Ethnographies of Home and Mobility

Feeling at home across time and place: A study of Ecuadorians in three European cities

“…The interviews were conducted in Spanish. The choice of the questions and of the precise words to articulate them was driven not only by the existing literature but also by the findings of HOMInG's previous fieldwork with Ecuadorian immigrants in the three cities (Miranda‐Nieto et al, 2020; Miranda‐Nieto & Boccagni, 2020; Pérez‐Murcia & Boccagni, 2021). Moreover, the clarity of each question was subject to a pilot test and was discussed with all the interviewers in dedicated training sessions, prior to data collection.…”

“…We use the concept of time, here, in reference to the length of residence of an immigrant in a given location. There is a broad agreement in the literature on the importance of the time spent in a place, for someone to attach a sense of home to it (Lawrence, 1987; Miranda‐Nieto, Massa, & Bonfanti, 2020; Werner, Altman, & Oxley, 1985). Most notably, newcomers, as maintained under the broad theoretical rubric of assimilation (Alba & Nee, 2003), tend to forge new friendships, families and other closed connections as their length of stay increases (Alba, Beck, & Basaran Sahin, 2018).…”

Homemaking in the public. On the scales and stakes of framing, feeling, and claiming extra‐domestic space as “home”

“…For international migrants, feeling at home in a public space—if only for a while—may be related to the sense of “controlling” it, or of expressing their habitual lifestyles with some degree of freedom from the external gaze and control; or possibly to participate in shared activities (regarding leisure, religion, etc.) which either connect them with the past home experience, or bridge across the boundaries with majority groups (Boccagni et al., 2020b; Miranda‐Nieto et al., 2020; Wagner & Peters, 2014). Feeling at home in some parts of the public space may ultimately mean feeling “normal” —that is, not perceived as out‐of‐place—inside them (Damery, 2020).…”

For a comparative sociology of home: Relationships, cultures, structures

“…While getting access to the privacy of domestic environments raises practical, legal and ethical constraints for researchers, pioneering scholarly efforts have been made to reconstruct home experiences from within, via home tours, visual ethnographies, participatory or mobile methods, and so forth (Boccagni et al, 2020). Likewise, the interfaces between domestic and semi-public or public facets of home experiences, and between material and immaterial aspects, have been investigated in several national and local contexts, as well as comparatively between them on occasion (Kusenbach and Paulsen, 2013; Miranda et al, 2020).…”

“…Still another important question involves comparative research, that is, the multisited study of social experiences of home across spatial and temporal coordinates, between different groups, and indeed, between different case studies of home. As, again, research on migrant homemaking has revealed (Miranda et al, 2020), inter-group comparison should not only transcend the most obvious or politically salient divides, such as natives versus immigrants, or long-term residents versus newcomers. A variety of other variables and sets of practices are equally significant for inter-group comparison.…”