HOME AND BELONGING IN MIGRATION

Home and belonging are interconnected categories, and point to questions of increasing significance, in migration and refugee studies. This entry reviews the main ways of conceptualizing them. This opens up an interdisciplinary and intersectional field across the social science – humanity divide. Both notions can be applied in several research domains and understandings, taking up emic meanings that do not necessarily resound with the etic ones. Ultimately, both home and belonging have to do with the place we have, or aspire to have, in the world; with the characteristics of such a place, and the degrees of freedom in negotiating them; on a larger socio-political scale, with the attendant dynamics of attachment and appropriation, inclusion and exclusion.