Home in hardship : Exploring how United Nations professionals negotiate constructions of home in and between hardship settings

Abstract

There is a general recognition within the social sciences that extensive mobility challenges how we perceive the notion of home. With this idea as its starting point, this article explores how situations of hardship impact the ways in which mobile professionals negotiate and construct their homes. The actor-network theory (ANT) has been used as the means to explore the interactions between the people who inform this study and the multidimensional characteristics of the hardship setting. Through individual, open-ended interviews, the research draws upon the experiences of five international civil servants from the United Nations (UN) system of organizations who are assigned to hardship duty stations. Applying ANT to the empirical material drew the attention to the identification of five principal entities (or actors) that come into play in the negotiation of home construction, namely the civil servant, [in]security, mobility, ownership and social relations. The influence of the various nonhuman actors on home construction varied according to the individual and their transnational ties and professional status – those with family nuclei tended to situate their homes in terms of territoriality, whereas for others, factors such as privacy, materiality and social interaction weighed more heavily in the act of creating home.