A research visit to Tokyo and Toyo University

Toyo University campus

In September 2023, I visited Tokyo and my wonderful colleague Ksenia Golovina at the Department of Global Diversity Studies at Toyo University. The research visit was planned as a follow-up to our jointly organised conference E-MigrAgeing held in Karlstad in blended format in 2022 and our collaborative writing on the topic of migrant homemaking. Both Ksenia and I have been studying the meaning of home and homemaking in migratory contexts for some time and this visit offered a chance to exchange ideas and plan future research.

The urban walk offers a great way to get to know and sense the city. I thank Ksenia for organising several such walks in different ethnic neighbourhoods including China Town, Korea Town, and Little Nepal, as well as locations around the Toyo University campus, the Immigrant Cemetery in Yokohama, and Meiji Shrine to name a few. Connecting it to our research on Russian homemaking in Japan and the UK we looked for and discussed different signs of how diasporic belonging can be present in different urban cityscapes.

Here is a video summary produced by researcher and artist Mariia Ermilova that captures key points of this trip and features a rare moment of me speaking Russian in a professional context when discussing the topic of Russian homemaking – a good example of how we think with and about research.

It was of course a fun and exciting week full of personal reflections on different “global” cities I visited and lived in (New York and London in particular).  The trip also made me think about the role of diasporic connections in our professional relations, our many uses of languages in/for research and how our personal and professional identities intertwine in a lot of unexpected ways.

Urban walks in Tokyo

Home ... a special kind of place

In one of the chapters published this year, I explored the idea of the ambivalence of home, being particularly drawn to its ‘darker’ aspects exemplified by the notion of ‘sticky objects’ that evoke difficult and, at times, ‘dark’ associations for their owners, who, however, continue keeping them, as if they got ‘stuck’ to them.

However, I also had a chance to think about the productive and more creative aspects of homemaking thanks to the Everyday Enchantments Conference I attended in Manchester in July this year. Thinking about home as an enchanted space brought me to the idea of homecoming - which, I undeniably experienced strongly in Manchester, a place I used to call home for several years.

Below is a short extract from a conference paper I delivered back in July which presents a recollection of memories from multiple commutes, travels, house moves, and revisits. In it, I tried to capture the first moments of returning home from an absence, short or long, and recognising it in a sensory and embodied way.

I end this year thinking of home as a place that may not always be a sense of comfort and joy, but can still offer magical moments of excitement, familiarity and connection.

The enchantment of returning home - a special kind of place one continuously rediscovers © Kenneth Kajoranta

…So here is A returning home from the trip, maybe she hasn’t been here for a few days, or even longer. It’s evening, the end of the working week. She turns the key and enters the hallway. The house is quiet and feels deserted. There is a scattering of post lying on the floor. She leaves the suitcase in the hallway and walks upstairs holding the banister lightly with one hand. She pushes open the door to her bedroom and checks how it looks. She senses the smells, the room’s temperature, and the tiredness from her journey. She notices the half-closed curtains, she realises it's starting to get dark. There is a familiar sound of road noise coming from the outside. She takes some moments to observe the state of the room and the objects left untouched during her absence, the scattered items on the bedside table. Perhaps she should make herself a cup of tea or pour a glass of water. She walks down to the kitchen with ease, she doesn’t need to switch the lights on, and it feels good to know how to move around the house. She gets water and moves to the front room. She then settles on the sofa allowing herself to get absorbed by the gradual enchantment of being back home again -  a special kind of place she continuously rediscovers.

New Project Announcement

Over the last few months I have been delving into research concerning ageing and the role of digital and communication technologies in older age, in addition to my existing interests in home and migration. Some of this thinking resonated with several others and resulted in the idea for a joint research. Happy to share that the project “Sustainable Ageing of Migrant Populations in Sweden and Japan and their Transnational Families” has been awarded funding from Intsam/Vinnova as part of MIRAI 2.0 Academia/Industry collaborations.

So, in January-June 2022 together with Satu Heikkinen, Tara Mehrabi of Karlstad University and Ksenia Golovina of Toyo University we will organise and host a two day international workshop on the topics of ageing, migration, and digital technology, with a focus on East European migrant populations in Sweden and Japan. As part of the project we would also like to feature artists’ works on the theme of ageing / migration in the two countries.

More details to follow in the new year!

MIRAI announcement: https://www.mirai.nu/collaboration-between-academia-and-industry-in-japan-and-sweden-seven-projects-have-been-granted-seed-money/

Moving countries in the time of #stayhome

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One of the images from #lockdowndiary series by Ken Kajoranta https://www.kenkajorantaphotography.com

In March 2020, just at the beginning of the first lockdown in the UK, I read Paolo Boccagni’s very interesting analysis of how the COVID-19 pandemic, #stayhome and forced domesticity affected practices and experiences of home. The pandemic has certainly highlighted the significance of home as well as the need to rethink more deeply what home means and how it is experienced/lived by different groups of people.

A few months later, in Summer 2020, as I was packing my bags (or rather identical in size and look removal boxes) to move from the UK to Sweden I was struck by the ambiguity of the situation - we were moving home while being expected to #stayhome.

As people continue to move and migrate for various reasons and as a result of different circumstances, in times of lockdowns, changing border regimes and quarantine regulations - there may be new implications for research of homes in movement. Below are some quick thoughts and reflections about potential topics for future work - including more general ones and some more specifically linked to my own interests.

• Materiality of home and removal boxes. The process of sorting out possessions and packing things is an important part of migration and it is interesting to see how the pandemic may contextualise it in a new light. Objects get invested with symbolic meaning over time and recent changes and reorganisation of life and work at home may show that some objects can take on new meanings and significance which is more closely linked to the pandemic. In a situation when domesticity is forced and prolonged the ambivalent meanings of home become more pronounced. Thus, home may not always mean a welcoming place and the role of domestic objects can reflect this - while some offer comfort, others may enforce a sense of non-home, or of a place where one would rather not be. And if one moves home during this time, what objects would be taken and how they would mark those moments and experiences? What will get packed in the boxes? 


• One of the important points that did come up in my previous research, but which perhaps I didn’t highlight sufficiently, is that the current point of residence is not necessarily a final one and it’s not the only one. Materiality of homes represents layers of experiences which can be linked to different countries of residence and origin. People’s backgrounds are complex and rich and the way the context of the pandemic may intertwine with other experiences and memories would certainly be a point to explore more.


Moving day after several months of packing and waiting

• Home, non-home and time. Another thought brought by the experience of the move is about its relation to time and waiting. Preparation, packing and waiting for the moving date may take time and be characterised by uncertainty, for instance when the journey is dependent on whether flights will be operating, or certain documents processed in time. So, over this period the practices of homemaking gradually change, while boxes get packed, furniture dismantled, pictures are taken from the walls and home is changing into a non-home. And while the actual journey hasn’t been taken yet there are definitely changes that indicate the beginning of the departure. The situation of transient and precarious homemaking has been documented by research into vulnerable groups and perhaps this is where I’ll be turning more to think about the time of home-in-between, when the distinction between home and non-home gets somewhat blurred, or at least when non-home has a growing presence in one’s everyday life.

“New Life” (c) Ken Kajoranta

• Finally, while there seems to be a lot of focus on things that one takes or accumulates as a result of migration the aspect of unpacking and allocating things at a new place does not seem to be that prominent. In fact, unpacking boxes is equally, if not more, laborious, time-consuming, challenging and emotional as packing. Once again I am thinking here of the time taken to develop that home-to-be, what one does to make it work, to feel at home in this place, room, street, building - with the added elements of working from home, social distancing, isolation and immobility. In terms of actual unpacking, one of the metaphors of this process that I used in my previous work was to compare it with trying to attach the flowers on the walls, or literally stick them up with black tape, which would represent the idea of reconstructing domesticity and sense of home in a new place (see photo). Ironically, our new flat in Sweden was absolutely empty, and there were the empty white walls again. Interestingly, as the boxes got gradually unpacked and the house started to “come together” the walls remained empty for a while - as if there was some kind of expectation for the right moment to add that final touch, or maybe as if there was a need to live in this not-a home-yet a bit longer, to keep it unfinished, open, not quite there. In any case, there is certainly a lot to think about how we unpack and why, and is it really possible to ever get it right? There is resourcefulness of this “nothing on the walls” (and here I think about Susie Scott’s brilliant work on a Sociology of Nothing); with a promise of the blank page, which is equally inviting and slightly terrifying.

CFP for BASEES 2020: Working in post-Soviet contexts: Methods, Challenges, and New Avenues

Call for Papers for BASEES Annual Conference (3-5 April, 2020, Cambridge, UK)

Working in post-Soviet contexts: Methods, Challenges, and New Avenues

Organiser: Anna Pechurina, Leeds School Of Social Sciences, Leeds Beckett University

This panel will critically evaluate methodological choices, challenges and opportunities surrounding research within and across various post-Soviet contexts—not only understood as a geographical location but also as a discursive category that represents specific practices of identity and belonging. Quite a few studies have explored post-Soviet and post-Socialist identities, relationships and ways of being, in the process highlighting the multi-dimensional, multi-sited and transformative nature of this broad category. More recently, a focus on transnational, diasporic and cross-linguistic dimensions has added relevance and urgency to such themes and concerns, if at the same time calling for more systematic and comparative contributions that broaden and invigorate existing approaches to researching and working within post-Soviet contexts, as well as critically reflect on current research. The panel seeks contributions from social-science scholars working in Eastern and Western Europe in the following broad areas:

• Research reflections, techniques, methodologies to approach and understand post-Soviet identities, practices, and experiences

• Mapping post-Soviet spatialities: approaches, challenges, reflections;

• Working in post-Soviet contexts: reflecting on the process of research and good practice;

• Ethical challenges of working with post-Soviet communities;

• Developing research on post-Soviet international migrations in comparative and transnational contexts.

If you are interested in submitting a paper to this panel, please send:
a title, abstract of up to 250 words, and full contact details to a.pechurina@leedsbeckett.ac.uk by September 27th 2019