No Obvious Home: the Public’s Dialogical Creation of Home During the Third Wave of Decolonization

Abstract

The global crises we currently face, ecological, refugee-related and dealing with austerity arising out of the Covid-19 pandemic share a common feature. Together they have the capacity to call into question shared understandings of what constitutes the physical, political and psychological boundaries of home. Consensual understanding (social representations) of home, if unexamined, risks retaining primordial, stable, bounded and historically continuous dimensions. The focus of this article, to this end, is the public's understanding of home. The "un-homing" techniques used by populist leaders are brought into dialogue with how citizens, as dialogical selves, talk about home. The contours of common-sense on belonging are being informed; it is proposed by a third wave of decolonization. Stimulus-led interviews (N = 76) were conducted in England, Germany, Ireland, Scotland and Sweden. Dialogical analysis shows the public use two social representations relating to (i) freedom of movement and (ii) how the world is organized. These social representations decolonize home beyond national/transnational boundaries towards the transglobal. Citizens, irrespective of degree of migration, navigate future (in) securities using intergenerational dialogue. This serves to anchor transglobal migration-mobility to intergenerational continuity and the possibilities of travelling together through life. Public dialogue, when diffracted into a spectrum of positions on home, has the capacity to counter black/white, us/them, xenophobic protectionism within nationalist populism. In conclusion, scientific studies which reveal the depths of public capacity may become centrally important to post-pandemic recovery.

No borders on a fragile planet: Introducing four lay models of social psychological precarity to support global human identification and citizenship

“…This finding suggests the value of measuring migration-mobility along the MMC (Mahendran, 2013(Mahendran, , 2017Mahendran et al, 2021a). Of interest to future studies is the expression of an ideal of a no-border position, which occurred when participants chose to control borders, which perhaps indicates an alternative social representation of a cooperative world.…”

“…In the sense that rather than explore autobiographical sense-making, participants are brought into direct dialogue with stimulus materials such as factual questions and political speeches on international relations. We work with Bakhtin's concept of the dialogical self and social representations (Mahendran et al, 2021a(Mahendran et al, , 2021b to understand participants as co-authors in key political processes, in this case border controls. Participants take up an I-citizen position, this I-citizen position (Mahendran et al, 2015), arises out an Arendtian notion of 'enlarged mentality' (Arendt, 1961) combined with Dewey's theorizing on public capacity.…”

“…This opened with the sentence-completion questions 'the world is…', 'I am a part of…' and 'I vote/do not vote because…' participants then answered questions on citizenship including the question 'Do you consider yourself a citizen of the European Union'. Participants then answered six questions which enabled them to be positioned on the MMC (Mahendran, 2013(Mahendran, , 2017Mahendran et al, 2021a).…”

“…Both components were conducted in English, transcribed and built into a database using NVivo 12. The analysis moved iteratively between five steps, with the first three authors analysing alone then meeting to engage in co-analysis (Mahendran et al, 2021a(Mahendran et al, , 2021bNieland et al, 2022). The fourth author then reviewed this analysis in the drafting phase.…”

Arenas of Crisis

“…Mahendran et al ( 2021 ) discuss how ideas of “home” have been dialogically constructed during the pandemic. Based on interviews conducted in England, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, and Sweden, the authors discuss negotiations of home beyond the common boundaries of space.…”