Paolo Boccagni will give a presentation at the UNSW City Analytics Lab, Sydney, next 30 June. The seminar is part of the CFRC Seminar Series and is accessible online. More details below.

House, home, both, neither: on the reach, boundaries and dilemmas of “home” in an asylum centre

Home and homemaking are recurrent questions in the international scholarship on forced migration. Little of this, however, has been situated in the lived experience of refugee housing, as approached “from within”. With this premise, my lecture revisits a four-year ethnographic study of an asylum reception centre in Northern Italy, through the analytic of the housing-homing interplay. Within a housing context that is typically provisional and remote from the normative register of home, fine-grained ethnography of asylum seekers’ daily routines reveals meaningful and contentious forms of homemaking, in terms of space appropriation and (to a lesser extent) attachment. This is particularly salient within the residents’ bedrooms – a semi-domestic space to which I gained access over time, as “guest of the guests”. What home means and entails, under legal, temporal and biographical suspension, can then be appreciated less at an abstract and principled level, than through a range of everyday practices. These have to do with boundary-making within and between groups, as well as with mundane rituals, material cultures, care and all attempts to appropriate an apparently empty and “idle” timespace. This ethnographic understanding has important implications for the debate on the meanings, functions and dilemmas of home among forced migrants, as well as for the complex and ambiguous relation between housing and homemaking – more fundamentally, between house and home.