This paper explores the changing production of home in migration as a complex and uncertain place. In contradistinction to the relational view of place as a collection of flows, trajectories and pure extension, this article explores the importance of boundaries and thresholds in producing place of bounded openness. In developing the account of boundedness and difference, this paper challenges traditional view of home as a site of mastery and ownership. Instead it highlights elusive and conflicting nature of home in migration as dispossession, both familiar and strange, effaced and uncontainable within dominant ‘homely’ stereotypes. Drawing on the results of the ethnographic work with the recent (post-2015) migrants in the UK in the PERCEPTIONS project, it considers the movement beyond self and identity that creates home as both happy and unfriendly, inside and outside, an exposure to the foreign and unfamiliar encountered in migration. The paper explores the ways in which migrants express home as open and endlessly dispersed, bringing gradual erosion of identity and sense of rootlessness. Contrary to the interlinked view of migrant lives prioritising connectivity and cohesiveness, the examples from migrant interviews point to the fractured sense of home, impossible to re-compose and bring together, and resisting translation into coherent narratives. The paper concludes with the reflections on unity and relation in migration, and offers alternative definitions of place.
Keywords: place|home|migration|limit|uncertainty
A102998SS