The aims of these preparatory workshops was to explore the extended possibilities that visual ethnographies could play in the understanding of migrants’ experiences of home and their practices of homemaking by creating a space of care and ease where research participants were able to explore the textures of  home and homemaking individually and collectively.  

 

Facilitated by artist Henrik Teleman, with the support of Chris Hands, the workshops consisted of two 6 hour-long ‘parties’. The 14 migrant participants were introduced to each other in advance through a dedicated phone App and invited to bring objects and visuals connected to home and homemaking and a ’home’ dish to share.  As co-researchers participants maintained contact with the group between and after the workshops and gained the experience of being researchers of their own lives and reflecting collectively on the multi-scalarity of migrant homemaking. This encompassed (i) home as daily practices of homemaking (ii) Home as a retrospection, representing values, traditions, memories, and feelings of home (iii) HOME as embedded in the current global order and predetermined by institutions (Brun and Fabos, 2020).

 

The workshops resulted in a re-calibration of MaHoMe’s visual ethnographic methodologies that was shared with researchers in Denmark and Sweden who were developing parallel workshops. They also provided a visual methodology for subsequent individual participant interviews.