Chapter 1: Introduction: home and migration - setting the terms of belonging and place-making on the move
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What does home mean and entail for international migrants, and what is the promise of the home-and-migration interplay, as an interdisciplinary and multi-sited research field? The notions of home and migration are in a productive analytical and existential tension, whatever our understanding of home (homing) and the ways to connect it with house (housing), as a burgeoning scholarship suggests. This calls for a critical overview of the literature on home and homemaking after displacement and migration, as a large, diverse, unequal and politically contentious field. Following a discussion on seven key insights from a recent project on the same topic, ERC HOMInG, I present the contents of the handbook. Its seven parts are dedicated, respectively, to theoretical backgrounds, emerging questions, lived experiences, scales and materialities, differences and inequalities, methods, and non-Western research and approaches. Home matters for people on the move in ways that have elicited critical attention across social sciences and humanities, and call for a specific systematization.

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