Home and the politics of location and displacement

Abstract

In this chapter I engage with the notion of home in relation to displacement with a specific focus on refugees' positioning, although some of my arguments also have broader implications for migrants in general. The chapter starts from a critique of the "sedentarist bias" that may seem outdated, but I argue for its remaining validity, albeit in a changing context. Then I discuss using a rhizomatic approach to home by adapting nomadology as a lens. I show that this approach to home is not about over-celebration of free-floating mobile cosmopolitans. It is rather about prioritizing migrants' embodied histories and memories not as passive victims of marginalization (even when they face forceful acts of exclusion) but as a group that makes the inherent contradictions and failure of global structural injustice visible. I use personal, relational and community-based narratives to show multiple possibilities in which home is experienced, constructed and contested through intersections with mobility and connections to a variety of locations, places and spaces.