Migration, Work and Home-Making in the City

Dwelling and Belonging among Vietnamese Communities in London

Annabelle Wilkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138577176
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351267663
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the relationships between home, work and migration among Vietnamese people in East London, demonstrating the diversity of home-making practices and forms of belonging in relation to the dwelling, workplace and wider city. Engaging with wider scholarship on transnationalism, urban mobilities and the geopolitical dimensions of home among migrants and diasporic communities, the author draws on ethnographic work to examine the experiences of people who migrated from Vietnam to London at different times and in diverse circumstances, including individuals who arrived as refugees in the 1970s, as well as those who have migrated for work or education in recent years. Migration, Work and Home-Making in the City thus sheds new light on the social, material and spiritual practices through which people create senses of home that connect them with their country of origin, and reveals how home-making is constrained by immigration policies, insecure housing and precarious work, thus highlighting the barriers to belonging in the city.

1 Conceptualising home, work and migration in urban contexts

This book begins from the concept of home as a spatial, embodied, imagined and symbolic site and process that is experienced at multiple scales, including within a dwelling, in relation to neighbourhoods, cities and nations and across transnational space (Blunt and Dowling 2006). While there are large and diverse areas of scholarship on transnational migration, migrant livelihoods and cosmopolitan encounters in the city, as well as an expanding body of research relating to home, a relatively small number of studies have examined the inter-relationships between these broad themes (Blunt and Sheringham 2018, Blunt and Bonnerjee 2013). East London has a long history as a site of migration, settlement and cultural diversity, and has been widely studied in geography, history, sociology and literature (Eade et al. 2002, Hamnett and Butler 2011, Kershen 2005, Sinclair 2011; 2009). In contrast to the large body of work on migration to East London among a diverse range of populations, Vietnamese communities in London have received little scholarly attention (Barber 2015). In focusing on Vietnamese migrants in London, this volume does not assume that ‘the Vietnamese’ constitute a homogenous community’. Instead, this book situates Vietnamese migrants within the increasing ‘super-diversity’ that characterises East London and the city as a whole (Vertovec 2007). It focuses on experiences of home, work and mobility between East London and Vietnam, examining the material, embodied and emotional connections between home and work, as well as translocal relationships between Vietnam and East London.

A growing number of scholars argue that migration studies should attend to relationships between mobility and dwelling rather than reinforcing artificial boundaries between migration and settlement, or the local and the transnational (Blunt and Bonnerjee 2013, Datta 2011, Pratt 2004). This book builds upon the recognition that migrants’ everyday lives are local and emplaced as well as transnational, acknowledging that the city may be a more significant site of home than the nation (Blunt and Bonnerjee 2013: 224). In addition to emphasising relationships between movement and dwelling in the everyday lives of transnational migrants, the book builds upon understandings of home not only as a dwelling or spatial location, but also as a set of experiences and emotions that are continually recreated through the practices of those who inhabit it (Blunt and Dowling 2006, Pilkey et al. 2015). However, in addition to emphasising the ways in which home is made and re-made by individuals, I also recognise the ways in which home is shaped by wider power relations (Blunt and Dowling 2006, Brickell 2014; 2012). The book extends scholarship that reveals the ways in which external forces enter the intimate space of the home, but also emphasises the home as a site from which agency and resistance are mobilised (Brickell 2014). It becomes clear throughout the book that migrants’ access to housing and wider senses of home are intertwined with, and often contingent upon, their immigration status.

This chapter is divided into four sections, each examining one of the broad conceptual frameworks that are drawn upon throughout the book. It begins with an analysis of inter-disciplinary perspectives on home, including the recognition of relationships between home and homeland, home and work and the emergence of critical geographies of home (Blunt 2005, Blunt and Dowling 2006, Brickell and Datta 2011, Hamlett and Hoskins 2011). The second section engages with some of the key conceptual debates within migration and transnational studies, exploring how this literature has theorised transnational homes and practices of home-making among diasporic communities (Al-Ali and Koser 2002, Burrell 2008, Conradson and Latham 2005, Salih 2002, Tolia-Kelly 2004, Walsh 2006). The third part of the chapter positions this book in relation to a range of theoretical approaches surrounding the city, with a particular focus on the processes through which London and other global cities have been shaped by migration. I argue that frameworks emphasising migrants’ experiences of inhabiting, navigating and belonging in the city are particularly relevant to this book, drawing upon ideas of urban learning, navigation and encounter in contexts of super-diversity (McFarlane 2011a, Knowles 2014, Vertovec 2007). Finally, the chapter introduces the methodological approaches that underpin the book, arguing that a combined emphasis on participants’ narratives, ethnographic and visual methods is needed to fully explore participants’ migration trajectories and practices alongside memories of past homes and imagined future homes.

Home and homeland

Writing on the relationship between space and place, Tuan (1977) evocatively describes the multiple scales at which home can be experienced:

Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to one and long for the other. There is no place like home. What is home? It is the old homestead, the old neighbourhood, hometown, or motherland.

Tuan 1977: 3

Tuan’s description highlights the uniqueness of home as a focus for simultaneous attachments to family, land and nation, as a material dwelling and an emotional relationship. Tuan (1977) emphasises that home is often considered in relation to a temporal past: the ‘old homestead’ and neighbourhood are remembered with nostalgia as places of comfort and safety. At times, people yearn for the freedom of the world beyond the home, but its familiar security makes home a place to which they long to return. This book, however, contributes to a body of scholarship that questions these ingrained, often taken-for-granted ideas about home as a place of nurture or private refuge from the external world. Home is understood as a spatial location and an emotional experience that exists at multiple scales, including in relation to a dwelling, neighbourhood, region, nation and across transnational space (Blunt and Dowling 2006). While this definition of home reveals some parallels with Tuan’s humanistic perspective, critical geographers draw attention to the ways in which home may not be a place of security and comfort. For many people, home is associated with insecurity, violence and isolation, and may be a site of conflict, displacement or oppression (Blunt and Dowling 2006, Brickell 2012a, 2012b). Building on the aforementioned scholarship, this book recognises that home often exists within experiences of mobility and that an individual may feel a sense of home within multiple contexts (Al-Ali and Koser 2002, Blunt and Dowling 2006).

In contrast with much of Tuan’s writing on home, this book demonstrates that home is intertwined with wider power relations. It is now well established that, for many people, home is not regarded as separate from work; indeed, home is often a place of work in itself (Blunt and Dowling 2006, Hamlett and Hoskins 2011). The home is a site of the unpaid, often invisible work of maintaining a household and caring for family members, as well as diverse forms of paid work that are performed within or from the home.

The topic of home is an expanding area of research that spans multiple disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. This diversity of academic interest is reflected in the numerous diverse ways in which home has been theorised, including as a site and extension of personal identity, and a process in which home and its inhabitants transform each other (Dovey 1985, Mallett 2004, Miller 2001). Within housing studies, home has been broadly understood in terms of its role as a source of shelter, with its economic, social and policy-related aspects being emphasised (Forrest and Murie 1992, Jacobs and Smith 2008). However, geographies of home have moved beyond a focus on housing as a route to conceptualising home, arguing that a house may not always be experienced as a ‘home’, and that home may be located and established beyond the house (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 10).

Heidegger’s (1971) opposition between building and dwelling challenged the idea that home exists solely as a physical structure, offering an understanding of dwelling as a form of Being in the world (Heidegger 1971, Martinez 2014). Heidegger defined dwelling in terms of a state of being cared for and protected, regarding it as an essential part of human existence (Heidegger 1971). Within the concept of Heimat, home was understood as a place that enables a state of dwelling in which people can rest, take care of themselves and others and feel a sense of belonging (Martinez 2014: 36). The concept of Heimat also reaches beyond the individual dwelling, encompassing ideas of the nation as a homeland. Attachments to the homeland are frequently evoked through ideas of permanence and rootedness in the ‘native soil’ in which an individual’s identity is situated within the lineage of their ancestors (Malkki 1992). However, concepts of Heimat also emphasise a sense of ownership and territoriality over the land that depends upon the exclusion of or triumph over others (Tuan 1977). Several scholars note the reactionary risks of place-based identity politics, which are often grounded in ideas of origins, blood and prejudice against those who are defined as outsiders (Kaplan 2003, Malkki 1992, Morley 2000). Walters (2004) proposed the concept of ‘domopolitics’ to describe the ways in which states govern political spaces as home. Domopolitics mobilises ideas of the nation as ‘homeland’: a site of belonging, familiarity and security in which ‘we belong naturally, and where, by definition, others do not’ (Walters 2004: 241).

Relationships between home and homeland are highly relevant to the themes addressed in this book. They articulate the multiple meanings and scales of home, as well as the powerful impact of migration upon broader ideas of home and where or when it is located. Ideas of the ancestral homeland as being at the centre of the universe are important within Vietnamese concepts of home, family and nation (Jellema 2007a). These principles are closely associated with religious and spiritual practice, including rituals of care for deceased ancestors and gods who are believed to protect the home, village or city (McAllister 2012). Similar ideas can be found in a range of cultures, in which the home is regarded as the link between the spiritual and the domestic, connecting the individual in space with their living relatives and in time through connections with their ancestors (Tuan 1977). This book examines Vietnamese ideas of home (nhà) and homeland (quê hu’’ng), exploring the overlapping dimensions of dwelling, family and homeland and how participants’ attachments to home are affected by migration. However, it also draws upon perspectives that critique ideas of the nation as homeland among diasporic communities (Blunt and Bonnerjee 2013).

Heidegger argued that in order to understand what it means to be at home, we must first experience the contrast between the homely (heimlich) and unhomely (unheimlich). The idea of the unhomely has also been described in terms of the ‘uncanny’, and can refer to experiences of strangeness and unfamiliarity that disrupt the usually familiar, intimate idea of home (Lipman 2014). However, Martinez (2014) notes that, in Heidegger’s analysis, ‘the foreign and the return to home are inseparable, as the foreign contains within itself the promise of return’ (Martinez 2014: 38). Connections between dwelling and journeying, the homely and unhomely are particularly relevant to relationships between home and migration. Several studies emphasise how the concept of home becomes an important symbol for people who migrate, but also how processes of migration lead to new understandings of home (Al-Ali and Koser 2002, Boccagni 2017, Blunt and Dowling 2006). Other literature emphasises the dialectical relationship between leaving and returning in the context of Vietnamese migration (Jellema 2007b). While Vietnamese people are called to return to the ‘original homeland’ in order to venerate their ancestors, these returns are accepted as occasional and temporary, and regarded as being compatible with mobility and separation.

Relationships between the homely and the unhomely also relate to distinctions between public and private, the home and the world, both of which are disrupted by migration. In a re-working of the concept of unheimlich, Bhabha (1994) draws upon ideas of liminality, arguing that the in-between position of the migrant and the transitional experience of migration destabilise the taken-for-granted categories of public and private. In a discussion of relationships between home and work for immigrant women in Barcelona, Nair (2015) draws upon Bhabha’s engagement with liminality and unheimlich alongside Arendt’s work on the potential for everyday actions to contribute to broader social change and the empowerment of the marginalised. Nair argues that the everyday presence of migrants disrupts the categories of the home and the world:

The liminal signals an in-between space, one where discrete categories become confused, where the private and the public, the home and the world lose their specificities in favour of shifting and contingent spaces of uncertainty – precisely, the premises upon which the deterritorialized engage in a politics of empowerment.

Nair 2015

This book contributes to literature that unsettles boundaries between public and private through its focus on the significance of migrants’ everyday practices and mobilities as actions that have the potential to re-shape the city and to challenge fixed boundaries between home and work, mobility and dwelling.

Home and work

In addition to examining the spatial, material and emotional significance of home, this book builds upon literature that challenges views of home as a place ‘to which one withdraws and from which one enters forth’ (Tuan 1971: 189). These ideals of home have also been criticised for their lack of attention to the conflicts and power inequalities that exist within homes. Critical feminist scholars have argued for a reframing of domestic labour as reproductive labour, enabling a new understanding of economic relations within which domestic work is included (Mitchell et al. 2003, Young 1981). As growing numbers of women have entered paid work outside the home, feminist scholars have argued that women face a ‘dual burden’ of paid work and domestic responsibilities (Bradley 1999, Hochschild 1989). Building on these perspectives, scholars of home have highlighted the intertwined nature of home and work, interrogating the idea of separate ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres (Blunt and Dowling 2006, England 2010). Focusing on the intersections between gender, work and migration, Amrith and Sahraoui (2018) examine the experiences of migrants employed in sectors of the economy that are typically regarded as marginal, including domestic work and care work in private homes, with the goal of understanding the aspirations and mobilities of migrants and their families (Amrith and Sahraoui 2018). Exploring links between home and work demonstrates that ideas of public and private, home and work are constructed and experienced through particular social, historical and geographical conditions (Santos 2015). Hamlett and Hoskins (2011: 111) define work as ‘encompassing both economically productive activity … and the less immediately quantifiable household work that supports the material and social well-being of a household’. This description highlights the often fluid boundaries of work, particularly that which is performed within the home. Research on the theme of ‘home-work’ has focused on paid and unpaid work undertaken in the home within a range of contexts, including cleaning, food preparation, administrative tasks and childcare (England 2010, Oberhauser 1995). Other scholarship has focused on home and work in terms of the boundaries between them (Nippert-Eng 1995, Sturges 2012, Warhurst et al. 2008). Nippert-Eng (1995) notes the importance of everyday objects such as calendars, clothing and keys in maintaining boundaries between home and work, arguing that the ‘boundary work’ involved in maintaining these realms also relates to concepts of the self and identity. Other research frames these relationships in terms of ‘work-life balance’, often focusing on the tensions and conflicts that can occur as a result of ‘spillover’ between work and home life (Ashforth 2000, Ekinsmyth 2014, Warhurst et al. 2008). However, amongst the current literature on home and work, few studies examine the possibilities of feeling a sense of home or belonging through work – particularly for migrant workers, whose experiences are often framed within a focus on precarity, livelihoods and coping strategies, or within the domain of ‘highly skilled’ migration (Beaverstock 2005, Favell 2008, Lewis et al. 2015, Wills et al. 2010). My book contributes to the literature on geographies of home, work and migration through its focus on inter-relationships between home, work, mobility and the city among Vietnamese migrants in East London. It explores the multiple forms of paid and unpaid work that are performed within participants’ homes and how these forms of work have been reconfigured through migration, tracing the particular histories of work among Vietnamese communities in East London. The volume also addresses relationships between places and practices of work, examining how work may enable migrants to feel a sense of home, identity or belonging in the city.

Migration and transnational studies

Following its emergence during the 1990s, the concept of transnationalism became widely acknowledged as a useful framework for theorising the processes that are associated with migration, with a particular focus on the ways in which relationships and practices are reconfigured by mobility (Conradson and Latham 2005). Transnationalism refers to the processes by which immigrants ‘forge and sustain multistranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement’ (Basch et al. 1994: 7). While research on transnationalism was initially focused on migration flows to the US (Kearney 1995, Basch et al. 1994, Foner 1997), its use has broadened to explore how economic, social and cultural practices and communities are formed and transformed across transnational space. Transnationalism was viewed as closely related to the impact of globalisation upon economic and socio-cultural contexts, facilitating new relationships and practices that required new research perspectives (Basch et al. 1994, Hannerz 1996, Portes 1996, Smith 2001). However, while several migration scholars argued that transnationalism was a new type of migrant experience that required new concepts, others point out that many transnational social, political and economic relationships actually have a long history. Foner (1997: 355) compares migration to New York in the early twentieth century with more recent migration flows, arguing that ‘while there are new dynamics to immigrants’ transnational connections and communities today, there are also significant continuities with the past’. Migration scholars have since examined the ways in which places are linked through everyday practices such as financial remittances (Vertovec 1999, Datta et al. 2007), as well as transnational political relationships, religious practices and ideas of citizenship (Levitt 2001, Bermudez 2010).

Alongside this proliferation of theories of transnationalism, an emphasis on movement within a range of disciplines led to the emergence of a ‘new mobilities paradigm’, in which social relationships were produced through the movement of people, objects and information (Urry 2007: 48). However, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptualising home, work and migration in urban contexts
• 2 Locating East London’s Vietnamese communities
• 3 Routes, journeys and encounters: experiences of departure and arrival
• 4 Home, work and the city: between Vietnam and East London
• 5 Material, emotional and spiritual homes
• 6 Future homes, mobilities and (im)possibilities of belonging
• 7 Conclusion: where is home in the super-diverse city?
• Participant biographies
• Bibliography
• Index