Abstract

As we grapple with a growing refugee crisis, a hardening of anti-immigration sentiment, and deepening communal segregation in many parts of the developed world, questions of the nature of home and homemaking are increasingly critical. This collection brings ethnographic insight into the practices of homemaking, exploring a diverse range of contexts ranging from economic migrants to new Chinese industrial cities, Jewish returnees from Israel to Ukraine, and young gay South Asians in London. While negotiating widely varying social-political contexts, these studies suggest an unavoidably multiple understanding of home, while provoking new understandings of the material and symbolic process of making oneself “at home.”

“An important contribution to migration research, especially for understanding home and homemaking in the context of lived realities.” • Nataša Rogelja, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

“One of the joys of this collection is the [range of] wonderful and innovative approaches taken by the contributors… The research methods and conceptual approaches vary considerably from chapter to chapter, making each chapter a voyage of discovery in its own right.” • David Clark, independent scholar

Nicola Frost has a PhD in Social Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has conducted fieldwork in Indonesia, Australia and the UK, working on community organization, multiculturalism, and the cultural politics of food and festivals. She has held post-doctoral fellowships at City University London and SOAS and now works for the Devon Community Foundation, doing research, data analysis and evaluation.

Tom Selwyn is Leverhulme Emeritus Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. For over a decade, he directed/co-directed research and development work for the European Commission’s TEMPUS and MED-HERITAGE programs in the Mediterranean region, and presently directs a project in rural tourism development in Ethiopia for the British Council and Department for International Development.