There are a few of my papers I would not be too bored or disappointed in reading again. The list, in chronological order, might go as follows:

12. Homing: a category for research on space appropriation and ‘home-oriented’ mobilities, Mobilities, 17(4): 585-601, 2022. Sketches out the theoretical side of what I have been trying to do with “homing” thus far. Makes a case for how, and why, it is worth researching further into “home-oriented mobilities” as a matter of social becoming rather than being, or coming.

11. “You’re Always in Transit, but the House Stays”: Remitting, restoring and remaking home in a migrant family house in Cuenca, Ecuador, Housing, Theory and Society, 39(5): 611-629, 2022 (with S. Yapo). One housing story in Andean Ecuador, at the intersection between research on remittances, housing, migration, development, material culture and transnational family life. Draws on extended rapport with the members of an Ecuadorian family spread between locations and generations.

10. Home in question: Uncovering meanings, desires and dilemmas of non-home. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 25(2): 515-531, 2022 (with A. Miranda-Nieto). Adds to the emerging scholarship in home studies, arguing that the lack of a place to call home is not always and only a matter of deprivation, marginalization, or downright displacement. It may also articulate an active choice not to accept a certain dwelling predicament as home. Builds on conversation between domestic ethnographies in migrant shared housing and in asylum seekers’ temporary accommodations. 

9. Fixed places, shifting distances: Remittance houses and migrants’ negotiation of home in Ecuador. Migration Studies, 9(1): 47-64, 2021 (with L.E. Pérez-Murcia). Sums up, in a comparative guise, my research experience on migrant housing investments in Ecuador – the field of relationships these rely upon, the symbolic and economic capital they embody, the ultimate tension between the sedentariness of dwelling and the ongoing mobility and hard work that are necessary to maintain dream houses, and the housing dream.

8. At home in the gurdwara? Religious space and the resonance with domesticity in a London suburb, Religion, 51(3): 423-442, 2021 (with B. Bertolani & S. Bonfanti). Based on extended and collaborative fieldwork in a London district with a historical record of Indian labour migration, investigates the multiple ways in which houses of worship are also (functional equivalents of) home(s), in multiple respects: as places of ingroup conviviality and mutual support, identification and control, by contrast with the larger society; as thresholded inner spaces that afford religious people an intimate and meaningful experience, as if in public homes, away from home. Advances the grounds for conversation and mutual enrichment between migration, religious and home studies.

7. Ambivalence and the social processes of immigrant inclusion. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 60(1-2): 3-13, 2019 (with P. Kivisto). Elaborates on the notion of sociological ambivalence and illustrates its promise to cast light on migrant lives, in relation both the countries/communities of origin and to the ones of settlement. Paves the way for further research on the meanings and implications of ambivalence as both an intimate emotion and a pervasive, if unequally distributed condition across migrant categories and life settings.

6. At home in home care? Contents and boundaries of the ‘domestic’ among immigrant live-in workers in Italy, Housing Studies, 33(5): 813-31, 2018. Based on an in-depth archive of life stories of migrant domestic workers, unpacks the tension between not being at home and making the place homely that is typical of live-in care work. Contributes to the expanding scholarship on care, home and domesticity, especially in relation to older adults and dependent people. Unpacks the meanings of home, and care, in a form of domestic life that is as segregated, as precarious and fraught with ambiguities. 

5. Searching for well-being in care work migration: Constructions, practices and displacements among immigrant women in Italy. Social Politics, 23(2): 284-306, 2016. Building on original interviews with migrant female care workers, explores their subjective constructions of wellbeing. Reveals how it is systematically displaced and procrastinated to the benefit of others. Discusses the consequences of this externalization of wellbeing in terms of gendered inequalities and social injustice.

4. From the multi-sited to the in-between: Ethnography as a way of delving into migrants’ transnational relationships. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 19(1): 1-16, 2016. Revisits my ethnographic PhD materials, arguing for the centrality of in-betweenness, rather than multi-sitedness, to the ways of doing ethnography with transnational migrants. Focuses on crossborder circulation of information, objects and emotions, starting from their traces and aftermath in everyday life on either side.

3. Burden, blessing or both? On the mixed role of transnational ties in migrant informal social support. International Sociology, 30(3), 250-268, 2015. Contributes to the emerging scholarship on reverse remittances by unpacking the instrumental, affective and moral ways in which so-called non-migrants “give back” to Ecuadorian women working in Italy. The tension inherent in their distant relationships, the scope for remittances in mediating it, and the ultimate reference to the country of origin as a source of future embeddedness are also critically discussed.

2. Practising motherhood at a distance: Retention and loss in Ecuadorian transnational families. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38(2): 261-277, 2012. From my PhD fieldwork, on the mixed emotional experience of transnational parenting in a large-scale migration corridor. Based on ethnography of intergenerational and gender(ed) transnational relations between Southern Ecuador and Northern Italy.

1. Reminiscences, patriotism, participation: approaching external voting in Ecuadorian immigration to Italy. International Migration, 49(3): 76-98, 2011. First paper I published on political transnationalism as a field of claims-making, distant nationalism, ritual celebration and nostalgic consumption. Draws on (one of?) the first empirical mixed-method studies on migrant external voting in Italy.