In this episode we look at how homes are created and disrupted through movement and migration across international borders. We tend to think of domestic space as fixed in one place, but where is home? For many people home happens across various geographies: it is mobile and unstable. We discuss the relationship between home and migration, particularly in the context of transnational mobility in London.
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MoDA objects relevant to this episode
The street markets of London
London is not all about being modern and this depiction from 1936 shows one of its oldest traditions: the street market.
Britain in Brussels
This fantastic booklet filled with pattern and colour was designed to promote Britain abroad in 1958.
New sights of London|||New Sights of London, 1960
'New Sights of London' was published by the London County Council in 1960.
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to That Feels Like Home, a podcast by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, reaching you from Middlesex University London. I’m Ana Baeza Ruiz, and I’m hosting this third series to look afresh at what ‘home’ is, and what it means.
We’ve previously looked at home from a wide range of perspectives, including in series 2 some of our shared experiences of home during the pandemic. This season, we’ll be in conversation with academics and activists who have moved beyond traditional ideas of home as a place ‘of safety, privacy, and care’.
Each episode will propose alternative readings of home, from its engagements with histories of empire, the politics of micro-living under neoliberalism, home as a queer space, or the changing meanings of home for people who cross borders.
As always, we draw inspiration from our collections, and the stories missing in them, to rethink the past through the lens of the present.
Ana: In this episode we’ll be looking at how homes and spaces in the home are created and disrupted through transnational mobility and migration. We tend to think of domestic space as fixed in one place, but where is home? For many people home happens across various geographies, it’s mobile and unstable. In this episode, we’re going to talk about the relationship between home and migration, and particularly we’ll be looking at the context of transnational mobility in London. And joining us to talk about this are Dr. Annabelle Wilkins and Dr. Olivia Sheringham, both geographers who have collaborated with the Museum of the Home on the Stay Home Stories project that we’ll talk about today. It’s really great to have you here. Thanks so much for joining us.
Olivia: Thank you for the invitation.
Annabelle: Yeah, thank you Ana and it’s great to be here and discussing this with you both.
Ana: And just to introduce you before we jump in, Dr Annabelle Wilkins is a social and cultural geographer with an interest in home, migration and belonging. She’s currently a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary University of London and at Kingston University London. Annabelle is the author of Migration Work and Homemaking in the City Dwelling and Belonging among Vietnamese Communities in London, which was published by Routledge in 2019. Dr. Olivia Sheringham is a lecturer in social and cultural geography at Birkbeck University of London. Her research interests span home migration and belonging in urban contexts, cultural diversity and geographies of encounter, religion and migration, and creative and collaborative practice. And she has published widely on these themes, including in a recent co-authored article, “The Living of Time Temporalities of Home and the City”. So a very rich set of topics. And I think we’re going to struggle to get through all of them today. But I wanted to start with a first and sort of broad initial question, which is around your own motivations for starting to research these issues of home, migration and the city. You both live in London. It’s a super diverse city. So what brought you to this?
Annabelle: Yes, so I, I moved to London actually when I started my PhD and I originally came from a quite rural kind of coastal town in the southwest of England. So it was a real, you know, completely different experience for me moving to London, and I think even just being here, experiencing what it’s like to live alongside and kind of as part of so many different communities and the, yeah, really important part of my research to actually experience being in this place and learn about all the different histories of migration, the different reasons people have arrived and settled in the city and are still continuing to do so. And the kinds of challenges that they faced along the way. So I think, it’s given me a real sense of that rich history of migration, and I’ve definitely brought that into my work.
Olivia: Like Annabelle, I come from a place that is much less urban and much less diverse. so living in London and sort of living alongside such diversity has always been something that’s motivated and inspired me. But my interest in home particularly stems from an interest more in migration and people’s migrants’ relationships. I did my PhD research, was working with Brazilian migrants and very much interested in people’s connections with homes back in Brazil and these ideas of sort of connections with multiple homes, these transnational connections. And, from that, I became interested more about questions of belonging. and it was only sort of later that I started thinking about the work that we’re going to talk about today of thinking about a more expanded idea of home and how that very much relates to this idea of belonging or not belonging in the city.
Where is home?
Ana: And I wanted to follow up from that on this expanded sense of home. And start with this question, well -where is home? If I look at the collections at MODA the museum, there is all these manuals from the nineteenth century and in the early 20th century that talk very much about that private world of the home often constructed as women’s natural domain. And it’s very much separated from what’s outside of the home. But your research is pointing at, different set of perspectives, of, a sort of relationship between home and the city. Home isn’t just that domestic space. It’s also something that can happen in public space. It’s that expanded sense of home.
Annabelle: Yeah, I think absolutely, just only building from what you say Ana that, well, I would start from the point of saying that home is a multiple experience, an entity, something that can be experienced in different places. So, of course, can be within the dwelling, within the interior. as geographers, we also think about how those dwellings are connected across multiple different spaces and places. and I particularly have been inspired by the work of Alison Blunt and other critical geographers of home who talk about home as multi-scalar so can be found within the local neighbourhood, within the city, across transnational space. And of course, this is particularly important for people who’ve migrated, people who’ve been displaced and thinking about how they kind of remake or sometimes unmake the home and build a home in the new place. I also think about home in terms of practices and homemaking. sociologist Paolo Boccagni talks about homemaking as an active process, within which a sense of security and familiarity and control of particular importance. And again, if we think about how some people who’ve migrated might experience this, that might be a kind of loss of autonomy.
Annabelle: And another way of thinking about home is in terms of the emotional and embodied aspects, things like memory, identity and space for family and people to sort of care for one another. And so, yeah, I think there are these multiple different ways that we can look at home and how we experience it.
Olivia: Yeah, I think I think this is a really interesting question, how scholarship unsettles some of these normative ideas as home of the sort of security homes associated with these kind of positive ideals of safety, security and critical and feminist scholars have emphasised the need to look beyond these assumptions of home as a haven, or as a place of refuge, and actually demonstrating that this experience is a site of violence or insecurity, as Annabelle has said. Katherine Brickell, talks about home unmaking and draws attention to, how home can be a site of fear for many people. so we might think about contexts of domestic abuse, violence but also thinking about how the structures of the state, structures of the state violence infiltrate the home.
Olivia: And again, this idea of how state policy shape people’s domestic lives and then work on refugees and asylum seekers. And certainly this has come out in my research in terms of thinking about home for refugees and asylum seekers, people whose lives are in limbo. So spatial and temporal limbo, and this constant waiting, waiting for a letter from the Home Office waiting to be displaced, and that this uncertainty shape and constrain people’s domestic lives in multiple ways (for an analysis of this see Darling 2014).
We can’t about home without thinking about how it’s deeply tied with these questions of race, class, gender and the kind of colonial imperial power relations and how these play out. But also, I think, as Annabelle says, relating to practices of homemaking. It’s also important to think about migrants not as victims of these forces and thinking about questions of agency and resistance, which we might touch on again later.
Ana: I think that lays the groundwork in a great way. And it leads me to another question, which is, how far do you think the meanings of home and family life are still dominated by domestic experiences that are associated with white British households? You both mentioned the importance of thinking about race, thinking about gender, and your work looks at that. how are your projects shifting the terms in which we can talk about home?
Olivia: I think this question is really interesting in terms of thinking about how migration and the experiences of migrants shift and unsettled migrants sort of very broadly, broadly thought about how these shifts and unsettle our ideas of what it means beyond the sort of normative ideals of the white household. as we’ve touched on urban scholars have drawn attention to the role of migrants in city making. So the ways in which migrants in cities shape the kind of spaces of the city and carve out these spaces of belonging and how the impact it has on the sort of urban landscape.
On the one hand, these migrants that are very much (pause) fundamental to our, to our cities and to us, the city making alongside being excluded and excluded from these processes of urban change. But I think this idea of migrants and city-making can be extended to these discussions around homemaking and understandings of home and the kind of contradictory processes that underpin it. So home, as we’ve talked about, encompassing feelings and imaginaries across temporal and spatial scales. Home as a sort of fear, potentially and uncertainty. But also, as I as I touched on earlier, this idea of home as a site of resistance and creativity and resilience that go into these practices of migrant homemaking. And this sort of came out in my own research on Brazilian migrants in London, these real practices of how to make multiple homes, how to make home across borders, how to make home both within domestic spaces or not, within other community spaces in the city and also in my recent work with refugees and asylum seekers in London. So thinking about this active role of migrants in the making of home.
Annabelle: And I think, yeah, my work, everything builds on the work of the scholars that we’ve been discussing in terms of homemaking and city making and not sort of separating out home and mobility, but looking at them as intertwined and also not sort of assuming that home is the place or the dwelling is the place where people might feel that sense of belonging. And in my PhD research, I was exploring these kinds of questions with Vietnamese people in communities in East London, and they’d arrived in London for very diverse reasons. So some people who’d arrived as refugees in the 1970s and 80s and other people who’d arrived much more recently. So I was looking at how they experienced home, but also these connections between home and work home in the city and how people’s everyday experiences of the city really shaped what they thought of as home.
And I think this is how perhaps we can challenge some of these normative assumptions that are often coming from Global North Academia, Western academia. It’s really important to think about how literally, how the idea of home is translated in different languages and different cultures. So I was learning about the meanings of home in the Vietnamese language and Vietnamese culture and this idea of the original homeland or the ancestral homeland that was very important to some people and could be quite different from the home that they experience in the present, but was a really important part of their own sense of perhaps a longer term home or a more profound sense of home where their family and roots were, as well as where they were right now.
Homemaking, agency and precarity
Ana: You’re listening to That Feels Like Home, a podcast from the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. I’m Ana Baeza and in this episode I’m talking to geographers Annabelle Wilkins and Olivia Sheringham about home, mobility and migration. In the next section, we discuss what home might mean for different people: it can be space of autonomy, but also one of unsafety or oppression.
Ana: That’s really interesting. I wanted to touch more on one thing that you’ve both said, which is on the one hand, moving beyond the idea of home as a place of safety and starting to understand how it can be a place of oppression. But then there’s that other dimension that you brought up Olivia about home as site of resilience, which I think it’s also something that has come up in some of the literature, particularly from feminists of colour who have talked about the home as it might function as a space of autonomy from racial domination. So I wonder -how these perspectives kind of collide in your work in thinking about migration and home.
Annabelle: Yeah, I think I can start on this, and I think, again, it really speaks to the ambivalence of home and also the importance of considering what home means for different people, how this intersects with their wider experiences, whether that’s displacement or other forms of oppression and subjugation. And I’ve been really inspired by bell hooks’ work. And she talks about the Homeplace, which she defines as a space through which black women have historically survived and resisted these different forms of oppression, particularly white supremacy, white power and control. And this is in the context, particularly of the US and slavery and the legacies of this, but also the kind of wider dominance of white supremacy within social and cultural and economic life. So within this home was a kind of site of sanctuary and resistance, from these forms of dominance. And she goes on to say that it was only in that Homeplace, it was created and kept by black women, that they had the opportunity to grow and develop and to quote her ‘to nurture our spirits’.
And I think this is really interesting to reflect on in the context of migration. And particularly we could apply this in the context of the hostile environment in the UK. But it makes me wonder to what extent the home can be particularly safe place and a place of autonomy if there is still the danger of state’s intervention into the home. So things like evictions, deportations, we really see this aspect of intervention in every aspect of life, including the domestic space. So I think this just shows that it’s really important to look at an intersectionality.
Olivia: Yeah, these are these assumptions around home as experienced in a particular way that that we need to unsettle. I really like Azeezat Johnson’s work on black Muslim women and home (Johnson 2017). she talks about clothing practices and reflects on these ideas of comfort and discomfort within the home, as well as beyond the domestic space, but particularly thinking about home in this broader sense. But for her, both comfort and the home need to be thought of as negotiated and dynamic and related to the construction of identity, and feelings of belonging as well as their opposites. So these feelings of home autonomy, comfort that we’ve been talking about as fluid and contextual how it’s shaped by these legacies of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, as well as these contemporary forms of coloniality.
Ana: You’ve both talked about this infiltration of the state in the home when we talk about the experience of migrants and refugees, that’s often also joined by condition of precarity, for instance, having restricted access to affordable housing or to funds. Could you talk a bit more about this?
Annabelle: Yeah, I’ve seen this came up in my PhD research, particularly in very different ways, depending on the circumstances of people’s arrival. And so it is very clear for people who arrived as refugees in the 1970’s that they’d been forcibly displaced from their homes in Vietnam due to the violence and conflict there. And then once they’d finally been resettled in the UK, they’d often along the way spend time in refugee camps in Hong Kong and other places. But once they arrived in the U.K., they often had to wait months in so-called reception centres, which were often in former military barracks, and then they were dispersed around the country, which is something that’s still done with asylum seekers in the UK in the current context. And so this kind of process of dispersal really impacted on the way that they could form a community, find support. And it was really exacerbating the trauma that they too often experience. So many of them actually moved again in the 1980s and 90s to form communities in London and other major cities. And that was kind of part of this process of, yeah, seeking support, seeking solidarity. migrants who have arrived more recently and been impacted by the UK’s increasingly restrictive immigration policies, including, as you mentioned, the no recourse to public funds. Several people that I met who wanted to stay in the UK were finding that it was increasingly difficult because the UK had abolished the post-study work visa at the time. So they yeah, they didn’t really have any sense of certainty as to how long they could stay. So things like having very transient housing, rented housing, not being able to decorate or furnish the home in the way, you would ideally want to, but also this broader sense of precarity, of not knowing where you can live, where you can establish a longer-term home.
Ana: I want to link that to just another question, which is about the public portrayal of those temporary accommodation or housing estates, which in the media more often than not, tend to be presented as unhomely, alienating and seem to be lacking security community belonging.. how do you see these media representations?
Olivia: Yeah, I think that’s a really important question the relationship between these media representations and then how the kind of the policies that then become related to that. I think the sort of tendency comes out in to separate the physical dwelling with experiences and emotions and practices of home. So in the context of housing estates, as you mentioned, particularly in the UK context, these have been widely portrayed as unhomely, as you say, and then this notion emerged of sink estates. And I think this was a speech that was made by Tony Blair at the Aylesbury estate in south London in the 90s. But then this became and still used as this kind of framework to justify social housing policies that marginalise and displace people. how the power of this rhe-rhetoric has been to associate these forms of housing, these sort of forms of housing as associated with decay used to justify these acts of dehumanising and marginalising people that live in them somehow kind of apart from society. And I think this is where sort of scholars of home remind us of thinking about these dwellings through the lens of home and all that that implies. Home is relational, home is about emotions, memories, community. we need to think about this through a broader understanding of home and more complex and nuanced understanding, the sort of challenges, the simplistic and damaging narratives of the media.
Olivia: And just to mention this brilliant film by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, about the Haggerston estate, in Hackney. the film is called A State of Reverie. And it kind of tells multiple stories of the estate and its residents in the seven year period, when it sort of in between the decision to put it down when this was announced and then when residents were finally rehoused. And the film just provides this this really sort of powerful counter to some of these narratives surrounding, sink estates and the people that dwell in them. it’s a kind of reverie, sort of dreamlike portrayal that captures these multiple layers that we’ve talked about, – temporally and spatially that encompass the home, but also the injustices of the housing system alongside processes of structural racism and austerity, but without painting the people as victims.
The value of domestic objects
Ana: We’ve been talking about home as being ambivalent, both reflective of social injustices around access to housing and a space of protection. Now we’re going to talk about domestic possessions: how do these create a sense of home over time?
Ana: We’ve talked about home as it spills outside of domestic space. But I’d actually like to go to the interior of home as a site for the creation of a sense of belonging. you’ve both talked about the power of objects, in forming archives of memories and desires. Could you speak a bit about this?
Annabelle: Yes, it is, I mean, so much really interesting and rich literature that is considering the importance of domestic possessions and in context of mobility and displacement and how those contribute to home making everything from kind of photographs, souvenirs, paintings, foods and practices of cooking, amongst many other examples. And again, speaking to the work of a colleague, Kathy Burrell, who looks at how migrants from Poland and Zimbabwe who are in the U.K. sustain these material and tangible links and also emotional links across borders through sending and receiving parcels, clothing, furniture and other items. And she really highlights the practices of care and effort that are involved in maintaining these domestic connections.
I draw some of these ideas, these kinds of the power of objects and how that might be interpreted and reconfigured in context of migration and throughout my own research, and particular objects were very important in in my work with participants in terms of connecting them with their past homes in Vietnam and the memories of homes, particularly homes that they’d had to leave and in difficult and traumatic circumstances.
But it was particularly challenging for people who had arrived as refugees to actually bring many physical objects with them. So that was one of the first things that a participant said to me, that we could only bring kind of very tiny photographs, small Polaroid pictures that they later had enlarged and put on the walls of their homes. But the kinds of possessions that they could bring were completely priceless to them. They couldn’t really bring very much at all. And so later, when it was possible to travel or to have objects sent from Vietnam, these were hugely important for those memories. And several people that I met had objects that were brought on return visits to Vietnam, pictures depicting some kind of idealised images of rural Vietnam and such as village scenes. these objects are not just about sort of reconstructing a past home that must be thought of in terms of how they’re being used and navigated reinterpreted in the context of London and its new homes that people are making.
And the younger participants, their parents would often send domestic and other objects to their homes in London, such as carpets, bedding, food, even medicines. And this was a really important part of maintaining this family relationships, the parent child relationship, because many of the people I met were still students in London and enabling that cross-border sense of home and religious and spiritual objects were hugely important for several people that I spoke to, including the materiality and material culture of altars and shrines to deities and ancestors.
Olivia: I suppose just to just to build on that, domestic objects have been important in my research with migrants as well, and like Annabelle, one of the things that I’ve been interested in that’s emerged is the ways in which religion and spirituality has been experienced and practiced in people’s home spaces. And we’ve written a chapter together on this in a book called Spaces of Spirituality, in which we look at Annabelle’s work with Vietnamese migrants.
So I talked in my research of the ways in which these objects home shrines, candles, photographs, kind of have this this spiritual dimension and become really important for creating and sustaining these ties with back home. So as well as creating a sense of belonging in the context of London. So both creating these transnational ties alongside. So, again, that’s thinking about the relationship between the mobile and the, city and the mobility and belonging.
A lot of people talked about portable religious objects, so amulets or images of saints that people carried to sort of remind them or give them a sense of solace or comfort in often quite unwelcoming contexts of the city or even sort of religious apps on people’s phones.
Ana: Annabelle you’ve alluded to the link to memories and how that, links to the present, but also to the future, how do you think this remaking of the home or using of objects is also a way of shaping some kind of future? how do you see that overlapping of past, present future in that one space?
Olivia: Yeah. I think that’s really important to think not just about spatial scales but also about temporal scales and the overlapping, as you say, of the sort of past, present and future people talk about homes left behind and both the kind of, terms of physical dwellings, but also in terms of families and emotional ties, thinking back to the past also reminds us, about history and the colonial legacies that underpin experiences of home for many people. So I think as migration scholars, this is something that we sort of have a responsibility to really foreground.
But as you say, the sort of thinking about future homes is also important as well as current homes. And one way that this is this has come up in my research and in a lot of the wider literature around migration and home is about homes that migrants’ build using money. So these kind of remittances are sending money back home or back to countries of origin potentially to then build, often referred to as a remittance home, so built in a country to then return to some day.
Olivia: And these are often talked about in relation to home and that they’re often left empty for a long period of time and often may never be returned to. What sometimes doesn’t come up enough is the sort of overlapping of the present and the future and the past. So it’s not that this future is something that future home or this remittance home or these desires for a home are necessarily not connected with the experience of home in the present. So whether or not the home is going to be inhabited doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s very much part of that making of home in the present..
Annabelle: We can also talk about temporalities of home and mobility over the longer chronology. So over the life course. And Megha Amrith has done a lot of work on this. So in terms of ageing and migration and how migrants relationships with them change not only just because of the passage of time, but because of significant family events and such as births, marriages, deaths and in her interviews, I think it shows that, you know, migrants who may once have planned to return to their original home or country of departure, the various things that happen along the way in life that mean that those plans may get derailed or put on hold indefinitely. And I think that really speaks to what you were saying Olivia about these different forms of waiting and how these are really carried through everyday life.
Stay Home: homes during the pandemic
Ana: I’m speaking to Annabelle Wilkins and Olivia Sheringham about the ways homes change over the life course. In next part of our discussion we focus on how the pandemic has affected our sense of home, and the Stay Home Project that Annabelle and Olivia are both working on in collaboration with the Museum of the Home.
Ana: I wanted to talk about dwelling during the pandemic and how that impacted on people’s experiences on home. You’re looking at Stay Home Stories, which is in collaboration with the University of Queen Mary and the Museum of the Home. You’re exploring how people’s sense of home has been affected by the pandemic. And I’d like to hear more about what you’re finding out how people have been negotiating the relationship with that domestic space,. Could you talk about the project?
Annabelle: Sure. So, yeah, this is a UKRI funded project, part of the rapid response to Covid-19 fund led by Professor Alison Blunt and involving quite a large team of her colleagues and the Royal Geographical Society (RSG-IB), the Museum of the Home, and the University of Liverpool, Birkbeck and Queen Mary and National Museum of Liverpool. And the aims of the project are really to document and analyse how home has been experienced and represented and imagined during and after the three UK National Lockdowns. Part of the project is to extend creative and curatorial, a museum based work that documents people’s experiences of home during the pandemic and also to understand how practices and meanings of home have changed during and after lockdown, particularly for people with histories of migration, other minoritised and marginalised groups and people of faith and also children and young people. And there’s one strand that’s looking at how this directive to stay home has been represented in both political and media coverage. And we’re also working with the Museum of the Home on their rapid response collection, which was asking people to share their experiences of home during the pandemic. And most of those submissions were during the first lockdown. So we’ve actually been doing follow up interviews with some of those contributors to find out more about how their experience of home is changed over that longer period. And then the second strand is called Practising Home, which we’re both working on. And we’re looking really at these kinds of relationships and tensions between home and mobility or immobility. So thinking about the unequal and uneven capacities of people to stay home, depending on their work, their housing, the risks of doing so for many people, and the impact of social distancing, particularly for people who are living in shared or temporary or precarious housing.
Olivia: Yeah, I think I suppose a sort of key motivation for being involved in this project is sort of challenging and really exposing these multiple stories of the home in the pandemic and this stay home directive and all the kind of normative assumptions that encompasses and lots of those normative assumptions that we’ve talked about today. As if home is a sign of safety for everyone, as if home is a refuge, as a home is this kind of house with a garden and all these kinds of things that that really can be unsettled through thinking about yeah these multiple different stories of home.. this idea of stay home clearly mean something very different when you’re living in an overcrowded room, when you’re living in a hostel or as we’ve talked about, when you’re when you’re constantly waiting.
Ana: And as part of a project that second strand Practising Home, I understand you’ll be interviewing migrants and refugees. you were just mentioning that Annabelle, what that instruction Stay home has meant for different people and how you’re also interested in looking at how that resonates with other government initiatives to encourage or force migrants to go home. I’d like to hear more about this aspect of the project and how you’re going to approach these conversations.
Annabelle: Yeah, so I’ve actually started by doing some interviews with practitioners and staff members from organisations who support refugees and people seeking asylum, people with no recourse to public funds and the ways that that kind of support has shifted. And one of the things that has come out sort of repeatedly is that when the first lockdown started, there was this sudden shock and, you know, organisations were responding as quickly as they could. But this is particularly impacting on people who are perhaps not even in the asylum system or they may have had their initial application refused. And so they rely on perhaps often informal forms of support. So they may have been, you know, sofa surfing or having some shelter with a friend or relative. But then when the lockdown started, sometimes people felt that they couldn’t keep providing that, it wasn’t safe to provide that. So they lost their temporary home in that way. Also people who had been housed in temporary accommodation, such as hotels, which were used quite a lot to house people seeking asylum and also people experiencing homelessness. And one way, of course, we can see that that was a positive thing, that they would be provided with housing. But actually, this often entailed a huge loss of autonomy and particularly for people seeking asylum. They didn’t know when they might be moved or dispersed. They were often waiting months and months longer for any decision on their case.
And I think that some of the interviews, many of the interviews with community researchers have really drawn out the challenges faced by people from different minoritised groups and migration backgrounds in terms of trying to social distance or isolate and stay home when your home is precarious or transient or just not conducive to that kind of, yeah, isolation. And I think a lot of the government guidance really overlooked how difficult that would be for people, whether or not that’s because they have to go out to work or they’re key-workers or even people who worked sort of on the so-called front line were often worried about bringing the virus home to their families. So we can’t really separate out this kind of home and yeah, wider city or wider community and the really huge challenges that people faced in different ways.
Olivia: Yeah, I think another thing that’s really come out in our research is that this assumption or this directive to stay home and all the assumptions surrounding it -how can you stay home and stay safe in these overcrowded conditions? Or if you do actually need to go to work? but also, I think it sort of overlooks the multi scalarity of home and the wider networks of care that are so important to the sense of home for so many people. So thinking about religious spaces, thinking about visiting the Red Cross once a week, which which people might do, taking part in language classes, community groups, all these things that are no longer available or that have shifted online. But then that opens up these questions of digital inequalities and, you know, uneven access to these forms of support.
Ana: It’s still early days, but I wondered if you’re thinking this research might in the future inform the policy to address precisely the kind of inequalities that you’re outlining or what t sort of impact do you envision for the project?
Annabelle: Yes, so we are developing policy toolkits and reports and based on the work that’s going on in both London and Liverpool and obviously a very different kind of urban context and regional context there, but particularly hope that it might support the work that these organisations are doing to support migrants and refugees and the kind of, yeah, perhaps recommendations or practices, best practices that we can share and what organisations have already been doing. But I think what’s really important is that we really connected with these underlying structural inequalities. And there have already been organisations bringing reports out about the importance of housing and housing inequalities and how that’s disproportionately affected and particular communities, minoritised ethnic communities and others in London and elsewhere.. And we’re also going to be doing a toolkit for religious and interfaith organisations and leaders who’ve been supporting different faith practices and also just trying to bring these experiences and testimonies to as wide an audience as possible. So we have a lot of content on our website to the Stay at Home Stories website. And we’re also producing podcasts and films kind of involving participants and community researchers throughout as much as possible. So, yeah, trying to bring that to a wider audience beyond the kind of academic papers that will be publishing.
Olivia: Yeah, I suppose Annabelle’s kind of outlined the main impact that we see, but I suppose what’s important to sort of really draw attention to how the intersections, how Covid is so deeply intertwined with these wider structures, how it relates to austerity, the hostile environment, the recent immigration acts and how we cannot see, and Brexit, and how we cannot see that it is kind of separate. So a lot of our findings in a pandemic and potentially post pandemic context or a very relevant to thinking about, yeah, the features in relation to these wider questions of marginalisation.
Home as homeland
Ana: You’re listening to That Feels Like Home, a podcast from the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. I’m Ana Baeza and in this episode we’re talking about home, city and migration. In the final part of this discussion, we move onto thinking about how ideas of home as the nation have been mobilized, and to what effects.
Ana: As we’ve said, London is a super diverse city and this might serve as a foil to a more nationalist focus. But there is still a way in which the home and the domestic are often used to mobilise, also an idea of the nation as a homeland. So there’s a wider sense in which home is implicated in the national and the transnational. How does this play out in your work and in the context that you’re looking at?
Annabelle: Yes, so this relates really closely to the other project that I’m working on at the moment, which is called MaHoMe, or Making it Home funded by NordForsk. And this is a UK-Nordic collaboration across the UK and with colleagues in Denmark and Sweden. And we’re looking at migrant homemaking and also the politics of integration, particularly through immigration policies and integration policies in those three countries and how home materialises in those policies. So one key finding that we’ve been able to apply is this idea of domopolitics or home as a metaphor and the ways in which home is used to exclude particular groups who are deemed to be a threat or to not belong or to be outsiders. And we draw quite a lot on work by Walters who coined this term domopolitics and by the national home is defined as belonging to particular groups and they are sort of seen to belong naturally and others not to belong (Walters 2004). And how immigration enforcement and kind of checks are used to filter different groups who are deemed to be desirable or undesirable and kind of boundary drawing that goes on in these policies. And one of the UK examples that I’ve analysed for this is and you may come across in 2013 and other scholars have written about this as well, but that with these vans that were driven around the UK as part of an immigration enforcement exercise where they were basically instructing undocumented migrants to go home and look at how home is kind of being portrayed as the country of origin or elsewhere for so-called illegal migrants in this context, and how it just cannot possibly be imagined that they might have built a home here in the UK.
And yet the kinds of ways in which this idea of home or settlement is reserved for particular groups who are deemed to be contributors to the economy or other kind of rhetoric around migration, I would say look at the Right to Rent policy from the Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016 and how this basically uses the idea of the rented home as a vehicle for settlement and therefore restricts it to particular groups of migrants who have the correct immigration status and how landlords are used to basically check their immigration status and whether they have the right to rent or not, and how this impacts on whether migrants can establish a long term home here. So I think that, yeah, this idea of home in the more divisive and and often, yeah, political rhetoric around home is really important to bring in. And one way that we can do this is by looking at the policies themselves.
Olivia: Yeah, I think all of this, the sort of questions of homeland and this fixation with the nation, again, as we sort of touched on today, really compels us to to think about these these questions of colonialism and the and the legacies in our contemporary cities and thinking about his relationship with home, Nadine El-Enany, another Birkbeck colleague, a legal scholar at Birkbeck (El-Enany 2020). She talks about Britain as a space of domestic colonialism. Yeah, thinking about these processes of racialisation and marginalisation, even within our kind of our post- imperial post-colonial Britain, how yeah, this kind of contemporary processes of coloniality and how they shape the domestic.
Ana: So as well as talking about belonging, we really need to think a lot about this term home as a place where you might be exiled from or where your presence is unwelcome or is not seen on equal terms where you’re treated as an outsider. So this term unbelonging, is that something that you’re using to reflect in your work?
Annabelle: So I think here it’s really important to discuss and amplify the work that is currently being done by particular diaspora heritage and migrant-led groups, particularly in London and amongst East and Southeast Asian communities. And I’ve been really inspired by the work of Moi Tran and others. He really kind of deconstructs the archive and who has access to the archives of their own migration stories and how that can tie in with this idea of belonging or not belonging. And yeah, who has who has told these stories and who has been spoken about and how people can actually be telling the stories that they want to tell in their own words. And also the “Remember and Resist” collective who are East and Southeast Asian heritage in London. And they’re really exploring the impact of borders and experiences of trafficking and racial injustice and the politics of solidarity and how that connects with other current movements around racialisation and the politics of this. And yeah, I think that I’m constantly learning from the work of these groups to sort of really question what is meant by belonging, who belongs and in what contexts. I know that’s not always something that’s easy to explore if you’re asking people about home and where they belong, that’s a very complex and, you know, sensitive question. So I think, yeah, there are many different ways that we could approach that.
Olivia: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point for Annabelle to draw upon in terms of thinking about practices of resistance and really asking us to question some of these ideas around belonging that we have again and assumptions and yeah, thinking about this idea of the government narrative to stay home, which clearly sort of jars with this hostile environment that is intent on creating for racialised communities. So saying that this isn’t their home, that people don’t belong here at the same time is telling people to stay home and stay safe.
Ana: I wanted to finish asking your question about the future, you’ve talked to diverse groups of people and communities. You’re looking at the experiences of home and how this have shifted during the pandemic so far. Where do you see the shifts, the continuities, the differences, the commonalities? It’s a complex process, as we’ve discussed, but what are you seeing from your research and what do you hope for the future?
Annabelle: I think part of what we’re doing in the Stay Home project is asking the people that we interview, what they would change either about their home in the context of the pandemic or the kind of wider aspects of social life and think it’s been, yeah, a really huge learning experience to see what individuals are thinking about their own personal futures and the idea of home, meanings of home and how they might shift. But I think also, as we’ve said throughout, drawing attention to the inequalities and uneven experiences of the pandemic and home and the need to sort of challenge the assumptions around it. And yeah, I think in terms of home in the city, one thing that’s come out is the different ways that people have engaged with their local neighbourhood and the wider city throughout lockdown and this expanded sense of home. And I think I was expecting that this would be felt as a kind of loss, perhaps a lack of the public spaces that I had once and have been enjoying. But I think, people have often discovered new places, you know, depending on where they live in the city and how long they lived there. But, yes, I think we can think about the possibilities for widening our understandings of home and an outdoor space. But again, looking at the inequalities of access to this, you know, not everybody had access to outdoor space or green space. So thinking about the future city and yeah possibilities for what we want this to look like and who is welcome within this.
Olivia: Yeah, I think one of the key focuses of this project and also a sense of sort of wider research in relation to migration, home and and the wider geographies of that, I think it’s for me it’s about thinking about alternative narratives, that challenge these these deeply unequal and uneven and top-down ways of positioning and marginalising people in relation to home. And I think it’s foregrounding and exposing the injustices, but also drawing attention to alternatives and possibilities for resistance and resisting these injustices and in terms of hopes for the future, I guess the hope is, is through doing this, through exposing and drawing attention to these alternatives, to thinking about more or just and equal futures Really drawing attention to a much more broad and intersectional ideas of home that can expose some of these possibilities.
Ana: Thank you so much, Annabelle and Olivia, for this really thought provoking, interesting conversation that has expanded, I think certainly my own and I’m sure also listeners understandings of home. So it’s been a pleasure to have you with us.
Olivia: I just wanted to finish with a quote from Arundhati Roy, where she talks about “What lies ahead? Reimagining the world. Only that” (Roy 2020). Only that and I think that’s quite an important quote for us to think about how this is this is what we need to do, we need to reimagine the world as a better one and a more just one.
Ana: I think that’s a great note to end on, thank you.
Olivia: Thank you so much, Ana. It’s been really great to talk to you today and thank you for inviting us to be part of this podcast.
Annabelle: Thank you, Ana it’s been a fantastic discussion it’s been really expanded my own ideas about what we’re looking at in these projects. So I’m, really grateful and look forward to the feedback from the listeners as well. Thank you again.
Ana: Thank you for listening, and especially a huge thanks to my guests for this episode, Annabelle Wilkins and Olivia Sheringham for joining us to talk about home as mobile experience, as something relational and changing. In the rest of the series we’ll continue to reassess traditional ideas of home and venture into other, more critical readings of this space.
I’m Ana Baeza and this podcast is brought to you by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. We’ll be back again soon, stay tuned.
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Further Reading
Amrith, M., 2021. The linear imagination, stalled: changing temporal horizons in migrant journeys. Global Networks, 21(1), pp.127-145.
Blunt, A., Ebbensgaard, C.L. and Sheringham, O., 2021. The “living of time”: Entangled temporalities of home and the city. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 46(1), pp.149-162.
Blunt, A. and Sheringham, O., 2019. Home-city geographies: Urban dwelling and mobility. Progress in human geography, 43(5), pp.815-834.
Christou, A. and King, R., 2015. Counter-diaspora: the Greek second generation returns’ home’ (No. 6). Harvard University Press.
Christou, A., 2011. Narrating lives in (e)motion: Embodiment, belongingness and displacement in diasporic spaces of home and return. Emotion, Space and Society, 4(4), pp.249-257.
Darling, J., 2014. Another letter from the Home Office: reading the material politics of asylum. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(3), pp.484-500.
El-Enany, N., 2020. (B) ordering Britain: law, race and empire. Manchester University Press.
Fathi, M., 2020. Displaced Home-Objects in Homing Experiences. In The Handbook of Displacement (pp. 613-628). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Fortier A-M. ‘Coming home’: Queer migrations and multiple evocations of home. European Journal of Cultural Studies. 2001;4(4):405-424. doi:10.1177/136754940100400403
Johnson, A., 2017. Getting comfortable to feel at home: clothing practices of black muslim women in Britain. Gender, Place & Culture, 24(2), pp.274-287.
Kelley, Carol E. Accidental Immigrants and the Search for Home Women, Cultural Identity, and Community / Carol E. Kelley. 2013.
Roy. A., 2020. Azadi. Penguin.
Sheringham, O., 2010. A transnational space? Transnational Practices, place-based identity and the making of’Home’among Brazilians in Gort, Ireland. Portuguese Studies, pp.60-78.
Tolia-Kelly, D.P., 2018. Interrogating embodied precarity in an era of forced displacement. Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies.
Tolia-Kelly, D. 2004a. Materializing post-colonial geographies: Examining the textural landscapes of migration in the South Asian home. Geoforum, 35(6), 675–688.
Tolia-Kelly, D. 2004b. Locating processes of identification: Studying the precipitates of re-memory through artefacts in the British Asian home. Transactions, 29(3), 314–329.
Tolia-Kelly, D. 2006. Mobility/stability: British Asian cultures of ‘landscape and Englishness’. Environment and Planning A, 38(2), 341–358.
Walters, W., 2004. Secure borders, safe haven, domopolitics. Citizenship studies, 8(3), pp.237-260.
Wilkins, A., 2017. Gender, migration and intimate geopolitics: shifting senses of home among women on the Myanmar-Thailand border. Gender, place and culture : a journal of feminist geography, 24(11), pp.1549–1568.
Wilkins, A., 2018. Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives. By Paolo Boccagni. Migration studies, 6(3), pp.470–472.
Links:
https://www.stayhomestories.co.uk/
Credits
Produced by Ana Baeza Ruiz, with guests Annabelle Wilkins and Olivia Sheringham
Editing by Zoë Hendon, Ana Baeza Ruiz and Paul Ford Sound
Transcription by Mia Kordova
Music Credits
Say It Again, I’m Listening by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License
Let that Sink In by Lee Rosevere is licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)
Would You Change the World by Min-Y-Llan is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
Phase 5 by Xylo-Ziko is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.