Introduction

Exploring home in migration research has become a vast field that has developed in different directions. An important and interesting aspect of this area is understanding the concept of home from and within dynamics of public spaces, where migrants are physically and emotionally in the presence of others. Public space, in understanding the relationship between emotions and home, is less explored than domestic space, where people construct more private and intimate relationships with objects, close members of family or others, and interior spaces of home. This chapter focuses on ‘spatial belonging’ as it forms in the exteriors of domestic homes for young male migrants who live in Cork, Ireland. The chapter is based on a recent ethnography, Youth-Home, that I conducted with young migrant men on the notion of home. Here, I focus on participants’ significant emotions that are involved in relation to the notion of home in Cork. The chapter first draws on recent literature on emotional geographies of home, before moving on to the methodological approach taken in this study and a presentation and discussion of findings.

Emotional geographies of home: a theoretical framework

‘Home’, as a central concept in sociology and the geography of migration, has developed in different directions (Ahmed et al, 2003; Basu, 2004; Walsh, 2011; Kochan, 2016; Boccagni, 2017; Geurts et al, 2021). In much of this multidisciplinary literature, the concept of home is understood in a wider sense than a house or a dwelling (Mallett, 2004) and is more commonly equated to a place of belonging and familiarity (Ahmed, 1999; Savaş, 2010). It is also linked to a longing for one's ‘homeland’, where ties to past lives and identification with the ‘country of origin’ inform practices and feelings after migration (Flynn, 2007). Home also encompasses a variety of ‘the sensory world of everyday experience’ (Ahmed, 1999, p 341; Vanni Accarigi, 2017). Home is an ‘ambiguous site’ (Schroder, 2006) that is composed of the interconnection between protective and limiting characteristics at the same time. Mallett (2004) argues that ‘home is a place but it is also a space inhabited by family, people, things and belongings – a familiar, if not comfortable, space where particular activities and relationships are “lived” ‘(Mallett, 2004, p 63).