Notions Of Home Research Articles

Strengthened by struggle: Homeland attachment in the Karen diaspora after the 2021 Myanmar coup

This study delves into the heightened dynamics of homeland attachment within the Karen diaspora following the 2021 Myanmar military coup. It examines how this critical event has catalyzed a stronger sense of belonging and identity among the displaced Karen people across global diasporic communities. Drawing on qualitative data, this research highlights the intensified connection to their homeland that the Karen diaspora maintains, despite geographical separation and the transformative impact of resettlement. The concept of “homeland” for the Karen goes beyond physical borders, encompassing the shared experiences and narratives fostered within refugee camps and passed down through generations. This paper discusses how post-coup displacement has reshaped identity and how notions of home are re-envisioned within the diaspora’s collective memory and cultural practices. It demonstrates that homeland attachment is a complex mosaic of collective memories, cultural practices and a persistent sense of belonging that transcends boundaries. By exploring the transnational identities of the Karen diaspora post-coup, this work provides insights into the mechanisms by which displaced communities maintain their cultural uniqueness and affirm their belonging in a globalized world. The findings present a nuanced view of the dual challenges of assimilation and cultural retention, offering a deeper understanding of the strategies the Karen diaspora employs to preserve their identity in the face of these forces.

‘Home is just a feeling’: Essentialist and anti-essentialist views on home among Ukrainian war refugees

The notion of home, understood as a distinct and meaningful place is frequently explored in migration studies. It emerges as an especially significant point of reference, though it is often marked by ambiguity and ambivalence, especially in the narratives of war refugees. This article examines how Ukrainian refugees in Poland define and experience home, exploring the evolving meanings of home in the context of displacement and resettlement. We conducted semi-structured interviews with thirteen refugees and forced migrants who left Ukraine after Russia's full-scale invasion on February 24th, 2022. Using a theoretical framework of essentialist and constructivist (anti-essentialist) notions of place, we identified three major themes in the way refugees perceive home. The first theme highlights attachment to home, where refugees express feelings of security, stability, and rootedness. The second reveals a profound sense of ‘non-home’, where home is lost or unattainable. The third theme explores how refugees attempt to reconcile a fixed sense of home with their experiences of mobility, reshaping home through multiple, meaningful sites. By integrating these theoretical perspectives this study offers a nuanced understanding of how displacement and migration reshape the concept of home for refugees.

Lonely Times, Lonely Places: Christopher Isherwood’s Chronotopography of Loneliness

This article outlines the connections between the phenomenon of loneliness and the categories of time and space in Christopher Isherwood’s writing. Characteristically autobiographical, it reflects the author’s quest for self, including the geography of his wanderings around Europe and emigration as well as the complexities of the historical context of his life. The study starts with a discussion of loneliness as an existential issue and goes on to explore its temporal and spatial manifestations at the various levels of national, gender, and age identity, including the experience of being a foreigner in an alien sociocultural space and psychological immaturity as a specific temporal modality of emotional estrangement. The article then investigates how Isherwood uses time and space to construct narratives of historical change, in which the pre-war anxiety and the post-war consumerism are revealed through the city/nature juxtaposition. The social dimension of loneliness is analysed in terms of the Foucauldian concepts of heterotopia and heterochrony. Gay bars, hospitals, and universities alike constitute spaces of contained otherness, where time is experienced differently, reinforcing either the sense of community or social alienation. Finally, the article looks at the notion of home, which functions as a chronotope and the point of conceptual and structural organisation for the circadian novel.

The matter of home: repurposed churches, heritage and belonging in Amsterdam

ABSTRACT In this paper I look at the widespread, and often much debated, abandonment and reuse of church buildings in the Netherlands. I focus on the striking case of the Roman Catholic Chassé Church that, after years of being left abandoned, was converted into the Chassé Dance Studios and Hotel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the site, I show that the transformation process of the Chassé Church took place within a field of contestation in which different groups involved, articulated distinct modes of understanding the site and attributing it with value. I argue that these registers of valuation all centre in important ways on notions of home. Consequentially, while the repurposing of the church building represents the loss of a home for some, it has been co-opted as an instrument of home-building by others. For the latter, the site has played an important role in their quests for local belonging, feeling at home in the neighbourhood and, to some extent, delineating a national culture. By tracing such emotions of not only attachment and belonging, but also loss and nostalgia, this paper calls attention to the everyday affective dimension of processes of religious heritage making.

Imagining home: Mahtab Hussain’s photography of diaspora and belonging

This paper responds to the works of photographers dealing with questions of diaspora, home, and belonging in the context of South Asia. I offer a close reading of the works and practices of Mahtab Hussain, a British-Kashmiri artist, by placing his photographs and practices in conversation with the work of scholars in the field of diaspora studies and educational research. Hussain’s photographic work offers a curriculum: a rewriting, a creation, an imagination, and a retelling of the story of the Azad Kashmiri diaspora and it is told from multiple axes—the homeland, those who moved, and the ways in which this migration impacted the lives of those who stayed back. Ultimately, Hussain’s artistic work invites educational researchers, theorists, and artists to rethink our notions of home, belonging, and diaspora; to imagine otherwise.

“And the House Burned Down”: HIV, Intimacy, and Memory in Danez Smith’s Poetry

Abstract Danez Smith’s [insert] boy (2014) not only bears witness to the intricacy of the intersection between queerness and Blackness in the United States of the twenty-first century, but also illustrates an overcoming of multiple forms of oppression through poetry. In Smith’s second collection Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), this experience is further complicated when a positive HIV diagnosis enters the equation. This paper wonders about the possibility of reading the speaker's account of HIV as following a narrative arc from anxiety to agency. With this idea in mind, and probing into issues such as intimacy, kinship, memory, and the notion of home, this paper presents a comparative analysis of Danez Smith’s poetry focusing on the metaphors used to explore the penetration of HIV into the body and the alterations this experience imposes on the perception of intimacy and memory.

CAREGIVING FOR OLDER ADULTS: EXPLORING THE IMPLICATIONS FOR FAMILIAL RELATIONS, DYNAMICS, AND FRIENDSHIP

Abstract In this symposium, we discuss about various aspects of caregiving for older adults who require care because of chronic illness, frailty, and/or long-term disability. Their needs take many forms and so do the demands and concerns of their caregivers, comprising family members and close friends. Under these trying circumstances, relationships are put to the test; shared sensibilities and understandings built over decades of marital and family life begin to unravel, and friendships fray. Thus, caregiving has profound implications for the family as well as non-family members who provide care. Caregiving itself is marked by varying intensities expressed in anguished voices of loss, frustration, and anger but they also convey a deep sense of responsibility, gratitude, and love. There is much that caregiving could offer in terms of the potential for deeper meaning, connection, satisfaction, and goodness. Hence, the papers in this symposium will examine how caregiving responsibilities are distributed among family and non-family members; analyze the implications of caregiving on the notion of home/homeliness for caregivers; account for the meaning of caregiving for a parent or older family member as diverse expressions of filial piety; and explore the issues and challenges around caregiving for older adults with cognitive impairment including dementia from the perspectives of family and non-family members who are caregivers. Collectively, the papers highlight the relational and reciprocal nature of caregiving, and in which intimate relational and cultural processes shape not only the quality and experiences of caregiving but also foundations of the family and notions of home.

INFRASTRUCTURES OF CAREGIVING: RECONSTITUTING HOMELINESS AND FAMILY IN SINGAPORE

Abstract Caregiving comprises concrete everyday tasks that are built-on and revolve around the home, yet few studies have looked at caregiving as practice(s) that shape the home as a place of/for care. We examined the socio-material arrangements of people, activities, and things that enable caregiving at home, asking how caregiving is orchestrated, sustained, and delivered at home, and how the home is in turn re-constituted by caregiving. In-depth interviews were conducted with 40 family caregivers, aged 55-85 years, caring for their spouse and/or parent(s). Relations, activities, and things that enabled caregiving were analyzed through the theoretical lens of “care infrastructure”. Caregiving is enacted through a network of people and things – including family members, live-in hired helpers, medical and social workers; technologies like surveillance cameras and strategically placed mirrors at home to monitor care recipients; televisions turned-on 24/7; assistive devices such as wheelchairs and ramps, and placement of hospital beds at home, etc. – that change living arrangements and routines. Care tasks, responsibilities, and decisions are marked by negotiations, tensions, and compromises between people and with things. Caregivers appropriate, adapt, and improvise in situations of uncertainty, conflict, and impossible demand. We conclude that new socio-material arrangements of people, activities, and things that emerge because of caregiving change/disrupt the notion of home as a place of safety, familiarity, and comfort for caregivers. Understanding the emplacement/displacement and interconnection of things, activities, and people sheds light on how the home shapes the effects of caregiving and vice versa.

Understanding Diaspora: Home and Overlapping Hyphenation in The Shadow Lines

The idea of an imaginary homeland and the adopted country is at the heart of diasporic discourse. There is a continuous struggle on the part of the diasporas about the donor culture and the recipient culture which creates an ambivalence, separation anxiety over dislocation, as well as, an existential crisis. The apparent solution to this problem seems to lie either in shading off one’s individuality as an ex-colonized and eventually becoming westernized or retaining the “desh” in him/her while appropriating the diasporic state. However, the more they try to assimilate or acculturate themselves, the more they feel alienated from the recipient culture. Thus, they posit a “Trishanku” position and because of their peculiar positionality, they try to transcend time and space with the wings of memory to experience the lost past which they call ‘home’. This paper takes Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines into consideration and explores how different characters in this novel harbor different notions of home and how they come to terms with their hyphenated position in a transcultural space. This will be achieved through the trajectories of two of its main characters: Tha’mma and Ila. For them, the diaspora home becomes a problematic site, and there is a silent clash in their ideologies. This paper shows that it is more so because the sense of self/existence is shaped by the social relations determined by the collective history, class, race, gender and, most importantly, by culture. Thereby, the characters’ concept of a home remains a prolonged paradox. Spectrum, Volume 17, June 2022: 66-74

Home is where the art is? Reflections on changing notions of home and contemporary art practices in the wake of the pandemic

How has the pandemic changed ideas of home, and how have artists responded to these changes? This article considers the implications of Covid-19's impact on notions of home for contemporary art practices, with a focus on the experience of woman-identifying artists, given the gendered politics of home. Many artists have been forced to rethink how they work in response to the pandemic's effects on freedom of movement, financial security, and exhibition opportunities. In the broader community, 'working from home' has resurged with added legitimacy. To the more optimistic social analysts, Covid-19 has offered an opportunity for a major reset of work practices, but evidence suggests that the pandemic has doubled down on the unpaid care burden of women. For some woman-identifying artists, such developments have become the tipping point for exiting the industry; others have rendered their work almost entirely digital; for yet others it has provided the official imprimatur for long-developed sustaining strategies. I analyse how notions of home have been explored in contemporary art, reflect on how Covid-19 has challenged conventional experiences of home, and discuss examples of artistic practice that have adapted to these changes to examine what 'working from home' might entail in the wake of Covid-19.

Material worlds: Domestic objects and the question of auto/biography in contemporary art

At the turn of the twenty-first century, due to the expansion of postcolonial consciousness, artists identified as "non-western" gained a new visibility in the Euro-American art world that was far from unproblematic. Installations and multimedia practices revolving around domestic space and daily objects were internationally celebrated as a novel source for reflections on the notion of home. Based on the assumption that artists' lived experiences of migration, separation, or loss made their use of the domestic inherently transgressive, these disparate works were framed as autobiographical or self-representational. With this, the institutional landscape seemed to undergo a total transformation in reevaluating the use of personal materials in art practices. Dismissed as confessional or narcissistic when articulated as a key critical strategy by feminist Euro-American artists just a decade earlier, it was precisely this personal and domestic quality that seemed to be seen as valuable and relevant in the context of an art world with newfound pretensions of inclusion and globalisation. Focusing on Ishiuchi Miyako's work Mother's 2000-2005: Traces of the Future as a case study, I argue that the reasons behind this notable shift were twofold: first, the shift in artistic language, from the political explicitness of earlier feminist artworks to the use of material subtlety and conceptual ambivalence, allowed for these works to travel well from national to international exhibitions; at the same time, the use of personal and domestic objects seemed to justify their framing through biographical narratives that, in turn, served to comfortably categorise them, while also offering grounds for viewer engagement.

Revitalizing Polemics Through Exile Testimonio in the Select Poems of Jacinta Kerketta

Exile Testimonio induces a unique frame of mind, the dynamics of which necessitate close examination. Collective sorrow, displacement, and trauma are preserved in the texts of exile testimonio. They recall the past and use that information to imagine or describe their ideal house. De-territorialization provides communities of exile Testimonio with a wellspring of fresh ideas. Historically, people have associated the idea of home with a certain country or region. The emergence of exile testimonio is a strong indication that the notion of home has expanded beyond its traditional one-dimensional and geographical confines. Members feel they have a duty to work together to protect and improve the places they call home. People in any society will always need to rely on one another to fulfill their various requirements. The issue of land alienation has been made worse by incomplete and unreliable land records in a complete state. Since the tribal people tend to be quite trustworthy in both their informal and formal interactions and since they are often deeply in debt, they are often the ones who alienate their land. Tribes have always been marginalized due to the economic interests of more powerful groups. It is important to keep in mind that tribes are embedded inside Indian society, making the issues of purposefully altering or modernizing Indian society broadly relevant to them as well. Tribes had near-total dominion over Forest Land and its fruitful resources prior to independence.

Between the acts: At home in uncertain times

Written during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, this short essay reflects on a changing world in the midst of major upheaval. Bringing together the philosophical thought of the late Agnes Heller with the historical meditations expressed in Virginia Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts, the essay attends to the ways that historical transition plays out in the everyday. Writing on the cusp of the Second World War, Woolf is acutely aware of an atmosphere of historical change, and she writes this unease into the everyday transitions of her characters and ambience of the novel. Drawing on Heller’s reflections on notions of home, I consider how our experience of everyday life reflects the undulations of history. Taking Woolf’s prompt, I tune into the ways that the unease of historical transition enters the everyday through a heightened awareness of contingency and growing sense of the uncanny.

A Rich Inheritance: An Ecocritical Reading of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Short Stories and Poetry

ABSTRACT This article examines Ken Saro-Wiwa’s (1941–1995) vision for the Ogoni people through an ecocritical interrogation of his short fiction and poetry. Academic analyses of the Ogoni struggle have been unfailingly anthropocentric in their approaches. This article challenges this dominant epistemology by centring the non-human world. I examine Saro-Wiwa’s collection of short stories ‘A Forest of Flowers’, the poetry anthology ‘Songs in a Time of War’, and his final poems written in prison in the 1990s. An ecocritical reading of these texts will reveal how Saro-Wiwa invokes pastoral tropes and romantic portrayals of a pre-oil ecological paradise to articulate a primordial eco-nationalist Ogoni identity. Throughout his fiction, the fate of the people and the natural world are intertwined, and notions of home and community expand beyond the human to incorporate the ecosystem of the bioregion.

Treating Vulnerable Mothers, Infants and Young Children Living in Poverty: Co-Creating a Psychoanalytic Playground in Various Alternative Settings

ABSTRACT The families referred to the Anni Bergman Parent Infant Program (ABPIP) Home-Visiting Project often face multiple, overwhelming stressors embedded within the market-oriented system of poverty and exploitation. These stressors compromise the quality of parental care, which in turn negatively impacts the infant’s well-being. These financially vulnerable families are usually in an urgent crisis that needs immediate attention. The author describes the innovative model of this outreach program based on psychoanalytic infant observation that encourages interventions on multiple levels simultaneously. Another unique aspect of the program is its reshaping of the analytic frame. Considering the ever-changing nature of the physical settings, the analyst’s internal setting becomes a vital, anchoring, and facilitating factor of therapeutic change. Through two detailed case examples, the author shows how these outreach analysts place themselves in between external and internal realities, recognizing the interdependent nature of both, while also maintaining a psychoanalytic attitude and frame that is primarily situated within the analyst. The author also reflects on her own precarious status as an international, temporary visa holder in the US and the ways this external reality entered into the playground of therapy that allowed the author to understand and help a child in a deeper, more personal way based on the dyad’s shared preoccupation with the notion of home.

“The House with the Red Roof:” A Migrant-Owned Apartment in Japan and the Surrounding Relations of a “Society with Houses”

ABSTRACT This paper explores the case of a migrant-owned apartment in Japan that has been rented to migrants for over a decade. The apartment, located in the “house with the red roof,” and people’s relations that develop within and around it are approached through the anthropological concept of “societies with houses.” The apartment is regarded not only as a dwelling but as an institution that governs relations in a loosely tied migrant society with houses. The study contributes both to migrant housing studies, offering an experimental perspective that goes beyond inquiries into migrant spatial distributions and notions of home, and to the “societies with houses” concept through expanding its toolkit and application. The apartment in question not only provides a place to live for migrants but also enacts the functions of protection, capital accumulation, social memory reproduction, disguise and exposure, and metaphorical kinning.

One’s Own and Foreign in Context of Later Heidegger’s Philosophy

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the interrelations between the notions of one’s own and the foreign in later Heidegger’s philosophy. It is pointed out that later Heidegger contextualized the notion of the world by the notion of home and its derivatives “homelessness” and “homecoming” that are of great value in his philosophy. The scrutiny proceeds from the study of the peculiarities of Heidegger’s approach to the problem of being that is considered to be the knot of his philosophy. It is noted that Heidegger, having deserted the traditional ontology already in his early works, continued, nevertheless, using its terms including “being” for a long time and thereby in a way obscured the peculiarities of his approach. Only later Heidegger tried to reject the traditional concept of being as infinitely continuing state in favor of the concept of Ereignis that is usually translated as “appropriating event” or “event of appropriation”. Thus, according to Heidegger, being gives us beings as a whole by appropriating sense to them and thereby turning them into the familiar and accessible environment for dwelling. Just the “givenness” of beings as a whole makes them familiar, one’s own. Accordingly, the “dwelling” means for Heidegger not only the security, but also the intelligibility of the environment, whereas the homelessness means the latter’s uncanny incomprehensibility. It is emphasized that Heidegger’s interpretation of homelessness is closely connected with a standard theoretical model explaining the emergence of the private and public realms. According to this model, just the extension of family as the initial one’s own resulted in the turning of household into city-state that, having been specified by the image of one super-family, added the elements of the foreign to the initial state of society.

The Vogue for a New Interior: A Study of the Presentation and Interpretation of Servants’ Quarters in Country House Visits

The article is a study of the presentation and interpretation of servants’ quarters in country houses in England and Wales (Erddig, Lanhydrock, Audley End, Petworth and Ickworth), directed at theorizing the latest popular fascination about the ‘downstairs’. Hinging on Gaston Bachelard’s twofold reading of the interior as a contained physical space and an elusive imaginal one, the notion of home as the site of domesticity is compared with that of the country house, whose ‘domestication’ is surveyed in a series of visual and spatial analyses of its rooms and, specifically, its servants’ quarters. Probing the tendency of ‘leaving the green baize door’ to the servants’ quarters ‘ajar’ allows for an understanding of the reasons behind the inception and development of such a vogue, arguing that it is the experience of the tangible everyday that defines the popular ‘doing’ of the country house visit.

‘In and Out of Each Other's Worlds’

Abstract The art of Austrian Kindertransportee Helga Michie has been much discussed, particularly in the context of the work of her identical twin, Holocaust writer Ilse Aichinger. This article, however, focuses in particular on Michie's daughter, English-born painter Ruth Rix, and the relationship with her mother. It considers Rix's appropriation of images inspired by Austrian family photographs and more than a hundred picture postcards, provided by Michie. Across two generations, the art of mother and daughter – overshadowed by the Holocaust – is introduced, examining how each influenced the other, with Rix grappling with both memory and postmemory. As she suggests, Michie offered a ‘doorway’ into Austria, and she, conversely, one to Englishness, though both strayed constantly ‘in and out of each other's worlds’. Motifs inspired by private and wider tragedies highlight shared concerns: fracture, family, memory, identity, loss and notions of home, creating a trans-generational body of work which, when taken as a whole, is even more powerful than when viewed apart.

Perspectives on the Notion of Home

This paper aims to handle the conceptual framework within which critics present home. It helps us think about our relationship with home and examine questions about the problem of displacement directing research to Third World. This overview provides the vocabulary for articulating this dilemma. Regarding methodology, the paper is an in-depth qualitative study based on views of selected critics. The findings have indicated that applying the critics' reflections on the conditions of people is advocated to detect whether homing is attainable or still remains a desire aspired to. Hence, the paper, as a preliminary study, stimulates for further research.