Paolo Boccagni will give a lecture at Radboud University, Geography, Spatial Planning and Environment Department, next 13 February at 12.15pm. The lecture is on Navigating categories of home: on the scales and reaches of a place that matters for migrants and refugees. See the abstract below.

How can the burgeoning repertoire of ‘home studies’ elucidate the lived experience of migration and displacement, and how is it mediated through the views, emotions and practices of (im)mobile people themselves? Drawing on my past collaborative and individual fieldwork, this lecture aims to advance elaboration on the scales and stakes of home as a category of analysis, and practice; one that may take up contrasting meanings and functions, in etic and emic respects; as a generally ‘unmarked’, but occasionally all-too-marked, term. In an ethnographic framework that foregrounds everyday life from the margins, against the background of biographical (including housing) pathways and conditions, there is a promise to explore how participants think of home, negotiate it through the senses, (un)make it through their ordinary practices. This can feed into meaningful and fine-grained narratives, if not without tensions, of untold and invisibilised lives. It is also instrumental to disclose the unequally distributed scope for appropriation and attachment over space, on a micro-macro continuum of scales, while revealing migrants’ evolving relationships with their life settings of reference: the places of origin and of the past, those of current dwelling (if any), those envisioned in the future ahead, as long as present life conditions afford to envision them. Migrant ways of scaling the place that matters for them, and its actual reach, are epistemic windows into their social position and perceived social conditions. They are also practical and politically meaningful avenues to facilitate recognition of their deeper moral and existential concerns, whatever the scope to make them “real”. In sum, the unequal extensibility and transferability of home across scales is a critical asset for different people to negotiate their ways of being after (in)voluntary migration and (forced) displacement.