Care Matters

After my PhD research, where I was following around diasporic Moroccan-Europeans on holidays in Morocco, I became interested in the homes they visited. These homes were both a refuge and a problem; they can be a foothold for them in Morocco, but also a drain on time and money and a constant source of worry for keeping them safe and in good condition. 

I published one article about this from my PhD data (Trouble at home) while continuing to investigate it over short fieldwork visits since 2012. Since then, the scope of this project has expanded from focusing only on how migrant-owned homes demand care to thinking about how homes implicated in all kinds of mobilities - second homes, tourism homes, shared homes (e.g. AirBnB) - are changing in who is providing their care and how that labor is configured.

In 2019 I published an article with my MA supervisee Titus Schaab about caring for housing as an often overlooked part of transnational care networks (Expanding Transnational Care Networks). In 2022, I began an NWO Aspasia grant to investigate this topic further with PhD candidate Joma Ronden as a smaller version of this project. Since then I have published three further book chapters in this project on Guarding presence, Meshing with your home, and the value of diasporic housing.

You can find the original proposal that led to this grant and a slide presentation of the key ideas below.