Migration and the Search for Home

This book explores the impact of transnational migration on the views, feelings, and practices of home among migrants. Home is usually perceived as what placidly lies in the background of everyday life, yet migrants’ experience tells a different story: what happens to the notion of home, once migrants move far away from their “natural” bases and search for new ones, often under marginalized living conditions? The author analyzes in how far migrants’ sense of home relies on a dwelling place, intimate relationships, memories of the past, and aspirations for the future–and what difference these factors make in practice. Analyzing their claims, conflicts, and dilemmas, this book showcases how in the migrants’ case, the sense of home turns from an apparently intimate and domestic concern into a major public question. 

“The book is innovative in its consideration of two allegedly antithetical concepts and combining them together. … This book provides plenty of fodder for a long list of dissertation topics. … I found the book particularly timely given the increasing prevalence of racial, ethnic, and religious tensions throughout the world. It appears that Boccagni has his pulse on what is unfolding not only in Europe but beyond.” (Jeffrey S. Smith, Journal of Cultural Geography, February 18, 2019)

“It is clearly more oriented to academic audience (students and scholars) than to policy makers. The book is indeed a welcomed contribution in the field of migration studies, where the focus on mobility and need to migrate tends to overlook the need of home and belonging.” (Anna Virkama, Nordic Journal of Migration Research NJMR, Vol. 9 (2), 2019)

“In this engaging book, Paolo Boccagni asks about the meaning of home for people who have decided to leave their previous home and settle in a new place. … Boccagni’s book is a great and important read on the migration-home nexus. It will be of high interest to students and scholars alike who work on migration, home and transnationalism.” (Christine Barwick, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, January, 2018)

“Paolo Boccagni introduces a new research agenda by studying migrants' search for home through homing and the migration-home nexus. … Thisbook is an important contribution to complex debates on home, migrant home-making, and homing. The introductory and concluding chapters help to underscore the relationships between place and the construction(s) of home. The book will be valuable to scholars looking to understand and heighten awareness on the home and issues of migrant homes.” (Charishma Ratnam, Emotion, Space and Society, July, 2017)

“Migration and the Search for Home does much to broaden and enrich our understandings of the home-migration nexus. … this book provides a major contribution to research across home and migration studies. The book goes beyond mapping theoretical and empirical approaches to migrant homing, providing a useful methodological and conceptual toolkit that will further develop the home-migration nexus as a research field.” (Annabelle Wilkins, Migration Studies, 2017)

“This book is a must read. It helps us better understand what migration means by looking at migrants’ feelings of home, or their lack thereof ... But the book deserves a wider readership than migration studies since it provides so many new insights in what ‘home’ is about, productively using the angle of migration. Boccagni is not claiming that we have all become migrants or nomads, but the times of stable homes are over for all of us.” (Jan Willem Duyvendak, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

“Paolo Boccagni joins a group of immigration scholars who are intent on developing the prosaic word ‘home’ and the somewhat less prosaic ‘homing’ into serviceable concepts to help us to better understand the complex processes at play for people who are at once emigrants and immigrants as they come to terms with place in multi-scalar terms. The volume constitutes a major contribution to that effort, offering as it does a comprehensive and analytically crisp theoretical argument. This is essential reading.” (Peter Kivisto, Professor of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Welfare, Augustana College, USA) 

“Boccagni has given us a much needed sociological compass to draw our attention directly to a topic of such import it is usually hidden from view. In his characteristic writing style – philosophical, poetic, reflective, insightful, and always engaging, he charts a theoretical and methodological course that promises to permanently locate analyses of home on the migration studies map.” (Loretta Baldassar, Professor and Discipline Chair of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Western Australia, Australia)

Paolo Boccagni is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Trento, Italy. His main research areas are transnational migration, social welfare, care, diversity and home, and his publication record includes articles in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Global Networks, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Housing, Theory and Society. He is also Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project HOMInG – The home-migration nexus: Home as a window on migrant belonging, integration and circulation (ERC STG 678456, 2016-2021).