Studies in Social Justice (Mar 2019)
Reimagining Home in the Wake of Displacement
Abstract
In the wake of displacement, people are tasked with reconstructing a sense of home in a new and unfamiliar location. In this article, we consider how the experience of displacement complicates our understanding of what it means to be at home by exposing the significant labour that goes into its imagination and re-imagination. We examine practices of homemaking after displacement through two interrelated themes: (a) narratives of home, where we discuss how displaced persons nurture a sense of home through memory and storytelling; and (b) textures of home, where we emphasize how a sense of home is sustained or re-imagined through material objects. Within this discussion, we maintain that there is a continuity between the violence of displacement and the violence of relocation, as the task of re-imagining home is often compounded by structural factors including socioeconomic marginalization and racialization in the country of settlement. We conceptualize displacement as an injustice and homemaking as a form of cultural labour that exemplifies the agency, innovation, and resilience of displaced persons.
