Feeling The Home/Feeling At Home: a Translocal Multisensoriality Of Home

The metaphor of "home" is often used by migrants in reference to their sense of belonging— both from a long-term perspective as a process of settling in a new location, and in the context of temporary experiences of familiarity that evoke a sense of home in the here and now. This presentation, employing a multisensory research perspective, focuses on the meanings, contexts, and metaphors of "home" as experienced through the sensory perceptions of migrants. It aims to present and discuss the practices of Poles in Norway and Ukrainians in Poland oriented toward (re)creating a sense of home in their new localities through multisensory practices such as cooking and food consumption, (re)producing scents, seeking familiar landscapes, and mobilizing bodily movement to feel at home.
Theoretically, this presentation is grounded in the reflective turn in migration studies (Amelina 2021), which considers migratory processes as socially constructed. Similarly, the concept of "home" is seen here as a construct of familiarity that simultaneously both aligns with a modern perspective of a normalization of immobility while also breaks with it thanks to a translocational nature of sensory impressions that materialize home in the context of migration.
Methodologically, the presentation is based on qualitative research using visual/multisensory methods. It draws on empirical data collected in 104 qualitative, photo-elicitation interviews conducted with Poles in Norway and Ukrainians in Poland within the HerInt project: Cultural heritage participation patterns among immigrants and their influence on integration. The case of Ukrainians in Poland and Poles in Norway.
Keywords: sensory anthropology, belonging, home, migration, multisensoriality

Neslihan Sriram-Uzundal ∆ & Farideh Shahriari ∆ (Education, Concordia University, Canada; Education, McGill University, Canada)
Refusing to Disappear: Racialized Resistance, Land Sovereignty, and the Myth of Migration as Liberation

This paper investigates the intersecting experiences of Black Baluch women in Sistan and Baluchestan, Iran, and the daughters and sons of Turkish and Greek guest workers in Germany, arguing that for racialized and colonized communities, migration is often less a solution and more a perpetuation of systemic oppression. Both case studies reveal how state-imposed displacement policies and structural racism force minorities into precarious positions of “in-betweenness,” challenging the notion of mobility as empowerment. Together, these cases illustrate how forced displacement and migration sustain colonial and racist structures. By juxtaposing these narratives, the paper introduces the concept of rooted fugitivity: a refusal to abandon one’s physical or cultural place, challenging systems of erasure while imagining alternative, sovereign futures. This theoretical contribution reframes resistance not as mere survival but as the active cultivation of autonomous possibilities that subvert state-imposed spatial, racial, and temporal constraints.
Keywords: migration, geopolitics, racism, oppression, colonization

Nassim Zand Dizari ∆ (UBC Okanagan, Canada)

Entwined Echoes

For Iranian self-identified women, public spaces in Iran have long been contested realms— segregated by gender and restrictive of bodily practices and sensorial expressions (Zarabadi 2023). Throughout the displacement trajectory, an Iranian refugee woman encounter an unfolding sensorial experience, between a physical and imaginative built environment, between here and there. This research stands in the threshold of such in betweenness to investigates the way in which bodily memories (Casey 1987) and sensorial registers (Ahmed 1999) emerge and influence the process of placemaking for recent Iranian women refugees in Metro Vancouver. Grounded in my ongoing sonic ethnographic fieldwork and approached from a feminist and decolonial standpoint, this study opens a dialogue about the daily sonic encounters of Iranian newcomer women living in Vancouver, exploring their personal narratives and critical listening positionalities (Robinson 2020). Central to this exploration is the Iranian notion of "Patogh/Patogh-Sazi"—a quintessential concept in everyday public life that refers to the places and ways individuals cultivate a sense of belonging within a built environment. By focusing on the aurality of these public space corners, the research explores how the relational and subjective listening practices of Iranian women refugees shape their sense of belonging or alienation within Vancouver's urban spaces.

Keywords sound, displacement, public space, sonic ethnography, Iranian diaspora