Our aim was to explore the potentials of an aesthetic-methodological approach that we call collective auto-ethnographic montaging for understanding migrant homemaking and, by extension, for unsettling dominant domo-political models based on a specific idea of integration.  The starting point was the production of 

individual auto-ethnographies based upon the three researchers’ participation in different aesthetic workshops run by NGOs and artist facilitators in Denmark, Sweden and the UK. 

 

By sharing and collecting our autoethnographies together, we collectively reassembled them from fragments into a collective montage, alongside notes and images from our personal and professional archives as migrants and researchers. The core themes that emerged were bordering; hospitality; fixity and mobility. 

 

We see the montage form as representative of the subject we study. The reality of migrant homemaking is complex, messy, multiscalar, made of seemingly disconnected bits and pieces, verbal, visual, textual, audible, and sensual all at once, stitching together here and there, past, present and future – but home in the context of migration is fundamentally made through the politics of relation. Making home is the making of connections. Collective autoethnographic montaging is an insightful and highly appropriate method for rendering this ontology of home and challenging the home-versus-away model on which integration politics are based.

 

The results have been presented in two conference papers:

Postmigratory autoethnography – a complicit aesthetic exploration of migrant home-making by Philip Dodds (Lund University) & Marta Padovan-Özdemir (Roskilde University) presented at the Nordic Migration Research Conference 2022.

 

Collective autoethnographic montaging of the politics of migrant homemaking by Philip Dodds (Lund University), Fran Lloyd (Kingston University), and Marta Padovan-Özdemir (Roskilde University). Presented at the MaHoMe research seminar at Lund University (2022) (PDF)

 

As a follow-up, Marta Padovan-Özdemir is continuing to develop the methodological protocol of montaging as an innovative and evocative approach to the study of a racialised migrant-home nexus in a book project with Christian Sandbjerg Hansen (Aarhus University).