Making it Home: An Aesthetic Methodological Contribution to the Study of Migrant Home-Making and Politics of Integration (MaHoMe) 2020-24

The Joint Nordic–UK Research Initiative on Migration and Integration (2019–2024) brought together researchers from the Nordic countries and the United Kingdom to build a stronger knowledge base for migration and integration policy. The MaHoMe project was one of seven funded projects. Led by Kingston University, in partnership with Roskilde University, Denmark and Lund University, Sweden.
Methods In this study
The MaHoMe project explored how migrants make sense of home within the complex politics of integration in the UK, Denmark, and Sweden. Our research questions were: 1) How do notions of home and home-making configure in policy narratives of migration management and migrant integration between 2010-2019? 2) How has migrant home and home-making been remembered, imagined and contested in contemporary artistic practices in the UK, Denmark and Sweden, 2010-2019? 3) How can aesthetic processes, artistic expressions and art-based ethnographies facilitate new understandings of migrant experiences of home and home-making?
Our multi-disciplinary and multi-sited ethnographic approach combined narrative analysis, visual ethnography, and participatory aesthetic methods to study both policy-making on migration and integration and migrant home-making. The in-country and cross-country analysis of policy-making on migration and integration, cultural heritage and contemporary migrant expressions encompassed working with NGOs and migrants as co-researchers, and engaging policy-makers and the wider public.
Findings
By bringing together analysis of policy-making, migrant cultural expressions, and the everyday practices of making-home in migration, the project foregrounded both the gap between policy understandings of home and migrant lived experience, and the creative ways migrants sustain belonging and imagine alternative futures. Migration and integration discourses largely treat home as singular and fixed. Migrants, however, create multi-scaled homes across places and times, maintaining continuity amid disruption. These conceptual, material and affective findings highlight the need to reconfigure and reimagine dominant narratives of migration and integration.
Conclusions
The project has created new solidarities and disseminated research-informed scholarly and cultural outputs that contribute to new understandings about migration and integration in Denmark, Sweden and the UK and their reconfiguring and reimagining. The outputs - a legacy website, methodological toolboxes, films, publications, and exhibitions – have generated comparative insights and broad societal impact across research, policy, and practice. https://www.making-it-home-research.com

Dataset

Interviews, Experimentation, Observation, Ethnography, Documents and Records, Own Creation