New Book: Struggles for Home. Violence, Hope and Movement of People

This volume deals with the dynamics and effects of violence and movement as two of the most obvious processes challenging the meaning and taken-for-grantedness of 'home'. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the chapters lay out the ground for analyzing home and home-making without taking nationalized, sedentarist notions of home as their unquestioned point of departure.

In the postscript Finn Stepputat discusses four important themes appearing in the volume: the meaning of home as 'a space of possibilities' which is shattered by violence and displacement; the importance of analyzing how power works to reconstitute societies and states through displacement and emplacement; the experience of loss of home in situations when people are confined to certain places, bereft of the possibility of movement; and the questionable myth of homelessness as a kind of liberation.

The book is published by Berghahn Books