Remaking Home

The main aim of this book is to explore the meanings of ‘home’ and the practices, processes and institutions which shape the way that refugees seek to emplace themselves—or make a ‘home’—in different contexts. It emphasizes, in particular, the relationship between individual biographies and life circumstances in determining the way people organize their lives in exile. It is a book on ‘integration’ but where the word itself is very rarely mentioned. The reason becomes clear in the introduction. As the author explains, current academic inquiry into ‘integration’ and ‘social inclusion’ of refugees and immigrants is predominantly state-centred and policy-driven. As a result, it tends to overemphasize the agency of the receiving states and their institutional mechanisms, paying little attention to ‘how people who are “managed” and “guided” by the receiving states actually “nest” themselves in their new sociocultural environments’ (p. 6). Instead, the author persuasively argues for a refugee-centred approach that acknowledges refugees as social actors who, as a result of their forcible displacement, operate in a context of extremely limited options

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Context (archaeology · Displaced person · Geography · Identity (music · Immigration · Inclusion (mineral · Political science · Refugee · Social integration · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science · Structure and agency · Anthropology · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Italian Social Issues and Migration · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Gender Studies · Law