Events

Programme

Roundtable 1: Homemaking and migration

12:20- 12:30 Introduction – Mastoureh Fathi, UCC

12:30-13:15 Francesco Cerchiaro, Radbound University
Making Home, Reconstructing Identity: Fatherhood and Belonging in Mixed Families

Q and A (10 mins)

13:30-14:15 Rik Huizinga, Utrecht University

Carving out a place to belong: On Syrian refugee homemaking, gendered everyday geographies and the intersectional politics of place in the Netherlands.

Q and A (10 mins)

14:30-14:50 Tea/coffee break

Roundtable 2: Structural Im/possibilities of making a home in migration

15:00-15:40 Tabea Scarrer, Bayreuth University

To go the (un)straight line. Structural conditions of placemaking for Somali migrants in Germany

Q and A (10 mins)

15:50-16:30 - Arshad Isakjee, Liverpool University

Actually-existing asylum: the material politics of ‘the Game’ through the Balkan Route

Q and A (10 mins)

16:40 – Closing remarks

Registration

To attend, please register by 3 November at https://forms.office.com/e/mrr3ZB6Cwa 

Book of Abstracts

Francesco Cerchiaro, Radbound University

Making Home, Reconstructing Identity: Fatherhood and Belonging in Mixed Families

This talk examines how mixed families involving Muslim migrant men and non-Muslim partners turn the domestic space into a site of identity reconstruction and family meaning-making. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on mixed families in Europe — including a PhD and postdoctoral research in Italy (2010–2018), a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (2018–2020), and an FWO Senior Fellowship (2020–2022) with fieldwork in Belgium and France — the contribution explores the making home out of home as both a material and symbolic process. With a particular focus on migrant fathers with a Muslim background in these relationships, it investigates how these men reconfigure their sense of self, masculinity, and care in contexts where home and belonging are negotiated across cultural and religious boundaries.

Building on my theoretical model of identity reconstruction (Cerchiaro 2020, 2024), which moves beyond the paradigm of identity “loss” as a result of intermarriage, the talk interprets mixed families as spaces of cultural creativity rather than erosion. Through everyday practices of care, negotiation, and spiritual redefinition, these men engage in forms of placemaking that reconfigure the boundaries between public and private, religion and secularity, difference and sameness.

In doing so, the contribution highlights how fatherhood becomes a key arena where the emotional, moral, and spatial dimensions of belonging converge. Within mixed families, fatherhood and home-making are deeply intertwined, as men’s engagement in care, domesticity, and emotional work gives form to both the physical and symbolic borders of family life. Through these practices, mixedness emerges not merely as a descriptive feature of difference but as a productive lens through which to understand home as a metaphor for family-making across shifting cultural, moral, and spatial boundaries.

By framing home-making as a process of identity reconstruction rather than identity loss, this talk reinterprets cultural diversity as an active and generative field of symbolic boundary-making. It moves beyond normative approaches to migration and integration that emphasize assimilation, showing instead how mixed families transform everyday domestic life and reshape the meaning of home as a moral and affective space of belonging.

Rik Huizinga

Carving out a place to belong: On Syrian refugee homemaking, gendered everyday geographies and the intersectional politics of place in the Netherlands

Forcibly displaced men and masculinities are increasingly marginalized due to anti-migration and anti-refugee sentiments within polarized societal and institutional contexts across the globe. In the Netherlands, Syrian men and masculinities in particular tend to be socially constructed as ‘undesired’ and ‘dangerous’ in public and political debates in the Netherlands due their presumed incompatibility with imagined ‘Dutch’ gender roles and relations. Hence, Syrian male migrants are often framed as a security threat which reproduces gender-essentialist understandings of vulnerability, refugeeness and asylum deservingness. This is harmful to all gender and intersecting identities that seek refuge as these societal perceptions have a deep impact in the everyday lives of those involved.

In this talk, I disentangle the intersections of societal perceptions and everyday life by discussing homemaking practices of young Syrian male refugees in the northern part of the Netherlands. It is based on a qualitative study with young Syrian men in the Netherlands as part of the doctoral thesis I defended in 2022. I focus on how these men re-live, re-imagine and re-produce home and belonging by using and claiming space in mostly unfamiliar host society spaces. Based on an intersectional life course analysis, I examine how  they enact various forms of masculinities as ‘strategic performances’, that is, a gender identity socially constructed and performed in relation to identities, ideologies, institutions and (transnational) geographies.

The analysis demonstrates that for most participants everyday life in the Netherlands is perceived as an oppressive space of shame, violence and (im)possibilities. They construct masculinities predominantly in relation to labor market access, social status and discrimination. These experiences however are differentiated by age, class, race and religion as well as the social and physical characteristics of the everyday spaces they traverse. Within this restrictive context, the findings also show how Syrian men actively shape and contribute to meaningful places to find home and belonging, which contributes to spaces of care, community and conviviality in both local and transnational spaces. They are emotionally connected to and inhabit multiple spaces and temporalities at once, illustrated by the transnational circulation of emotions, care and remittances. These insights highlight the messy realities of everyday life in forced displacement, differentiated experiences of oppression and privilege, and the way spatiality and intersectionality are articulated in these experiences.

I argue that investigating these ideas helps to understand forcibly displaced men and masculinities in more nuanced ways, ultimately contributing to addressing societal challenges and realizing the progressive potential of ‘the geographies of migrant masculinities’. To promote equal gender roles and relations for all in the context of migration, it is essential to redraw the boundaries of masculinities to understand how migration as a gendered and gendering process influences and perpetuates inequalities.

Tabea Scarrer

To go the (un)straight line. Structural conditions of placemaking for Somali migrants in Germany

This presentation does not deal with homemaking as such, but rather with the structural conditions of settling and placemaking. By following the migration histories of two Somali migrants in Germany, I will discuss how experiences before and while moving to Europe influence the ways in which they able to build a new life. Furthermore, I will explore five dimensions of settling – in addition to drawing on Bourdieu's notion of economic, cultural and social capital, I will examine legal capital and housing. All five dimensions have a significant influence on how forced migrants in Germany are able to settle and establish a new home. The presentation is based on long-term fieldwork conducted in Kenya, Germany, and Austria.

Arshad Isakjee

Actually-existing asylum: the material politics of ‘the Game’ through the Balkan Route

Actually-existing asylum is not so much a right to be claimed, but a Game to be ‘won’. To cross into the Western EU states via the Balkan route, migrants must evade a host of border technologies designed to repel them, including outright physical violence. Migrants routinely describe this spatialised struggle to cross borders as ‘the Game’. This paper explores what factors make for a successful ‘Game’ of migration across the Balkan route. Access to wealth, the capacity to endure bodily harms, and the ability to ‘pass’ as a white-European all help to determine the success of reaching intended destinations in relative safety - but access to material and monetary resources remains paramount. This has significant implications for the ways in which geographers conceive of migration and sanctuary; in practice, those who lack financial resources, those with physical limitations and those negatively racialised have greater difficulty finding the legal protection of asylum that most seek. This paper argues that to comprehend the implications of the Game, and to understand asylum in Europe as it actually exists, geographers must directly unsettle the bifurcation of ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘economic migrants’ and instead foreground a material analysis of asylum and migration - together with one that implicates race as a technology of European border violence.

Biographical notes:

Francesco Cerchiaro is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Diversity at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He is a cultural sociologist with a specific interest in cultural diversity, which he explores through the domains of family, migration, and religion. He holds a PhD in Social Sciences (2013) from the University of Padua, Italy. He has been awarded multiple competitive international research grants, including a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (European Commission) and an FWO Senior Fellowship (Flanders Research Foundation) for studies on mixedness, in particular on Christian–Muslim families. His current research focuses on high-skilled migrants and on halal dating apps (Faith Meets Swipe, funded by the Dutch Research Council - NWO) as spaces of moral negotiation and belonging. He has extensively published, contributing to debates on mixedness, migration, masculinity, religious pluralism, and the symbolic dimensions of sociological theory.

Rik Huizinga is an Assistant Professor in ‘Urban Geographies of Migration, Gender and Youth’ at the Human Geography and Spatial Planning Department of Utrecht University (UU). His research draws upon debates in social and cultural geography to investigate new and problematic relations in the context of globalization, migration and societal change. Rik’s main areas of research include topics around gender, masculinity and intersectionality; refugees, migration and settlement; and young people, identity and (in)equalities. He is also interested in issues related to qualitative and participatory methods such as positionality, reflexivity and research ethics. His work draws attention to the ways in which structural forms of marginalization (ageism, racism, sexism, capitalism) shape peoples’ everyday lives and highlights the variegated forms of resistance people display to counter exclusionary practices. His doctoral dissertation ‘Making Home in Forced Displacement: Young Syrian Men Navigating Geographies of Migration, Masculinities and Belonging’ applies a relational and intersectional perspective to study the gendered politics of home after forced resettlement. As a postdoctoral researcher in the HERA funded project ‘Refugee Youth and Public Space’, he investigated the dynamic ways in which young asylum seekers and refugees experience, use and claim public space to secure a sense of belonging in a hostile climate. Rik has published on gender, masculinities and forced migration-related issues in high-quality journals such as Gender, Place and Culture, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Geoforum and Urban Geography. He also co-authored the entry on ‘Masculinities’ in the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography by Elsevier. He is currently a member of the Gender, Sexuality and Migration (GenSeM) steering group of IMISCOE.

Tabea Scharrer is a social anthropologist working on migration, inequality, and religion at the University of Bayreuth and as Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Tabea has conducted research in refugee camps in Tanzania, about Islamic missionary movements in East Africa, and with Somali migrants in Kenyan urban areas and in several European cities. Her publications include a monograph on narratives of conversion to Islam (Narrative islamischer Konversion: Biographische Erzählungen konvertierter Muslime in Ostafrika, transcript, 2013) and two co-edited volumes on Middle Classes in Africa (Palgrave, 2018) and on Mobile Urbanity. Somali Urban Presence in East Africa (Berghahn, 2019). In addition, she co-edited the first German-language handbook on forced migration research (Handbuch Flucht- und Flüchtlingsforschung, Nomos, 2023). She is member of the editorial board of Comparative Migration Studies.

Arshad Isakjee is a senior lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Liverpool. He has researched irregular migration into Europe and the EU; with a specific interest in people moving along the so-called Balkan route. He has also led a 3-year project on Channel Crossings which is coming to a close.