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Bringing together the voices of nine individuals from an archive of over two hundred in-depth interviews with transnational migrants and refugees across five European countries, Finding Home in Europe critically engages with how home is experienced by those who move among changing social and cultural constraints. Highly conscious of the political strength of their voices, migrants and asylum seekers speak out loud to the authors, as this volume seeks to challenge the narrative that these people are ‘out of place’ or cannot claim their right to belong.
“Skillfully using a combination of oral history and ethnography, each of the nine main chapters is woven around the life story of one of the two hundred people who participated in a large-scale, four-year research project investigating searches for and struggles over home. Finding Home in Europe is simultaneously both a collection of individual stories and a critical analysis of how structural inequalities, including class, racisms and patriarchy and the legacies of European colonialism both shape and are occasionally subverted by the lives chronicled in its pages.” • Ben Rogaly, Professor of Human Geography, University of Sussex, UK
“The authors’ commitment to ethnographic longitudinal studies and individual biographies brings us up close to life as it is lived travelling from place to place, thus challenging and extending our knowledge, understanding, empathy, senses and tastes of homes left behind.” • Anne S. Grønseth, Professor in Social Anthropology, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences
“What makes this volume particularly compelling is how it weaves together sophisticated theorizing of home and migration with the lived, felt and narrated experiences of making home under often very difficult conditions. The volume strongly enriches our understanding of how searching, struggling and sustaining to belong is located in the precarious idea of home.” • Julia Pauli, Professor in Cultural Anthropology, University of Hamburg
“Through a series of richly etched and complex life stories of mobility, displacement and home, the volume offers a captivating and insightful journey into migrants' search for home on the move, negotiating roots and routes, and the struggles and challenges they face in doing so both in the public and domestic arena, including around practices of food preparation and sharing.” • Professor Nando Sigona, University of Birmingham
Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Manchester. His research interests include home and homemaking; displacement, migration and mobilities; ageing and narrative research. Since 2018 Luis Eduardo has collaborated with the HOMInG Project, University of Trento.
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Bringing the Migrants’ Voices to the Home and Mobility Nexus
Sara Bonfanti and Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia
Part I: Searching for Home
Paolo Boccagni
Chapter 1. ‘Moved by the Hand of God’: Lucho, A Peruvian Religious Minister in Manchester
Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia
Chapter 2. One Essential Home (“Ecuador”), Another Existential Home (“With My Mother”), Many Houses In-Between: The Story of Miriam
Paolo Boccagni
Chapter 3. Priya: Homing in the Global Job Market. Life Story of an Indian Woman in the Netherlands
Sara Bonfanti
Part II: Struggles at Home
Sara Bonfanti
Chapter 4. Once We Relax, the Door of Trauma is Open: Aaron’ Life Story
Milena Belloni
Chapter 5. A Story of Accumulated Homelessness. Mateos, an Eritrean Refugee in Rome
Aurora Massa and Milena Belloni
Chapter 6. Yolanda: A Peruvian Care Worker on the Spanish Frontline
Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia
Part III: Tastes of Home
Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia
Chapter 7. Cooking Multiple Homes by Revisiting Eritrean Food in London: The story of Makda
Aurora Massa
Chapter 8. Sumant: The Home Recipe to Make a Move. Life Story of a Sikh Man in Britain
Sara Bonfanti
Chapter 9. Paola: Performing Memory and Reproducing Food Cultures
Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia
Afterword: Home as a Trope of Inequality
Russell King
Index