Work

Integration and the struggle to turn space into “our” place: Homemaking as a way beyond the stalemate of assimilationism vs transnationalism

Year: 2021

Type: article

Abstract: This article investigates homemaking as a set of practices and a perspective on migrants’ ways of local incorporation, with its own material, emotional and relational underpinnings. Homemaking has the potential to emerge as an original category of analysis in immigrant integration, moving beyond the contraposition between assimilationism and transnationalism. Based also on our ongoing research, both in the United States and in Europe, we argue for the significance of migrants’ interactions with specific local structures of opportunities, including people and institutions as much as the built and natural environment. The latter is a critical site where the meanings, opportunities and contents of integration are negotiated between immigrant newcomers and their local and transnational counterparts. Migrants’ stratified rights, opportunities and aspirations to make themselves at home open a promising research perspective on group relations, as embedded in everyday materialities. While integration is a multi‐dimensional and multi‐scalar effort, it still rests on place‐bound fields of inequalities and interaction within and between groups, and on underlying differences in views, emotions and practices of home. These are both a mirror of larger asymmetries of power and of the opportunities available to challenge them.

Source: International Migration

DOI: 10.1111/imig.12846

Authors: Paolo Boccagni, Pierrette Hondagneu‐Sotelo

Institutions: University of Trento, University of Southern California

Language: English

Topic: Diaspora, migration, transnational identity

Subfield: Demography

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $2,750