INTRODUCTION

In this chapter the materiality of the migrant/diasporic home and its significance for understanding cultural identity and sense of belonging will be discussed by using the study of Russian migrants’ homes in the UK. The chapter will evaluate the role of material objects in the process of migrant/diasporic homemaking and how far particular objects contribute to a sense of home or non-home. In this sense, the chapter aims to show the ambivalent and complex nature of home in the context of migration and the related sense of being at home – one which material objects may help (re)construct or take away.

The chapter is located at the intersection of research into home and migration, the subfield of social sciences that has been gaining importance in recent years (Ahmed et al. 2003; Boccagni 2017; Boccagni and Kusenbach 2020; Fog Olwig 2007; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2017; Wiles 2008). Recent scholarship has shown that the notion of home, whether imagined, remembered or experienced, is closely interconnected with the experience of migration (Boccagni 2017) and thus reveals important insights into everyday life, identity and culture. Within this framework, home is defined as a multidimensional and multifaceted concept, one which combines notions of homeland (imagined, remembered or ‘real’) and dwelling, or ‘lived experiences, social relations and emotional geographies of home’ (Blunt 2005: 506). Researchers also emphasise the ambivalent character of migrant homemaking. For example, Ahmed et al. (2003) use the concept of uprootings/regroundings to describe an experience of migration during which one simultaneously uproots oneself from familiar contexts and regrounds with new ones.

Furthermore, some scholarly work on diasporic identities puts particular emphasis on the defining role of home within the process of identity construction (Ehrkamp 2005; Story and Walker 2016). Ehrkamp (2005) describes the connection between home and diasporic identity as negotiated, or (re)constructed in relation to ‘multiple societies and places’ (348), while for Silva (2009) diasporic identities are constituted through a continuous search for Home, where Home is an elusive construct linked to sensory experiences (Silva 2009: 694). Following Giogi and Fasulo, migrant homemaking can be described as a ‘work in progress that accompanies changes and different versions of identity through time’ (Giogi and Fasulo 2013: 113).