‘HOUSING AND HOME’ (E. FRAVEGA & P. BOCCAGNI, ‘RESEARCH HANDBOOK ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF MIGRATION’, 2024)

Enrico Fravega and Paolo Boccagni have recently published a chapter on Housing and Home in the new Research Handbook on the Sociology of Migration, edited by G. Sciortino, M. Cvajner and P. Kivisto (Edward Elgar, 2024). The chapter draws a conceptual map of the linkages between home and housing for international migrants. Based mainly on the study of migration in the European context, and focusing on the experience of low-skilled migrants and refugees, Fravega and Boccagni discuss the multiple entanglements between research on the politics and functions of housing, and scholarship on the emotional, relational and practical dimensions of home-making. This leads to problematizing any binary approach that is predicated on an essential separation between house and home – the material and situated arrangements and infrastructures of housing, as opposed to the ways of space attachment and appropriation that substantiate the idea of home. Following this premise, the authors argue for a dedicated research agenda on migrant housing and homing pathways. This is meant to highlight the cumulative forms of migrant social exclusion in Europe, but also to facilitate an original understanding of the influence of the “house/home” interplay on migrant everyday life conditions, and on their ways of making sense of them across space and time.