Shining a light on previously ‘invisible’ immigrant communities, this book explores how attention to feelings of home and cultural practices provides insights into immigrants’ settlement experiences.

Shining a light on previously ‘invisible’ immigrant communities, this book explores how attention to feelings of home and cultural practices provides insights into immigrants’ settlement experiences.

This dynamic Handbook unpacks the entanglements between the two notions of home and migration, which illuminate the lived experiences of (in)voluntary mobilities and the contested terrain of inclusion and belonging. Drawing on cross-disciplinary contributions from leading international scholars, it advances research on the social study of home in relation to migration, refugee, displacement, and diaspora studies. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

With a focus on the object and where it is situated, in time (memory) and space (mobility), Memory, Mobility, and Material Culture embodies a multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approach. The chapters track the movement of the objects and their owner(s), within and between continents, countries, cities, and families. Objects have always been considered with an eye to their worth – economic, aesthetic, and/or functional. If that worth is diminished, their meaning and value disappear, they are just things. Yet things can still fulfil functions in our daily lives; they hold symbolic potential, from personal memory triggers, to focal points of public ritual and religion; from collectors’ obsession, to symbols of loss, displacement, and violence. By bringing into dialogue the work of specialists in ethnology, art history, architecture, and design; literature, languages, cultures, and heritage studies, this volume considers how displaced memory – the memory of refugees, migrants, and their descendants; of those who have moved from the countryside to the city; of those who have faced personal upheaval and profound social change; those who have been forced into exile or experienced major personal or collective loss – can become embodied in material culture. This book is important reading to those interested in cultural and social history and cultural studies.

Rather than emphasising boundaries and territories by examining the ‘integration’ and ‘acculturation’ of the immigrant or the refugee, this book offers insights into the ideas and practices of individuals settling into new societies and cultures. It analyses their ideas of connecting and belonging; their accounts of the past, the present and the future; the interaction and networks of relations; practical strategies; and the different meanings of ‘home’ and belonging that are constructed in new sociocultural settings. The author uses empirical research to explore the experiences of refugees from the successor states of Yugoslavia, who are struggling to make a home for themselves in Amsterdam and Rome. By explaining how real people navigate through the difficulties of their displacement as well as the numerous scenarios and barriers to their emplacement, the author sheds new light on our understanding of what it is like to be a refugee.

This book explores the impact of transnational migration on the views, feelings, and practices of home among migrants. Home is usually perceived as what placidly lies in the background of everyday life, yet migrants’ experience tells a different story: what happens to the notion of home, once migrants move far away from their “natural” bases and search for new ones, often under marginalized living conditions? The author analyzes in how far migrants’ sense of home relies on a dwelling place, intimate relationships, memories of the past, and aspirations for the future–and what difference these factors make in practice. Analyzing their claims, conflicts, and dilemmas, this book showcases how in the migrants’ case, the sense of home turns from an apparently intimate and domestic concern into a major public question.

This book is the first compilation of the experiences of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Australia. It explores the theme of home—from what is left behind to what is brought or (re)created in a new space—and all the complex processes that ensue as a result of leaving a land defined by conflict. The context of the book is unique since it focuses on the ten-year period since the Sri Lankan civil war ended in 2009. Although the war has officially come to an end, conflict continues in diverse and insidious forms, which we present from the point of view of those who have left Sri Lanka. The multidisciplinary nature of the book means that various aspects of Sri Lankan Tamil experiences are documented including trauma, violence, resettlement, political action, cultural and religious heritage, and intergenerational transmission. This book draws on qualitative methods from the fields of history, geography, sociology, sociolinguistics, psychology and psychiatry. Methodological enquiries range from oral histories and in-depth interviews to ethnography and self-reflexive accounts. To complement these academic chapters, creative contributions by prominent Sri Lankan artists in Australia seek to provide personalised and alternative interpretations on the theme of home. These include works from playwrights, novelists and community arts practitioners who also identify as human rights activists.