DO##HOME: A home-activist guidebook

Most often we associate home with something private – a place where we can shut out the outside world and find comfort. But have you ever considered that there may be much more at stake when we do home?

DO##HOME is a plug’n play home-activist guidebook that can inspire and assist you and your allies to create new understandings of what it means and takes to find one’s way home, make home, and feel at home.

Background
Feminist scholarship (Ahmed 1999; Ahmed et al. 2003; Brah 2005) and more recent migration research (Duyvendak 2011; Boccagni and Hondagneu‐Sotelo 2023; Narvselius and Padovan-Özdemir 2022) have argued and documented how migrant homemaking is practiced and exists in politicised tensions between the private and the public, stretching migrant homemaking between the sanctuary and the battle ground. As such, migrant homemaking seems to constitute an “ontological struggle” (Andersen and Pedersen 2018, 83) that inscribes a simultaneous desire for home and critique of fixed origins (Brah 2005; Grünenberg 2006). Such tensions, struggles and simultaneities are not easy to capture nor articulate in linear arguments. Thus, put to everyday political practice and activism, it seems key to challenge these hegemonic and dualistic understandings of migrant homemaking.

Consequently, the MaHoMe project developed a participatory research design under whose auspices aesthetic workshops with self-identified migrants in Denmark, Sweden, and the UK were initiated. The concept and organization of the aesthetic workshops was led by Dr. Azadeh Fatehrad (Kingston University) in collaboration with NGO partners, ActionAid Denmark and Andromeda 8220, Compass Collective, and Baltic Art Center.

In Denmark, artist and curator Aysha Amin, interaction designer Alexander Muchenberger, and filmmaker Anita Beikpour co-designed and facilitated the aesthetic workshop as a film workshop. Prof. Marta Padovan-Özdemir (Roskilde University) participated in the workshop as auto-ethnographer on par with the other self-identified migrant participants.

Based on this workshop design and the migrant researcher’s experiences of participating in the workshop, the idea emerged to develop a simple plug’n play guidebook for migrants and their allies pursuing home-activism.
Theoretical principles

The guidebook builds on existing workshop guidelines of empowerment, participation, and aesthetic expressions (Dutto, Ricatti, and Wilson 2020; Suárez-Orozco and Strom n.d.) but advances an activist perspective that moves beyond educational aspirations.

In order not to reproduce the dualistic gulf between migrants and non-migrants the guidebook has been informed by the concept of postmigration. The postmigration paradigm challenges sedentarism and the widespread understanding of migration as an anomaly. Instead, the postmigration paradigm acknowledges that all societies and all denizens in them are already conditioned by migration, whether they like it or not (Foroutan 2019; Römhild 2017).
Consequently, the postmigration paradigm encourages us to move beyond the paternalistic relationship of non-migrants helping and welcoming migrants (Jacobsen and Padovan-Özdemir 2024; Vitting-Seerup 2017; Padovan-Özdemir 2020). Instead, the postmigration paradigm attunes our perception of ongoing power struggles along intersecting axes of class, race, gender, age, and legal status and under the imperative of the democratic promise, it binds people’s liberation up with each other invoking collaboration and solidarity (Petersen and Schramm 2016; 2017).

In sum, the home-activism guidebook is developed on six core principles:
•Home and homemaking are a matter of comfort, belonging, and justice.
•Home and homemaking are both concrete and ephemeral.
•Understandings, experiences, and feelings of home and homemaking must be acknowledged in their diversity and in respect of various power(less) positions.
•Complex perceptions of home and homemaking are communicated visually to achieve high impact.
•Home-activism is a collaborative endeavour.
•Home-activism is a public matter.

DO##HOME guidebook content
The DO##HOME home-activist guidebook can help you and your allies create new understandings of what it means and takes to find one’s way home, make home, and feel at home.

The guidebook guides you through seven simple steps on how to team up, share home experiences with others, visualise feelings and perceptions of homemaking, and engage in public conversation about home:
1.Take action
2.Team up
3.Share and appreciate
4.Visualise
5.Develop
6.Edit
7.Go public

This guidebook has been developed and tested as part of the Making it Home project (MaHoMe) 2020-2024 funded by Nordforsk.

DO##HOME poster
The front cover of the guidebook works as a poster saying DO##HOME.
This caption is a postmigratory response to the hostile slogan “go home”.
If you support the DO##HOME message, feel free to print the poster and hang it wherever you feel it is needed or suited.

Download the DO##HOME guidebook and get started.

References
Ahmed, Sara. 1999. ‘Home and Away. Narratives of Migration and Enstrangement’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 329–47.

Ahmed, Sara, Claudia Castaneda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller, eds. 2003. Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg.

Andersen, Dorte Jagetic, and René Ejbye Pedersen. 2018. ‘Practicing Home in the Foreign’. Nordic Journal of Migration Research 8 (2): 82–90. https://doi.org/10.1515/njmr-2018-0003.

Boccagni, Paolo, and Pierrette Hondagneu‐Sotelo. 2023. ‘Integration and the Struggle to Turn Space into “Our” Place: Homemaking as a Way beyond the Stalemate of Assimilationism vs Transnationalism’. International Migration 61 (1): 154–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12846.

Brah, Avtar. 2005. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. 0 ed. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203974919.

Dutto, Matteo, Francesco Ricatti, and Rita Wilson. 2020. ‘YOUTH IN THE CITY: LA NOSTRA PRATO’. www.youthinthe.city.

Duyvendak, Jan Willem. 2011. The Politics of Home. Belonging and Nostalgia in Europe and the United States. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Foroutan, Naika. 2019. ‘The Post-Migrant Paradigm’. In Refugees Welcome? Difference and Diversity in a Changing Germany, edited by Jan-Jonathan Bock and Sharon Macdonald, 142–67. Berghahn Books.

Grünenberg, Kristina. 2006. ‘Is Home Where the Heart Is, or Where I Hang My Hat? - Constructing Senses of Belonging among Bosnian Refugees in Denmark’. Ph.D. Dissertation, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.

Jacobsen, Gro Hellesdatter, and Marta Padovan-Özdemir. 2024. ‘Postmigratoriske Perspektiver På Pædagogisk Praksis’. In Kulturmødeanalyser, edited by Lise Paulsen Galal and Kirsten Hvenegaard-Lassen. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur.

Narvselius, Eleonora, and Marta Padovan-Özdemir. 2022. ‘Utilitarian and Exclusive Humanism: Conditioned Welcoming through State-Sanctioned Migrant Home-Making’. In Ukranian Refugees and the Nordics. Research-Led Best Practice on How to Cater for Ukranian Refugees Arriving in the Nordic Region, edited by NordForsk, 48–54. Oslo: NordForsk.

Padovan-Özdemir, Marta. 2020. ‘Kunst og pædagogik i et postmigrationssamfund’. Dansk pædagogisk Tidsskrift, no. 2: 38–59.

Petersen, Anne Ring, and Moritz Schramm. 2016. ‘Postmigration’. Kultur & Klasse 44 (122): 181–200. https://doi.org/10.7146/kok.v44i122.25052.

———. 2017. ‘(Post-)Migration in the Age of Globalisation: New Challenges to Imagination and Representation’. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 9 (2): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2017.1356178.

Römhild, Regina. 2017. ‘Beyond the Bounds of the Ethnic: For Postmigrant Cultural and Social Research’. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 9 (2): 69–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2017.1379850.

Suárez-Orozco, Carola, and Adam Strom. n.d. ‘Moving Stories: An Educator’s Guide to Connecting and Engaging Our Moving Stories’. Re-Imagining Migration. https://reimaginingmigration.org/moving-stories-collection/.

Vitting-Seerup, Sabrina. 2017. ‘Working Towards Diversity with a Postmigrant Perspective’. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 9 (2): 45–55.