Migration and Home

This open access short reader offers an intersectional perspective on the meaning of home in migration. The book provides a pathway through existing scholarship on home and migration, exploring how intersectional power relations and transnational migration regimes are felt, experienced, lived and navigated by migrants, who are differently positioned, in the making and imagining of home. The meanings associated with home are composed of the interrelation of places, spaces, people, social relations, materialities, emotions and temporalities. These multiple aspects highlight the complexities inherent in the idea of home, which come to the fore particularly when one moves location. Migration and Home explores these issues by focusing on specific key aspects of home in migration: home and gender; home and age; home and materiality; and home and migration status, class and race. It proposes the concept of structural im/possibilities as a framework for understanding the power relations and structures that shape where, when and for whom home in migration is more, or less, possible.

Dr Mastoureh Fathi is Lecturer in Sociology at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland. Her research revolves around everyday experiences of migration within intersectional framework, identity, home-making and belonging in diaspora and the importance of objects in displacement. Her monograph “Intersectionality, Class and Migration: Narratives of Iranian Women Migrants in the U.K.” was published in 2017. Dr Caitríona Ní Laoire is Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Studies at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland and is Cluster Leader of the interdisciplinary Migration & Integration Research Cluster of the Institute for Social Sciences in the 21st Century at UCC. Her research interests coalesce around the themes of migration/diaspora, return mobilities, childhood/youth, intergenerational relations, gender, rurality and the use of qualitative research methods such as life-narrative and children-centred methods.