My paper provides a conceptual framework to unpack the emotional, relational and material bases of feeling at home, an emplaced emotion which can be originally understood by exploring the intersection of housing, home and... [ view full abstract ]
My paper provides a conceptual framework to unpack the emotional, relational and material bases of feeling at home, an emplaced emotion which can be originally understood by exploring the intersection of housing, home and migration studies. Much has been written on migrants’ housing trajectories and on their sense of home across countries. However, this literature holds an under-appreciated potential to illuminate the broader debate on the relational side of dwelling, the values and meanings people attach to place, and the drivers of the perceived transition from a house to a home.
Discussing these “soft” dimensions may look like an unnecessary luxury wherever housing exclusion, marginality or eviction are the key issues at stake, all the more so for the foreign-born. Nonetheless, a systematic understanding of what makes a dwelling closer to a home, to whom and under what conditions, can refine both the theoretical bases and the policy implications of housing studies. Immigrant newcomers’ (initial) distance from the home cultures of receiving societies opens us a unique research venue into it.
There is nothing mundane or merely folkloric in questions such as How migrant’s deep-rooted views and practices of home interact with their housing circumstances; What material and immaterial factors contribute to embedding a sense of home into a dwelling, in light of dwellers’ demographics (ethnicity and immigrant background as much as gender, age, class etc.); What instrumental and symbolic objects are more likely to be available, used and displayed as a source of home-feelings; How internal domestic spaces are redefined, and the boundaries of their access, functions, and use are practically shaped. A comparative research overview has much to say, first, on the influence of housing facilities and arrangements, compared with key social variables, on dwellers’ sense of home; second, on the reasons why feeling-at-home needs to be taken
