to new environments. Potential topics include the role of objects and plants in bridging old and new worlds, the use of cultural symbols, and the power of daily rituals in rewriting narratives of isolation. Methodologically, we encourage ethnographic and visual approaches that emphasize the sensory aspects of home-making.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
Based on our experience as inmigrants and moose hunters in Newfoundland, we reflect on how certain practices that require close involvement with particular landscapes may go on weaving a sense of belonging to "new homes."
Paper Abstract:
This presentation mobilizes the concept of "infraestructures of emplacement" to think about the effects, to some extent unexpected, that the practice of hunting might produce. Based on our experience as both immigrants and hunters in Nefowfoundland, we discuss how the specificities of the intersection between this practice and the conditions required to carry it out, led us almost unwittingly to build closer relations with both the local landscape and people. This has 'magically' transformed the perception of ourselves in relation to the place we call "home". We take this experience as a launching point to discuss a series of (speculative) points about what it means to be emplaced nowadays, in a world dominated by infraestructures of displacement.
Paper Short Abstract:
Puerto Varas grew 40% in five years as lifestyle migrants sought nature and healing. Ethnographic research shows how their practices produce a “magical” landscape, intertwining spirituality, commodification, and rural imaginaries, reshaping both the environment and personal subjectivities.
Paper Abstract:
Puerto Varas, Chile, has experienced a 40% population increase in the past five years, driven by lifestyle migrants seeking nature, healing, and reinvention. This article examines how these migrants, largely middle- and upper-class urbanites, transform the landscape into a “magical” space through holistic practices, spiritual worldviews, and their interactions with the environment. Drawing on ethnographic research, including interviews with migrants and alternative healers, the study explores how this process intertwines personal transformation, commodified spirituality, and rural imaginaries.
The research highlights how migrants’ search for well-being, inspired by holistic and alternative spiritualities, extends beyond individual practices to actively reshape the environment. Elements such as lakes, forests, and volcanoes are reimagined as therapeutic and energetic agents, mediating relationships between people and the natural world. These dynamics reflect broader trends of neo-ruralism and wellness culture, where spiritual meanings are attached to landscapes, creating a blend of personal and environmental reconfiguration.
This production of a “magical” Patagonia, however, is not solely symbolic; it involves material and social transformations that commodify spirituality and redefine rural spaces. Migrants’ experiences reveal how their practices reshape not only landscapes but also subjectivities, fostering a sense of cosmic connection and holistic well-being. This study contributes to understanding how lifestyle migration intertwines with spiritual, environmental, and neoliberal imaginaries, emphasizing the active role migrants play in producing landscapes as spaces of healing, energy, and transcendence.
Paper Short Abstract:
This research explores the transformative power of the Mahakubh Mela, an annual celebration that magically transforms the city of Padova (IT) into a vibrant reflection of an Indian city for a single day, challenging stereotyped narratives to co-create more inclusive and multicultural spaces.
Paper Abstract:
Every year, during the last weekend of July, the city of Padova (Italy) undergoes a remarkable transformation, mirroring the vibrancy of an Indian city as it celebrates the "Mahakubh Mela" – a collective celebration for peace.
Through a seven-year Participatory Action Research immersion within the Indian diaspora community, the study examines how this event catalyzes processes of magical placemaking and diasporic homemaking in Padova's Arcella neighborhood. At its core, the Mela emerges as a crucible for grassroots initiatives that actively reshape public spaces, challenging conventional narratives of urban development and migrant practices. This citizen-led effort transcends its cultural roots to become a catalyst for intercultural dialogue and social cohesion, as the Indian diaspora and local residents collectively engage in reclaiming and redefining the neighborhood's identity.
By promoting inclusivity and amplifying diverse voices, the Mela resists the homogenizing forces of top-down urban planning strategies. Instead, it offers a bottom-up approach that celebrates the rich tapestry of multiculturalism woven into Arcella's public spaces, presenting a compelling case for rethinking traditional city development paradigms. The Mela's ability to temporarily transform Padova into a mirror of an Indian city underscores the power of these citizen-driven interventions to reshape urban narratives and foster a profound sense of belonging for diverse communities through magical placemaking and diasporic homemaking practices.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper draws from ethnographic research on arts and displacement with Syrian migrants in Türkiye, Uyghurs in France, and Burundian, Rwandan, and Congolese people living in a Malawian refugee camp. It examines how artistic creativity for “refugees” in these contrasting circumstances can serve as magical forms of “connective practices of home-making.”
Paper Abstract:
This paper examines how artistic creativity for people living as “refugees” in contrasting circumstances in three different countries can serve as magical forms of “connective practices of home-making.” It draws from ethnographic research with Syrian migrants in Türkiye, Uyghur refugees in France, and Burundian, Rwandan, and Congolese people living in the Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi. The larger project is centered on efforts by refugees who have landed temporarily or permanently to use arts to promote something positive within their own migrant communities or within the larger social context in which they find themselves. It offers counternarratives to the pervasive negative rhetoric about refugees by emphasizing strength, initiative, joy, and community, while bringing into relief the complex and very real challenges of forced migration. This presentation focuses on one example from each fieldwork site: 1) Syrian women living in Türkiye gather weekly to sing traditional songs, a means to connect them with their memories of home and one another. 2) Congolese youth living in a refugee camp in Malawi paint together in a shared gallery, giving youth something meaningful to do within a precarious existence. 3) A Uyghur poet living in exile in France teaches language through poetry to ensure that Uyghur children in the diaspora have a connection to a homeland they’ve never visited. In all three examples, artistic expressivity is the magic through which displaced people “unwrite” their narratives of displacement, grief, and fear to emphasize instead agency, connection, and joy.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper investigates the transformative potential of magic within Korean shamanism and its diasporic expressions, focusing on Meesha Goldberg’s Daughterland (2022). Presented during Gyopo’s event, “Between Worlds: Art and Shamanism in the Korean Diaspora,” this multimedia work, spanning endurance performance, experimental film, poetry, and painting, enacts magic as an everyday practice rooted in Korean shamanic traditions. Drawing from Koo Chaweon’s Spellbound: A New Witch’s Guide to Crafting the Future (2022), I propose the alchemy of fermentation as a diasporic and indigenous magic, decolonized from supernatural spectacle. Daughterland demonstrates the unseen yet powerful relational magic of engaging with the land, ancestors, and the mundane, reshaping the boundaries of diasporic indigeneity.
Paper Abstract:
This paper centers on the transformative and relational magic inherent in Korean shamanism and its diasporic manifestations, with a focus on Meesha Goldberg’s Daughterland. Presented during Gyopo’s event, “Between Worlds: Art and Shamanism in the Korean Diaspora,” Goldberg’s work, integrating endurance performance, experimental film, poetry, and painting, brings forth an intuitive and everyday magic that resonates deeply with shamanic traditions. Unlike explicit performances of shamanic rituals, Goldberg enacts a quieter yet equally potent form of magic, weaving together themes of ancestry, land, and diasporic belonging.
Grounded in Koo Chaweon’s Spellbound: A New Witch’s Guide to Crafting the Future (2022), I propose the alchemy of fermentation as a central metaphor for diasporic magic, an indigenous ontology that transforms and sustains through relational practices. This alchemy reimagines magic as embedded in the mundane, dissolving its reliance on visibility or spectacle. Through intuitive connections between ancestral histories, sacred landscapes, and embodied acts of creation, Daughterland disrupts binaries of “original” and “copy” associated with mimesis. It demonstrates the “in-the-making” nature of magic as an active collaboration with land and ancestral spirits, reframing indigeneity and diaspora as intertwined processes of becoming.
By addressing the growing popularity of Korean shamanism in Western artistic and academic contexts, this study critically intervenes in its framing as “ancestral magic.” Situating Daughterland within this discourse, I argue that diasporic shamanic arts illuminate the power of magic to transform relationships with self, community, and place, offering a new understanding of indigeneity as an ongoing, relational practice.
Paper Short Abstract:
In this paper, I focus on home-making practices among Syrian immigrants in Turkey. I argue that objects play a central role in the home-making practices of displaced people, emphasizing just how vital "home" is to those who have been uprooted. While the physical home itself is not portable, objects—and the emotions and memories attached to them—are. Infused with personal meanings, objects possess a transformative power; they "create magic" by helping people build a sense of home in an unfamiliar place.
Paper Abstract:
Migration is an experience of deprivation. It is a process in which relationships, meanings, and belongings are left behind. In the case of forced migration, it becomes even more profound as individuals are compelled to abandon everything that references their identity. Objects step in to substitute for the meanings that were left behind. While the outside world in a new geography may be beyond one’s control, the home remains personal and can be decorated in ways that reflect the individual’s identity and culture. In this regard, objects emerge as tools to compensate for loss, helping to restore a sense of biographical continuity.
In this paper, I focus on home-making practices among Syrian immigrants in Turkey. Specifically, I explore the objects acquired in Turkey to recreate a sense of home. Migrants who fled to Turkey following the outbreak of war in 2012 did not always have the luxury of bringing all the belongings they wanted. Many were forced to make hasty decisions due to life-threatening circumstances. Consequently, they often rely on familiar objects found in Turkey to decorate their homes or to carry on their habits. For some Syrian migrants, the feeling of "home" can manifest in sitting on floor cushions, reminiscent of traditions back in Syria, while for others, it is tied to the shape of a traditional Syrian tea glass. For some, it might even be a daily ritual, such as interactions with plants on the balcony.
Paper Short Abstract:
Through a novel ethnographic case study of Ukrainian war migrants in Newfoundland, this paper will explore the role of “safe folklore”—carefully selected cultural expressions that foster internal unity and bridge external societal boundaries—in the “magical” process of coping with trauma and home-building in a non-representative diasporic setting.
Paper Abstract:
The island of Newfoundland, known for its distinct regional cultural identity within Canada, has welcomed over 3,500 Ukrainians displaced by war. This is an unprecedented influx of newcomers over a short period to an island that has not historically been a popular destination for migrants and, thus, is not a representative diasporic centre. In contrast to representative diasporic areas elsewhere in Canada, no pre-existing Ukrainian resources existed in Newfoundland upon the arrival of the displaced Ukrainians, and many Newfoundlanders took numerous hosting- and settling-related tasks upon themselves.
The arrival of Ukrainians markedly affects the social and cultural fabric of Newfoundland. A growing number of Ukrainian events—flavoured with the themes of traditional folklore and heritage—that would have been viewed as “foreign” in the very recent past, have lately become a part of the local scene. “It’s all because of our nerves!”—a newcomer activist once jokingly described the time-consuming community-oriented efforts of the displaced Ukrainians who can often barely make ends meet. The activist meant that many Ukrainians are so traumatized by the war that they feel a heightened need to do something, both at home and in public.
Through a novel ethnographic case study of recent Ukrainian war migrants in Newfoundland, this paper will explore the role of “safe folklore”—carefully selected cultural expressions that foster internal unity and help bridge external societal boundaries—in the "magical" process of coping with trauma and building a sense of home in a non-representative diasporic setting.
Paper Short Abstract:
Building on the well-established view of magic as a distinctive form of knowledge characterized by deeply felt emotional relationships and experimental modes of association and connectedness, it is argued that magic’s capacity to foster spiritual connectivity and "conjure up" desired psychological outcomes makes it an especially apt lens for analyzing migrant home-making.
Paper Abstract:
This presentation explores the applicability of the concept of magic in analyzing the extensive ethnographic material collected during the NordForsk MaHoMe project (2020–2024). Building on the well-established view of magic as a distinctive form of knowledge whose key characteristics are deeply felt emotional relationships and experimental modes of association and connectedness, it is argued that this ability of magic to evoke a sense of spiritual connectivity and 'conjure up' desired psychological outcomes makes magic a particularly apt lens for analyzing migrant home-making.
Within this framework, the blueprints of magical rites can serve to establish and reinforce a "network of connectivity" for migrants, especially those facing involuntary displacement. These individuals often engage in deliberate efforts to reconstruct their life-worlds and facilitate the process of home-making.
The presentation further examines the epistemological and methodological implications of “magical home-making” and highlights specific examples of “magical” connectivity as observed in migrant home-making practices.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper analyses the meaning of objects, practices, rituals, and emotions in the process of reimagining home within the group of Romanian truck drivers in Germany.
Paper Abstract:
Professional truck driving is a common job among Romanian migrants, particularly men, who pursue it to secure better economic opportunities for themselves and their families. This paper explores how objects, practices, rituals, and emotions contribute to the reimagining of home among Romanian truck drivers in Germany. Navigating the constant challenges of their profession, such as creating a safe and comfortable workspace while rebuilding a home away from home, truck drivers often view their 3-4 square meter cabins as extensions of their identities. Their trucks serve as significant markers of identity, aiding in the formation of new relationships, especially with fellow Romanians in the same profession. These drivers transform the empty space of the cabin into a liveable and living environment by engaging with their memories, sense of belonging, and recreating habitus. In highway parking lots, objects sacredly kept in their cabins become tools for connection. Items like cooking utensils, portable chairs and tables, gas cylinders, radios, and images of saints serve as links to their home country. Truck drivers also extend their experiences beyond their physical environment, sharing their rituals on social media through written stories, comments, pictures, and short videos. There is constant activity on Facebook groups depicting truckers’ constant need to build their identities on the go and belong to a growing group with the same particularities. Moreover, communal activities create a sense of belonging and familiarity within their diasporic community, as they cook, drink, and spend their mandatory breaks together, transforming narratives of loss into empowering stories.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper will examine the objects that refugee ‘women as mothers’ chose to turn their social housing into spaces of belonging. By following the processes of home-making, I aim to explore what objects are placed in the new homes to create empowering spaces of belonging.
Paper Abstract:
Refugee families in the UK are initially placed in temporary housing, after long periods of waiting, that could be up to three years, they are provided permanent housing. Upon arrival these spaces are colour-less and material-less, it is the responsibility of the refugee families to move their belongings to this new space. In this paper I will examine the gendered, racialized and classed home-making process that refugee women as mothers navigate. What objects are firstly set out? What objects are left behind? Upon moving moving to their new houses, refugee ‘chose different objects to turn social housing into s where they are no longer out-of -place. I will examine the objects that are chosen by the mothers to slowly and purposely (and magically) turn this real state into places of belonging. Through the careful choice of pictures, symbols, furniture and colours I will explore how meaning is enacted and how they find ways of being emplaced. The arguments in this paper are based on my current research project with ‘(Un)deserving’ refugee mothers who arrived through family reunion processes to England.