Paolo Boccagni will participate in IMISCOE’s Annual conference next week at ICM – Aubervilliers – Paris. Within a session on “Death, dying and memorialisation”, convened by A. Hunter (University of Glasgow) on July 2 (10-50-12-20), Paolo will give a presentation on Homing on death through migration studies: A conceptual inquiry and its implications. See the abstract below.

Homing on death through migration studies: A conceptual inquiry and its implications Paolo Boccagni (University of Trento) This presentation explores the intersection between home and death studies, against a background of international migration. It aims to unveil the multiple analogies, resonances and functional equivalences between house/home and the last resting place, on one hand; and to revisit posthumous mobilities (and even previous life trajectories) as instantiations of homing, on the other hand. While my argument is primarily theoretical, it draws on empirical examples in migration, diaspora and refugee studies, and has significant implications for research and practice in the field. 

As a few scholars have illustrated in the last decades, migrants may have strong reasons to be buried in the country of origin, as home, and even to construct their burial place as home – that is, as the proper site to rest, be grieved by one’s own and reconnect with kin, ancestors and the ancestral land. This opens up a research avenue over the meanings home takes, here, in relation to other ways of understanding and emplacing it. If the burial place is home, wherever located, the very act of body disposal (whether via inhumation or cremation) has to do with homecoming, if the last site (including for ashes retention or dispersal) overlaps with the country of origin; or with homemaking, if a new location is found elsewhere, to be made “home-like” by the grieving and commemoration practices of those who will take care of it (whether these resonate or not with the mainstream ones). Furthermore, the symbolic and material economies of housing may cast light on burial or cremation practices, whenever a particular burial lot is purchased, appropriated or decorated in ways reminiscent of the dead’s background, and possibly of their “migrant houses”. As intriguingly, we can approach the literal mobility to a burial location and the symbolic/imagined mobilities that follow suit (according to many religious traditions) as instantiations of homing – the desired mobility, in death if not in life, toward a way of being and dwelling that eventually meets a culturally given ideal of home. Across these analytical levels, my paper aims to advance the state of the art in the large, but still fragmented research field of death in migration.