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A New Lens on the Migration-home Nexus Read chapter Read first chapter

2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

2. Researching Migrants’ Home

Author : Paolo Boccagni

Published in: Migration and the Search for Home

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US

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Abstract

Home, as an object of research rather than just a background to everyday life, raises interesting methodological challenges – even more so for the experience of international migrants. This chapter provides an overview of the “what”, “why” and “how” of social research into it. A heuristic matrix for the study of home is advanced, by combining levels of analysis (views, practices, settings) with conceptual dimensions (domesticity, materiality, spatiality, temporality). The promises and pitfalls of the prevalent methodological options are discussed, as well as the potential of research via participatory and mixed methods, and in a comparative perspective. While researching migrants’ home settings and relationships raises intricacies and dilemmas, it is critical to make sense of what home means to whom; to assess the prospects for achieving it; ultimately, to counterbalance the prescriptive and ideological bases of the home discourse with empirically grounded accounts.

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previous chapter A New Lens on the Migration-home Nexus
next chapter Migration and Home over Space
Footnotes
1
This argument, which mirrors my own background as a sociologist, is by no means an exhaustive one. From other disciplinary angles, other questions can be focused, which also speak to broader debates in social sciences (see, for instance, within environmental psychology, the recent contribution of Graham et al., 2015). The point is to appreciate that the social study of home, while bearing also on the study of houses (itself a rich and fascinating research field), is fundamentally autonomous, and reaches beyond the latter.
 
2
See, for instance, Murdie (2002) on Polish and Somali newcomers in Toronto.
 
3
Action-research projects conducted along these lines include, in London alone, the Finding a way home study of youth’s constructions of (un)safe and refuge areas, based on their own photographs, videos, maps, as well as “audio diaries” and interviews (Back, 2007); and more recently, the collaborative project Creating Hackney as a home, aimed to investigate the “sense of home and belonging” of young people in an “emblematic” London borough, again building on participatory and visual methodologies (Butcher & Dickens, 2015).
 
4
For sure, this cursory methodological overview is far from exhaustive. Further options include content and semiotic analysis of the discourses and visual representations produced around home (cf. Kusenbach & Paulsen, 2013), not to mention the abundant literature on (the) home across humanities, and beyond. Furthermore, the biographical and reflexive dimension which is activated by the notion of home can also be appreciated in life writings (Blunt & Dowling, 2006), including auto-ethnographies (Alsop, 2002). See also Blunt (2008) for a particularly rich ethnographic approach to the multiple locations of home.
 
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Metadata
Title
Researching Migrants’ Home
Author
Paolo Boccagni
Copyright Year
2017
Book
Migration and the Search for Home

Print ISBN: 978-1-137-58801-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-58802-9

Copyright Year: 2017

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58802-9_2