Picturing Home: exploring the everyday homemaking practices of migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women in Glasgow

How do we make sense of home in the context of migration? Can we understand home as rooted in place? What impact do legal status and gender have upon home-making practices, and how can visual methods help to address these questions? This thesis explores the complex webs between objects, people and places that are woven in the migration-home nexus (Boccagni 2017). Using the photo elicitation interview method with 20 migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women in Glasgow, this study draws particularly on the concepts of performativity (Butler 1990), habitus (Bourdieu 1990) and transnationalism (Vertovec 2001; Levitt 2009). By examining the everyday participation and home-making practices of migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women, this study sheds light on the wider social and structural factors that frame these practices. I argue that the disparity in access to resources and barriers faced by each of the three legal statuses discussed here - migrant, refugee and asylum seeker - have effects on the forms of participation in which the women engage in the process of home-making. The integration of the impact of gender and legal status offers a contribution to migration scholarship, and furthermore, the use of visual methods to undertake this study contributes to literature within the migration-home nexus (Boccagni 2017). This thesis concludes by emphasising that at the core of everyday migrant homemaking practices is the cultivation of familiarity, through drawing upon the old, and through growing accustomed to the new (Williams 1958; Back 1996).