'Meanings of Home' at 2022 Oral History Society Conference Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre

Members of the project team presented their findings at the 2022 annual conference of the Oral History Society, hosted by London Metropolitan University, at 8 and 9 July in the Great Hall.

Their panel presentation was titled: ‘Meanings of ‘Home’ amongst racially minoritised communities of African, Caribbean, South Asian, Latin American and Mixed backgrounds in London’.

The speakers were: Dr Alya Khan (Project Lead), Senior lecturer, London Metropolitan University; Dr Mabel Encinas, Senior lecturer, London Metropolitan University; Janet Douglas Gardner, Associate Professor, London Metropolitan University; and Harleena Jagde, Fair Outcomes Project Lead, London Metropolitan University.

Presentation abstract:

In Amartya Sen’s memoir, Home in the World (2021), he notes that every culture has an idea of ‘home’. He suggests that it is a global notion, intimately bound up with the universal human experience of authentic selfhood: that is, to understand our true selves, we must consider who we are in relation to our idea of ‘home’. Yet, at the same time, ‘home’ is somehow intricately tied to particular times and places (in the present moment and in memories), and in this sense must surely be seen as a local and situated concept. This interplay and overlap between the global and the local can work to both reveal and obscure what ‘home’ might mean at any given time amongst members of any given community. Where the global, or hegemonic, version of ‘home’ fits within systems of oppression and works to occlude the lived experiences, and therefore the needs, of marginalised communities, it seems crucial as a matter of social justice to bring this process into view.

We are a group of academics, professional services staff and students at London Metropolitan University, ourselves all from racially minoritised backgrounds, who have come together across our shared interests in decolonising methodologies to record and relate untold stories of minoritised communities in our City. Our oral history project works with different communities of African, Caribbean, South Asian, Latin American and Mixed backgrounds in London to explore what ‘home’ means to them. Our interviews are audio recorded and we also work with photography. The project is funded by a London Metropolitan University Rescaling Award of £8,536 held by Dr Alya Khan, and our recordings from the project will be preserved in a new public archive at the University.

Our panel comprises four related thematic papers:

1. Meanings of ‘Home’: home as lived and imagined: dwellings; homelands; homemaking; and intimate relations and home;
2. Home Cultures: domestic routines and traditions; artefacts; language; poetry, music and other arts; faith and religion; oral traditions; and sensory memories related to home;
3. Public History and Private Memory: narratives of migration; the impact of law, rights, and citizenship; social policies; campaigns for justice; and living through the Pandemic;
4. Intergenerational Perceptions of Home: stories from different generations of migrants; cultural attitudes of home and family; evolving cultural practices across generations; and the role of the media in maintaining links to ‘home’. In exploring these interconnected subthemes we will share reflections on the intersubjective nature of our decolonised oral history method. As co-producers, together with our narrators, of new meanings and understandings – of new histories – we will consider our place as decolonising oral historians in the process of interplay and contestation between global and local conceptualisations of ‘home’.

Exhibition:

In addition, a project exhibition was displayed in the Great Hall at the Oral History Society Conference 2022, entitled’ Meanings of ‘Home’: racially minoritised people in London’, curated by project lead, Dr Alya Khan.

Exhibition description:

This is an exhibition of photography, poetry and artefacts from the London Metropolitan University project recording untold stories of racially minoritised communities in London. The items serve to offer additional texture, nuance and complexity to narrators’ voices from the project's audio recorded interviews. The visual display is an integral part of a decolonial process of shared meaning-making, aimed at challenging and unsettling dominant discourses of Black and minoritised lives and experiences of home that the project is based on. Photographs and poetry were created at the time of interviews. Artefacts described by narrators during interviews are presented physically.

Photography: Adam Rowley. Artefacts: Janet Douglas Gardner. Collection of narrators’ poems: Dr Mabel Encinas