Summary of “Making Homes in Limbo? A Conceptual Framework,” By Catherine Brun and Anita Fábo
In the article “Making Homes in Limbo? A Conceptual Framework”, conducted by Catherine Brun and Anita Fábo in 2015, three main purposes were raised. The first section was to study the connection between home and forced migration. The second section discussed protracted displacement, its extent and how it affected the globalized world before protracted displacement started reflecting on the experience of the people dealing with it. The final section was where conceptual framework was placed (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
Home and Forced Migration
The terms home and place are interrelated notions which add belonging and identity to the experience of forced migration and make it more complicated. According to Brun, place is particularly an articulation of social relations that is prolonged beyond one location. It includes economic, social, physical and cultural realities. In the same understanding, home is a place where people experience psychological, social and emotive attachments. Richness and broad interest were recently brought to the contributions theorizing home and homemaking. In their book, Blunt and Dowling presented home as an idea and as a spatial imaginary (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
The increased social sciences and humanities’ interest in home led to mistaking home for haven. Home is something beyond a house, it refers to community, family and somewhere where people experience conditional acceptance. Home is more than a place to protect from the outside world, its boundaries lead to wider political and social locations. It is a place where the power relations of a broader society such as ethnicity, relations of gender and class are played out (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
Studies on forced migration uncritically embraced the policy of categorizing refugees, internally displacing individuals and additional terms as “main categories of analysis”. Many narratives of forced migration’s key features in the “national order of thing” defined home as elsewhere, misplaced refugees and the attached bond between homeland and home. The development of such connections between forced migration and home is the outcome of notions of limbo and the fixing of people in place. Sara Ahmed drew an analysis to explain the relationship between movement and home without forming a dichotomy between home as stasis and migration as movement. She undermined the concept of migration and its usage in theorizing the identity established on movement or loss. Nevertheless, she did not easily support dispensing “with any differentiation of home and away” because people’s identity does not change if they remain in one place or leave to one that feels home (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
Protracted Displacement in a Globalized World
“No solution in sight” was the description of protracted displacement according to the policy of the refugee and forced migration. This description leads people to put their lives at risk and to find themselves in an intractable and long-lasting state of limbo; however, their essential social, economic and psychological needs as well as their basic rights remain unsatisfied after years in exile. The international community’s predominant response has been intensely criticized as the “warehousing” of people (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
Although a lot of the recognized conditions of protracted displacement are linked with internally displaced people and encampments for refugees; however, there are more people being displaced outside caps who have dwell and produced in many spaces (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
In addition to the instability of unprotected neighborhoods for those in protracted displacement, there are strategies believed to inspire people’s readiness to return or to be “put back into place”. These strategies frequently involve limited access to other citizen rights and restrictions to property ownership (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
Living in Protracted Displacement: Immobilized Temporariness
Protracted displacement is now being described as “limbo” which gives the impression of a locked, fixed and therefore a static situation where people search for a better life. Yet, people often describe protracted displacement as “betwixt and between” a previous home and a new home. A lot of displaced people describe their experience through dual terms. However, in this outwardly static set of situations, homemaking occurs when people try to reconstruct familiarity, imagine a better future and advance their material conditions. To understand the methods where homemaking practices occur during displacement, we move towards a vocabulary of liminality that seizes the simultaneous procedures of control, marginalization, stasis and transformation and flows (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
The feminization of settled refugees also supports “the attribution of certain programs, practices and identities as passive, helpless, static”. These people are exposed to detention, abuse and deportations because of their “in-between” legal status.
In spite of the weak legal position and risky political and socio-economic conditions of forced migrants in protracted situations, sponsors of this issue prove that the work of homemaking does not cease (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
Constellations of Home
In the recent political context “place” and “emplacement” are the terms used to refer to large groups of people who are “out of place” although they are in a “fixed place”. This human capacity taking place to navigate uncertainty is practiced even when international agencies, local administrations and governments deal with these circumstances as “fixed” and their occupants as “in limbo”. This involves engaging with the idea of home for immobilized forced migrants. A lot of people in positions of protracted displacement will keep on thinking about their futures and organizing their daily lives even when their capabilities decide to appear curtailed, and even when their homemaking habits are created by uncertainty and hardship. It was suggested that these concepts happen concurrently when the people who hold them mobile among various locations to generate “constellations of home” that are a very complex idea of home (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
A further definition of constellations of home is traditions, memories, values and subjective feelings of home. The idea of home in the discussions of “home and displacement” is where displaced people dream and long for. As the writer of this special issue highlights, the concept of home articulated during protracted displacement is referenced to a more generalized ideal in specific socio-cultural contexts and affects domestic practices in temporary dwellings. The ultimate Home for forced migrants in protracted situations is shown in the dwelling, yet it is articulated in different scales (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
The final definition is coping with homemaking in protracted displacement needs engaging with the actual institutionalized meaning of Home for the existing global order. The idea of “homeland” is completely politicized for forced migrants who idealize their Home. The focus here is on the broader historical and political context where home is experienced and understood by the displaced people as well as the perpetrators of violence, nationalist exclusion and policy-makers who address protracted displacement as “durable solutions”. It also refers to the nation’s geopolitics and home that contributes to the ways where politics of home and the conditions of protracted displacement are essentially implicated in the reasons of displacement (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
Making Home in “Limbo”? A Feminist Proposition
From the feminist approach of the agentive work of making home, it helps us to empty the gendered features of control that is derived from the static understanding of home. A more dynamic perception of home is proposed in this special issue. In this approach, making home is different from homemaking. The term “making home” is defined as ways where home is established in protracted displacement in the dynamic relationship amid home-Home-HOME (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
Looking at the concept of making of home through constellations of home involves locating ethnographies in a broader context, and the pioneers of this issue engage with a variety of methods to make this a wider understanding of the political context (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
The influence on the understandings of making home is to bring the focus on the politics of immobilized temporariness for people who continue to think that home is found in a series of different places across time and space, and it acts within circumscribed political, historical and geographic contexts to create domestic spaces (Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos, 2015).
Bibliography
Catherine Brun and Anita Fábos. (2015). Making Homes in Limbo? A Conceptual Framework.
