While the nation remains critical to much of this work, migrants’ domestic
homes are also connected to past, present, imagined or future ‘homelands’ (Skrbis
1999, Burrell 2008, Datta 2008) – perspectives which locate the home in ‘a
relationally linked range of localities’ (Jacobs 2004: 167). The migrant home can
thus also be described as translocal in ways that it is shaped by consumption,
remittances, and social networks; by actual home-building, and by a range of
connections to other homes in other localities. These homes are the sites where
cultural difference and ‘otherness’ is constructed, lived, and negotiated through
the ambiguous relationships between mobility and migration. In turn, these issues
confront us with a number of questions which we ask in this volume – where do
home-spaces end, how far do they extend, and how are the spaces between home,
locale, and homeland negotiated?