Dissertation Summary
Homes Translated. Dispossessions, belongings, and the materiality of lives in asylum reception and exile
What does it take to make a home? How to reassemble what is needed when on the move and in exile? Grounded in extended research in German asylum reception facilities between 2016-2020, this ethnographic doctoral thesis gives insight into how asylum seekers and migrants with precarious legal status ‘translate’ pockets of home in challenging reception environments. Coming from a material culture perspective, the doctoral thesis apprehends (forced) migration and the negotiation of quests for diverse and diverging senses of ontological security and home through translations. Translations are processual shifts via which people on the move bring across borders to reassemble things, habits and notions for the sake of creating a sense of home. Material-based, socially interactive, and individual-centered homing efforts involve dissimilar materialities, resources and skills. Often, dispossessions and loss continue to affect people in their efforts. Yi-Neumann shows how things uniquely link personal attachments and hint at broader conditions of flight, migration and exile. In this sense, the doctoral thesis substantializes perspectives on (forced) migration, home cultures and efforts in order to mobilize and arrange means of belongingKeywords: home, home cultures, (forced) migration, asylum reception, material culture, dispossession, translation, asylum