Home and Migration: Mobilities, Belongings and
Identities
David Ralph* and Lynn A. Staeheli
Institute of Geography, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh
Abstract
Geographers deploy a panoply of theories and techniques to effectively study the meanings that
migrants attach to their mobility and settlement experiences. In particular, the emergence of transnationalism
as a major analytic tool offers scholars fresh insights into the ways in which migrants
maintain ties to their places of origin, while simultaneously adapting to their new environments.
Surprisingly, what remains assumed, more often than interrogated, in much writing on migrants’
transnational settlement experiences is how they make sense of the concept of home. This is perplexing,
given the centrality that questions over home’s meaning occupy in the migration process,
as well as the importance of home as a focus of geographical inquiry. Our review focuses on
recent migration research that examines migrants’ engagement with the notion of home. We suggest
that in the rush to conceptualise novel transnational configurations of people–place relationships,
some researchers overemphasise the shifting and mobile meanings that migrants give to
home, while underplaying the resilience of its stable, bounded and fixed interpretations. We contend
that the challenge for those studying migration today is to conceptualise together this tension
between home’s mobile and sedentarist aspects.
Introduction
In the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy runs away from home and is later swept
away to the land of Oz. In that fantastical place, she encounters many perils, but also
makes new friends. Together, each of the friends overcomes their fears, learns to recognise
they already had the skills they desired, and understands that they have the power to
shape their own futures. While the film is often described as a coming-of-age story, it is
also a story in which migration and attachments to home play central roles. For all of
Dorothy’s experiences in Oz, as wonderful and frightening as they might have been, she
is reminded, ‘There’s no place like home’.
Dorothy, like other migrants, has a complicated relationship with home. She needs to
escape it, in part to save her dog, but also to develop into an adult. Yet she is loathe to
break ties completely for fear of losing her sense of self and for fear of losing touch with
the people closest to her. But looming over the entire film is also the question of
whether Dorothy ever left home. Dorothy’s Aunt Em, for instance, tries to convince
Dorothy it was all a dream, that she had been hit on the head by a storm window, and
that she had been in Kansas the entire time.
Contemporary migrants may be much like Dorothy in the way that home is dreamt,
conceptualised and experienced. Scholars have often relied on the notion of ‘transnationalism’
to understand migrants’ entangled connections and the networks and social formations
that link homes in their place of origin and in the places to which they move. In
highlighting the shifting and mobile meanings that migrants give to home, however,
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there has been a concomitant tendency to underplay the resilience of its stable, bounded
and fixed interpretations. The challenge, we argue, is to conceptualise the simultaneity of
home as sedentarist and as mobile. We use a review of recent literature on transnational
migration to advance the claim that home must be conceptualised as both dynamic and as
moored in order to reflect the complexity and ambivalence that makes it such a tricky
and slippery concept. In particular, such an approach will help to enrich research that
explores the ways in which home is experienced both as a location and as a set of relationships
that shape identities and feelings of belonging.
As these comments suggest, home contains variegated and overlapping aspects that are
intimately related, yet at the same time distinct. Blunt and Varley (2004), for example,
analyse home from the perspective of its dominant dimensions: namely, home and its
relationships with place, identity and belonging. Yet each of these dimensions, we argue,
must also be understood as embedding the tension between home as mobile and home as
stable. While this adds a level of complexity to the understanding of home, it also better
describes the ways in which home is conceptualised by migrants and the ways that it is
experienced and given meaning.
In the first section of the paper, we review existing literature that examines the dimension
of place in relation to migrants’ homes. Following this, we examine further strands
of migration scholarship that examines the relationships between migrants’ homes as an
expression of identity and with the closely allied notion of belonging. We conclude by
suggesting a conceptualisation of home as being accordion-like, in that it stretches to
expand migrants outwards to distant and remote places, while also squeezing to embed
them in their proximate and immediate locales. In this way, home seems to extend outward
and to be mobile, but also to be grounded and sedentary. Such a conceptualisation
better reflects the ways in which many migrants understand and experience home. In the
final section of the paper, we draw together the ideas to outline a way of approaching
home that combines its sedentarist and mobile aspects. While we use the transnationalism
and international migration literatures, with their emphases on crossing and reimaging
international borders, we argue in the final section that even people who do not cross
such borders live in homes that are experienced in many of the same ways – as locations,
as relationships, as simultaneously fixed and fluid. In this way, the migrant serves as a
figure through which we can understand home, its definition, meanings and its implications
for the ways we live our lives.
Geographies of Home and Migration: A Question of Place
One recurrent and dominant strand of research on home relates it to a fixed, bounded
and discreet place. Inspired by philosophical writings on the power of place-attachments
(Bachelard 1958; Casey 1993, 1998; Heidegger 1971), this approach examines the ways a
sense of home plays an important role in grounding people to a particular place, a place
like no other. Yet in recent years, scholars have begun to problematise the ‘sedentarist
analytic bias’ (Chu 2006, 397) that sees home as a fixed, bounded and enclosed site, as
the analytical focus shifts to the threshold-crossing capacity of home to extend and connect
people and places across time and space (Brettell 2006; Datta 2010; Nowicka 2006).
This is especially the case in research on migrants’ homes, because the very act of moving
throws into question the ability to locate people in specific places, specific homes (Staeheli
and Nagel 2006). The increasing speed, intensity, frequency and volume of human
mobility and migration around the globe is sometimes claimed to saturate all facets of
contemporary life (Urry 2000). In particular, migrant transnationalism, and the rise of a
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transnational paradigm in migration studies, often provides a theoretical framework for
analysing the location-spanning social, economic and political ties that migrants sustain
across borders and emphasises the ‘bifocality’ (Rouse 1991), the ‘dual frame of reference’
(Guarnizo 1997) or ‘binationality’ (Kyle 2000) that migrants create and maintain. Both
place of origin and destination influence migrants’ routine practices and everyday lives,
leading to their effective refusal to simply be located in just one place (Al-Ali and Khoser
2002; Baldassar 1997; Basch et al. 1994).
It is in this context that many commentators challenge the way home is often imagined
as bounded, and instead offer a conceptualisation of home as messy, mobile, blurred and
confused (Ahmed et al. 2003; Nowicka 2006, 2007). From this perspective, it is important
to examine the ways in which migrants continue to ‘ground’ their lives in multiple
locations and to consider how home is already inflected with mobility – and conversely,
with the ways mobility is inflected with gestures of attachment (Easthope 2009; Flynn
2007; Lamb 2002). In response to this, a number of geographers investigate mobile geographies
of home, looking at the ways in which migrants dwell through travel, and vice
versa (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Blunt et al. 2007; Fortier 1999, 2001). These studies
suggest that mobility and stasis, displacement and placement, as well as roots and routes go
into the making of home (Clifford 1997; Gustafson 2001). In other words, in order to
grasp the empirical reality of contemporary meanings of home and home-making practices
for migrants, it is necessary, as David Morley (2000, 41) argues, to reconceptualise
‘the conventional contrast between traditional, place-based notions of home … and the
contemporary experience of globalisation in such a way that we might see this not as a
contrast between presence and absence of an experience of homeliness but rather as two
different modalities of this experience’.
One particularly detailed examination of this reworking of the relationship between
place and mobility is Magdalena Nowicka’s (2006, 2007) research on the experience of
home for United Nations staff members. Given that their roles periodically place them in
new countries, Nowicka examines specifically how homes are localised and territorially
pinned down for her respondents. She finds that her respondents construct a sense of
home around people and objects that are emplaced, but it is an emplacement that
revolves around mobility. Thus, refusing to assume that home is a stable physical place
where domestic life is realised, Nowicka examines home as the emplacement of practices
and objects that are attached, yet mobile. Home, she argues, is built through a dynamic
process of localising particular sets of relationships that do not necessarily depend on the
essential qualities of a particular place. Home, in other words, is a process involving both
the people we share home with but also the material objects therein.
The importance of material objects in creating a sense of home and of sustaining relationships
that help to constitute home can hardly be overstated. Possessions, Tolia-Kelly
(2004, 317) argues, ‘are connective markers to geographical nodes of identification.
Through their prismatic nature, ‘‘other’’ lives, lands, and homes are made part of this
one’. She continues that such material objects serve to both buffer individuals from the
pressures of outside cultures, but also help to forge a feeling of identity and belonging
somewhere, if not necessarily in the particular place they may occupy at a given
moment. In this way, people and material objects can form the basis of home, establishing
sets of relationships before these sediment to become what we have traditionally
called ‘place’. For Nowicka (2006, 82), the implication is that home is ‘a space inbecoming’.
The construction of home is thus not necessarily tied to a fixed location,
but emerges out of the regular, localising reiteration of social processes and sets of
relationships with both humans and non-humans (Jacobs and Smith 2008; Miller 1998,
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2001). Home is thus located, but not limited to a particular locale; it is sedentary and
mobile.
Yet in localising homes, the relationships that constitute home may subtly change,
and there is frequent dissonance between the lived and the ideal aspects of home. ‘Rememories
of home’ (Tolia-Kelly 2004) through objects, for instance, can lead to a
romanticised, nostalgic view that is often in tension with day-to-day experience (Moore
2000). Some aspects of this tension reflect the intersectionality of migrants’ experiences
and the power-laden relationships that are part of home’s construction. So for instance,
while home may be (some) men’s castle, it is a castle riven with inequality and power,
as well as love and care. Class, ‘race’, gender and various other power relations remain
important forces shaping the experience of home for migrants, as research by Pratt
(2004) in collaboration with the Phillipine Women’s Centre of British Columbia has
demonstrated.
The challenge, therefore, is not only to examine migrants’ articulations of mobile⁄
grounded homes, but at the same time to interrogate the ways in which various power
geometries influence such complex registers of home. For example, while they may share
some common characteristics in terms of how they understand home, a refugee’s experience
of home is likely to differ from that of an elite business traveller’s, the political
exile’s from the non-domiciled tax exile’s, the asylum seeker’s from the tourist’s and so
on. In heeding the intensely political significance of home, feminist contributions to
thinking on home highlight that much of the domestic and emotional work involved in
the making of that place we call home is performed by unpaid, unrecognised female
migrant labour (Espiritu 2003; Pratt and Yeoh 2003). Scholars influenced by post-colonial
and post-structural perspectives further unpack some of the power structures governing
migrants’ attempts to fashion home in their new environments (Blunt 2005; Dwyer 2003;
Legg 2003).
In these efforts to understand home, the importance of power and the ways it influences
home’s relationships are central. It seems likely, for instance, that migrants with
legal permission to be in the countries to which they have moved might find it easier to
reposition themselves in the spatialised relationships and networks that sustain and embed
home. Similarly, migrants with access to material resources might also be better able to
negotiate the power geometries that are part of home. Yet ethnographic work on migrant
survival strategies has demonstrated the variety of ways in which undocumented and desperately
low-income migrants also sustain senses of home that are spatially extensible,
even as grounded (e.g., Levitt 2001; Mahler 1995). It is therefore important to be attuned
to the different ways in which migrants, with different resources and different social locations,
negotiate the extensibility and fixity of home.
As may be becoming clear, conceptualisations of home as simultaneously mobile and
sedentarist and as constructed through spatialised networks can be related to broader
debates about the relationship between place and space. Massey (1994), for instance,
describes a ‘global sense of place’ characterised by relationships and networks that expand
outward, but that are rooted in (without being limited to) specific places. Nowicka’s
(2007) discussion of the ways in which home is localised and is a space in-becoming is
clearly influenced by such notions. It seems important, as Massey does, to apply the logic
about the relationships that construct and embed what we call ‘place’ to ‘home’. In this
way, home becomes understood as both mobile and sedentary, as embedded but also as
extending outward through relationships with humans and non-humans.
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Geographies of Home, Identity and Belonging
Those relationships and processes that construct home are also involved in creating identities
and feelings of belonging. In this way, dimensions of home seep into one another,
and maintaining analytical distinctions between them is difficult. And just as home should
not be presumed to be singular, migrant identity should not be presumed to be singular
or fixed to a singular home (Blunt and Varley 2004). It is therefore important to consider
the ways in which a loosening of identity moorings and markers allows for a fluid model
of identification with various places, various homes, whereby many migrants articulate a
multilayered, ‘hybrid’ identity that reflects (and perhaps shapes) their experience of home,
self and belonging (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Walter 2004, 2006; Yau 2007). In this
section of the paper, we explore the relationships between home, identity and belonging,
showing how the conceptualisation of home as simultaneously mobile and grounded
intersects with identity and belonging. The decentring and destabilising of identification
away from the notion of a singular, authentic home is, arguably, more evident for
migrants than for those people who do not migrate and who remain in their original
place of residence (Paspastergiadis 2001). As we will argue, however, people who do not
migrate are also embedded in the relationships that construct home. As such, we use
experiences of transnationalism to explore relationships between home, identity and
belonging, but will later argue that these relationships are not necessarily specific to transnational
migrants.
As migrants maintain contacts across international borders, their identity is not necessarily
tied to a unique home (Lam and Yeoh 2004). One implication is that migrants
continuously negotiate identities between ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds, forging novel configurations
of identification with home in both places (Appadurai 1996). Rather than movement
from one place to another uprooting or deterritorialising migrants’ identities – as
has been intimated – what scholars witness among contemporary migrants is a strengthening
and deepening of ties to multiple places. Numerous recent studies, for instance,
suggest a general and durable re-orientation of the migrant habitus whereby old- and
new-world values are conceptualised together to transform identities, transform homes
(Haller and Lanholt 2005; Levitt and Waters 2002). One revealing example of this is
Salih’s (2003) research on Moroccan women living in Italy. Focussing on their cooking
practices, Salih shows how these women fuse elements of both countries’ cuisines to symbolise
their double identities in homes ‘here’ and ‘there’. When in Italy, the women mix
traditional Italian recipes with imported Moroccan ingredients to enliven the dishes; and
conversely, returning to Morocco for holidays, Italian goods are used in the preparation
of local Moroccan meals. Rather than seeing the women’s identities in relation to specific
homes as mutually exclusive, Salih demonstrates how the meaning of home is defined
through interactive transnational identifications with homes stretched across geographically
remote places.
This research on migrants’ transnational identities shows how home is simultaneously
lived both ‘here’ and ‘there’. However, a singular focus on migrants’ border-spanning
linkages that maintain multiple identities to more than one home tells only part of the
story and runs the risk of overlooking the complex ways in which migrants negotiate
identities. Steven Vertovec (2009) points out that much of twentieth-century migration
scholarship concentrated on the ways in which migrants adapted to their new environments,
a process variously labelled as assimilation, integration, incorporation or insertion.
Vertovec (2009) argues that early work on transnationalism often emerged as a response
to the dominance of the assimilation paradigm, and therefore focused on the previously
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neglected cross-border aspects of migrants’ everyday lives and selves. For Vertovec and
others (Ehrkamp 2005; Morawska 2004; Nagel 2002; Nagel and Staeheli 2008; Portes
et al. 1999; Staeheli and Nagel 2006), this early work on transnationalism – while offering
a productive way of engaging with migrants’ powerful attachments to homes and selves
elsewhere – resulted in a lack of attention to migrants’ struggles in their new homes. In
this light, more recent research aims to consider how migrants build homes and identities
through complex relationships that are plural, extensible, but nevertheless localised.
A number of studies show that maintaining contact with places of origin – through travel,
communications or through material objects – in some instances serves as an adaptive
response to the hostile or unreceptive context in which migrants often find themselves.
In these circumstances, migrant identities often incorporate strong attachments to the
home of origin. Such attachments and identities, however, need not be enacted in the
place of origin, but instead may be recreated in the places to which they have moved;
Tolia-Kelly’s (2004) arguments about the importance of material objects from previous
homes are relevant here. And sometimes, these identities are enacted and reinforced in
living arrangements and neighbourhoods in new places. An example of this is given in
Cohen and Sirkeci’s (2005) account of Turkish-Kurds living in Germany. The authors
argue that Turkish-Kurds have limited interaction in Germany with either Germans or
with non-Turkish-Kurds. This results in the formation of Turkish-Kurd ethnic-enclaves
or ghetto-like neighbourhoods. But the question remains why there is so little interaction.
Phillips (2008) argues that in Britain and with respect to Muslim immigrants, the creation
of such enclaves reflects hostile attitudes on the part of white British people as well as the
comfort that comes from living with others who share Muslim faith and often a common
national background. Much of the public debate in both contexts centres on whether
such enclaves hinder or facilitates integration. The point we wish to make, however, is
that these enclaves – which manifest practices and relationships from multiple homes –
may create home spaces in which it is possible to sustain identities as both the same and
different from the ‘host society’ (Nagel 2002) and in which a sense of belonging can be
forged.
For all of the attention to hybrid identities, pluralised homes and so forth, it must be
acknowledged that some migrants do desire to pin-down their identities in a discretely
defined home, and this desire is often expressed in a desire to ‘return’ home. Conway
(2005), for example, argues that the much-discussed ‘myth of return’ is a symptom of
some migrants’ ongoing search for a stable sense of self in a world often characterised as
in flux. In a series of papers, Christou (2002, 2004, 2006a,b) demonstrates that the
continuing instability of identity while living away from an ancestral land – an ancestral
home – underlies the quest for an authentic sense of self allied to the act of ‘coming
home’ (see also Ralph 2009; Wessendorf 2007). Such yearnings require an explicit appreciation
that migrants’ multiple, hybrid and dynamic identifications with home may continue
to idealise a stable identity with a fixed home (Pratt 1999; Tolia-Kelly 2006). In
this sense, home incorporates both a lived and longed-for state. The articulation of a fragmented,
partial and fluid identity does not preclude the yearning for an integrated, whole
and stable identification with home (Varley 2008; Young 1997).
Yet homecoming rarely seems to fulfil that search for a singular home and stable identity;
instead, migrants often express a continued ambivalence on return, recognising that
they have changed, as has the place they had imagined so unproblematically as ‘home’
(Constable 1999, 2004; Nı´ Laoire 2007, 2008a,b). As a number of studies demonstrate,
returnees often consider the possibilities of re-emigration once the complex reality of
returning is recognised, suggesting a revision of the idealised model of homecoming as
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restoration of a fixed identification with home (Abdelhady 2008; Ley and Kobayashi
2005; Tsuda 2001, 2003). The gap that emerges between the dream and the reality of
return results in disenchantment among many returnees, leading some to revise their
self-identities and articulate a liminal status as both insiders and outsiders. Through the
interplay between home’s mobile and moored features, returnees begin to articulate the
disjuncture, and even antagonism, between the actual and the idealised meanings with
which they had imbued home and their identification with it (Ralph 2009). For these
migrants, a return to a home for which they have yearned and to which they identify
can be unsettling. For while they have returned, they often feel they no longer belong in
their home place. Thus, while seeking to stabilise an identity, they encounter the complex
relationships between identity and belonging.
These relationships are at the core of belonging. While belonging is a subjective feeling
held by individuals, it is also socially defined. The subjective side of belonging is in many
respects synonymous with aspects of home’s dimensions of place and identity. The ways
in which migrants describe a sense of fitting in ‘at home’ shares several characteristics
with their sense of place (Anthias 2001, 2002, 2008). However, there is an explicitly
social element of belonging that conditions home and identity. This social element speaks
not so much to the feeling of identification and familiarity as it does to experiences of
inclusion and, very often, of exclusion. Belonging, therefore, does not simply invoke
warm feelings of fellowship to various peoples, places and cultures, because it depends
on, or takes its meaning from, the inability of some people to participate in mainstream
societal practices. As such, belonging always prompts awkward questions about affiliation
and membership in neighbourhoods, communities, cities and nations (Hedetoft and Hjort
2002). This experience of exclusion is often pointedly the case for migrants’ encounters
with members of the places to which they have moved, irrespective of whether it is a
return to another home (Bauman 2001; Bromley 2000; Kristeva 1991).
Social processes of inclusion and exclusion depend critically on the categorisation of
people as belonging and not belonging, and so numerous studies have focused on the
ways in which members of dominant groups impose categories of belonging on migrants
(Ehrkamp and Leithner 2006; Nash 2008; Yuval-Davis 2006). These studies foreground
the issue that belonging is never entirely about migrants’ subjective feelings of ‘fitting in’
or not, but also relates to how (powerful) others define who belongs to home according
to specific spatial norms and expectations (Castles and Davidson 2000; Crowley 1999;
Ilcan 2002). Thus, while individual migrants may identify and define themselves as feeling
at home, or as belonging in a particular place or places, such definitions of belonging are
partly dependent on being recognised by others for their legitimacy (Valentine et al.
2009). It is not sufficient to claim membership of a particular home; membership must be
validated by the wider community or group to which one aspires to belong. As such,
belonging to home emerges out of entwined social processes of incorporation and exclusion
that are partly self-defined, partly other-defined (see Young 1990).
The internal–external dialectic that conditions belonging to home, moreover, is in
many cases predicated on an interplay of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ around the boundaries
of who belongs to home, and who does not (Benhabib 1999; Madsen and van
Naerssen 2003). This means that part of the reason a person may be incorporated into
any particular group or community stems from the fact that s⁄he shares certain criteria of
similarity or ‘sameness’ with other members of that collectivity. Conversely, part of the
reason a person may be excluded from belonging to the group results from in-group
members categorising her⁄him as different (and often inferior) and thereby not the same
as ‘them’ (Pred 2000). This process of recruiting and excluding based on the perceived
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sameness and difference of in- and out-group members respectively works both within
and between groups (Jenkins 2008). In other words, similar processes of belonging occur
in intra-group as well as inter-group incorporation and exclusion. While everyone is subject
to processes of categorisation, incorporation and exclusion, these processes are arguably
more evident for migrants, as they negotiate belonging intersubjectively in multiple
homes (Paspastergiadis 2001).
Individual migrants often fail to meet normative expectations of behaviour, language,
appearance, dress, eating habits, and countless other materialities and context-dependent
etiquettes, and are in consequence perceived and discursively constructed as a group as
being different to dominant others (Favell 1998; Noble 2002, 2005). A migrant’s difference
or foreignness excludes her⁄him, while simultaneously evoking and reinforcing the
shared similarities between members of the in-group (Koefoed and Simonsen 2007). A
number of studies show how various techniques and tactics of categorising and labelling
migrants positions and marginalises them as alien to and outside the boundaries of belonging
to ‘us’, which at the same time brings the host communities’ shared commonalities or
sameness into focus (Ehrkamp 2006; Neal and Walters 2006; Yeoh and Huang 2000).
Other studies, however, examine the ways in which migrants are understood as the
same as ‘us’ (Braakman and Schlenkhoff 2007; Devlin Trew 2007). Rather than focusing
on migrants’ alleged difference, the emphasis falls on their degree of similarity to members
of the dominant societal group. Numerous studies examine how migrants, based on
a perception of sameness, are recruited to the in-group and are understood as assimilated
and belonging within the boundaries of the host society (Germann-Molz 2008; Germann-Molz
and Gibson 2007). In many such cases, the onus falls on migrants to blend
with the host society’s normative expectations, and through the adoption of language,
accent, dress, intermarriage with the dominant group and so on, are gradually said to
‘belong’ to their countries of settlement (Alba and Nee 1997; Gordon 1964; Gray 2006;
Kivisto 2003). In this view, by shedding particular mannerisms and practices, migrants
come, by degrees, to belong in their new homes in a teleological fashion. But this attention
to particular outward characteristics and practices, however, addresses only the social
element of belonging, and not necessarily its subjective experience.
Belonging thus incorporates the subjective feeling that one’s identity is ‘at home’ in a
place, but also the awareness of how social relations and categories position individuals
and members of social groups. In this process, the construction of sameness and difference
work together in order to position migrants as belonging or not to home. Yet one analytical
difficulty is that it is often difficult to avoid falling into languages that construct
belonging as an either⁄or condition, an all-or-nothing state; the previous sentence is but
one example. Discussion of migrants’ feelings of belonging and home often fails to examine
how individuals move between sameness and difference precisely to challenge those
constructions. It is undoubtedly the case that the ways in which dominant others label
migrants as the same as or different from mainstream society may be internalised by individual
migrants in whole or in part. At the same time, such external categorisation of
migrants’ familiarity to or strangeness from dominant social groups may provoke resistance
on migrants’ behalf. Acts of non-conformity to norms of belonging are important
because they foreground migrants’ own practices of belonging that may emerge in the
interplay of sameness and difference.
Probyn (1996) argues that this interplay is reflected in two interrelated states that
together define belonging: that of ‘be’-ing, and that of ‘longing’. Any number of scholars
have taken up the challenge to think of belonging in these terms (e.g., Bell 1999; Feldman
2008; Mee and Wright 2009; Savage et al. 2005), yet the focus of many studies is
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on the latter aspect, the longing that belonging implies. While the be-ing element of
belonging focuses on the performance and reiteration of normalised codes of belonging,
migrants’ longings suggest an alternative mode of membership that goes beyond rigid categories
of belonging and non-belonging (Moreton-Robinson 2003; Walsh 2006a,b). As
such, many migrants articulate an idiom of inclusion that begins to resist demands to
look, behave and speak in ways that conform to dominant cultural expectations of
migrants as either the same as or different from the mainstream population, thus minting
a novel grammar of belonging to home in the process.
This grammar of belonging has a spatial syntax. The processes and relationships by
which inclusion and exclusion, belonging and non-belonging, the ability to home [in the
sense that Brah (1996) writes of ‘homing’] operate in a variety of practices and objects
and in a variety of mileux. So, for example, our focus on transnational migrants might be
interpreted as meaning that home is largely constructed for such migrants at a national
level; the homes between which such migrants move might be conceived of as nations.
Yet crossing a border – as laden with political, legal and cultural ramifications as it might
be – should not be assumed to mean that feelings of belonging or of being at home is
somehow specific to a national-level community or entity. In fact, crossing a border
might well be incidental to either the reasons people move or to the ways that they forge
homes. If we conceptualise home as being constructed through the interactions of relationships
and networks that are extensible, that are both place dependent and interconnected
with other places, other homes, it follows that identities and feelings of belonging
are also likely to be both place dependent, even as not constrained by a specific place or
a specific scale. The syntax of belonging, therefore, is structured by relationships and
practices in a variety of locations, be they local, national, cosmopolitan or, more likely, a
combination of all of those locations, as migrants move through their daily lives. The
analytical task in any given case is to understand how they are combined and interact to
construct homes and to understand how these homes are interpreted, understood and
given meaning by migrants.
Conclusions
We suspect Dorothy never left home, that she was not transported to Oz. But that does
not mean she was not changed by her experience, whether a dream or not. In this, she is
like any real person. In the course of the film, she changes and establishes a new sense of
self, and earlier relationships with other people and with home are stretched and given
different meanings. In this way, although a fictional character, Dorothy is like any person,
whether a teenager or not, whether a migrant or not. But by telling a story of movement
and transformation, it becomes possible to understand home, identity and belonging in a
more nuanced way.
We have argued for the importance of understanding home as simultaneously mobile
and sedentary, as localised and extensible. In this way, home is like an accordion, in that
it both stretches to expand outwards to distant and remote places, while also squeezing to
embed people in their proximate and immediate locales and social relations. We contend
that the fixed and fluid components of home must be viewed as enmeshed and working
together, without marginalising either of these qualities. Recognising home as at once
grounded and uprooted highlights the often-overlooked dissonance between the lived
and the desired meanings with which people imbue the notion. Our evaluation also softens
the hard boundaries between the private and the public aspects of home. It is not
enough to approach the concept of home as the product of subjective, idiosyncratic
Home and migration 525
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Geography Compass ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
sense-making efforts, because social meanings and social relationships inflect the ways in
which home is understood and experienced. Debates over belonging to home are thus
intrinsically debates over power and who controls it. Yet despite this, notions of home
are not over-determined by public categorisations that aim to fix its meaning. Efforts to
carve out alternative models of home can unsettle normative constructions, and draw
attention to the fundamentally fragile and porous nature of reified social representations
of home.
Geographers’ voices have been crucial in enhancing engagement with complex debates
on home and migration; they have also been crucial in theorising the spatiality of social
relationships, including those that construct home. In this paper, we have used the figure
of the migrant to enmesh the experience of home – with its mobilities and implications
for identities and feelings of belonging – with theoretical arguments about place and
space. In so doing, we hope to provide a lens by which home can be understood as
located in the complex relationships through which migrants and others build and interpret
lives.
Short Biographies
David Ralph has just completed a PhD on Irish return migrants from the USA at the
Geography Department of the University of Edinburgh. His research interests lie in the
area of migration studies, with particular focus on examining how migrants themselves
experience and understand their settlement and integration experiences in their new environments.
He has recently published an article in Irish Studies Review, looking at ideas of
home among Irish return migrants. David holds a BA in Philosophy and English literature
from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and an MA in European Thought from
University College London.
Lynn A. Staeheli is a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Durham.
Lynn has published extensively in political, urban, social and cultural geography. Her
recent work (with Caroline Nagel) on migration compares the integration experiences
and notions of citizenship of Arab-American activists in the USA with those of BritishArab
activists in the United Kingdom. Lynn has previously taught at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, and at the University of Edinburgh, and holds an MA in Geography
from Penn State University, and a PhD in Geography from the University of Washington.
Note
* Correspondence address: David Ralph, Institute of Geography, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh,
Drummond St, Edinburgh Eh8 9XP, UK. E-mail: davidralph81@gmail.com.
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