Paolo Boccagni will give an invited lecture at the University of Fulda, next May 20 at 4.30 pm, as a part of the “Researching Community” series of the DFG-funded research impulse ‘Shaping Future Society‘ (SaFe). Paolo’s lecture will be on Homing Revisited – Approaching Ordinary Struggles and Emerging Dilemmas of Future-Oriented Mobilities.

Homing, revisited: approaching ordinary struggles and emerging dilemmas of future-oriented mobilities In this lecture I take stock of the recent debate on homing, based on an understanding of home as a temporally shaped, open-ended social process, most visibly among people and groups with a background of frequent mobility, forced displacement, or transnational migration. Generally speaking, the notion of homing stands for a focused movement toward a specific target or, in zoology, for a return trajectory to an original point from a large  distance. As a sociological category, instead, homing is meant to elucidate mobilities that are more diverse, fragmented, contended (for many attempts at homing are in a dialectical reaction with unhoming pressures), and oriented to the construction of future homes, even while being driven by the normative weight of the past ones. This perspective expands the ordinary scope for research on place-making and homemaking in several regards. Three of them are especially worthy of discussion, here: i.) In ethnographic research, the normative influence of the ideal future home (itself changing over time) on everyday practices, which reveals attempts at future-making even in circumstances of utter precarity or marginalization; ii.) In biographical research, the conceptual contribution of homing to elucidating how people (as storytellers) make sense of their housing and living pathways, and reconnect different housing/household arrangements in the moral and cultural economy of what home means to them; iii.) In a yet larger, existential perspective, and again most critically for migrants, the significance of lifelong and even posthumous mobilities as incessant struggles to make home – and hopefully reach it in the afterlife, if not before. In all these empirical domains, questions of home and homing are also instrumental to interrogate people’s perceived and desirable futures, given their highly unequal scope and opportunities to get closer to them (that is, to their ultimate homes). Throughout, the argument draws on my relevant publications, on the emerging scholarship across mobility, housing, time and even death studies, and on serendipitous insights from my recent fieldwork, primarily in the frame of ERC HOMInG (2016-22).