Migrant homemaking through the senses

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the sensorial nature of migration and migrants’ homemaking practices. It brings together contributions from Migration Studies and Sensory Studies. More specifically, this chapter builds on phenomenological contributions on the feeling of being at home in order to highlight the central role of the senses in home-making practices in the context of migrancy. Migration, as a fully corporeal and embodied experience, brings about changes in migrants’ sensorial circumstances. In such context, the experience of making oneself at home by migrants and other mobile populations involves the establishment of a series of practices, some of them being highly sensuous. The lived experience of home is linked to the development or recreation of sensuous habitus and sensescapes. The concept of migrant sensescapes captures the ways migrants navigate and relate sensorily, in and with their places of residence.