Making home through memories and ritualized social practices

This chapter offers an account of a critical and comparative overview of bodies of international literatures on mobilities, materialities, memories and homecomings. The core theme of the chapter focuses on exploring how migrants make home through memories and ritualised social spaces. These elements are addressed through empirical insights into key interdisciplinary debates that tackle the relationships of memories and rituals with how a sense of home and homing for migrants is shaped by gendered belonging. The discussion explores firstly the interplay between materialities and memories through which we conceptualise home, homing and their emotional context; secondly, the gendered understanding of this relationship between memory and materiality gives coherence to how migrant belonging is constructed through experiences, which leads to the third set of insights on how migrant memories are a conduit to understanding migrant ritualisation as a set of social practices that further shape belonging. Finally, the chapter points to avenues for future research from a multi-dimensional perspective, including the global pandemic.

This is a draft chapter/article. The final version is available in Handbook on Home and Migration edited by Paolo Boccagni, published in 2023, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, ISBN 9781800882768

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