Chapter 8: Conclusions: Investigating the Home-migration Nexus from the Margins¹

Thinking home on the move has brought together the academic and personal reflections on home and migration of 26 scholars from a wide range of disciplines. By giving space to their voices, mediated by our own active engagement, this book reveals how personal experiences, fieldwork encounters and research trajectories have the power to influence the critical contemporary debate on home and migration.

Dialogues have a long history in literature and philosophy. Since Plato and his Socratic dialogues, conversations have been used as a rhetoric form to develop the understanding around a concept that is hard to grasp or is covered only by assumptions. Similarly, our homing interviews with established academics represent an attempt to discover what lies behind disciplinary-blinded or common sense prejudices about home. What emerges from these dialogues is that the idea of home – far from being a simple synonym of safety and peacefulness – reveals tensions, contradictions and dilemmas that need to be explored across the social sciences. We did so, in this book, by approaching the attitudes towards home and the homemaking practices of people on the move through the lens of marginality. Migrants' attempts to make a place into home, we argued in Chapter 2, are shaped by three interrelated forms of marginality, relative to the societal mainstream: in place, in time and in membership and belonging.