Project leader: Fran Lloyd, Kingston University, United Kingdom
Project duration: 2020-2024
Participating countries: Sweden, Denmark and the United Kingdom
Funding from NordForsk: 12,857,733 NOK
Project website: MaHoMe
The MaHoMe project explored how migrants make sense of home within the complex politics of integration in the UK, Denmark, and Sweden. Using a multi-disciplinary and multi-sited ethnographic approach, the project combined narrative analysis, visual ethnography, and participatory aesthetic methods to study both to study both policymaking on migration and integration and migrant home-making. By engaging migrants and NGOs as co-researchers, MaHoMe developed innovative outputs, including a legacy website, methodological toolboxes, films, publications, and exhibitions, thereby generating comparative insights and broad societal impact across research, policy, and practice.
Key Findings
- The project has provided an in-country and cross-country analysis of policy-making on migration and integration, cultural heritage and contemporary migrant expressions in Denmark, Sweden and the UK. The analysis of policy-making, art works and participatory workshops with migrants showed how integration discourses often treat home as singular and fixed. Migrants, however, create multi-scaled homes across places and times, maintaining continuity amid disruption. The study highlighted both the gap between policy and lived experience and the creative ways migrants sustain belonging and imagine alternative futures.
- Visual ethnographic and participatory workshops tested aesthetic methodologies, including montage techniques combining art, policy-making, and migrant testimony. These experiments revealed tensions and possibilities in home-making, producing cocreated exhibitions, films, and toolkits that engaged policymakers, practitioners, and the wider public.
- The three-country analysis explored how migrant home-making intersects with welfare state traditions and cultural heritage. Visual ethnography interviews and arts-based collaborations showed how migrants use material and cultural practices to negotiate exclusion, maintain continuity, and shape new futures of belonging, highlighting the transformative potential of their cultural expressions.
- By bringing together analysis of policy-making, migrant cultural expressions, and the everyday practices of making-home in migration, the project has foregrounded both the gap between policy understandings of home and migrant lived experience, and the creative ways migrants sustain belonging and imagine alternative futures. Thes conceptual, material and affective findings have highlighted the need to reconfigur and reimagine dominant narratives of migration and integration.
- Through working with NGOs and migrants, engaging policy-makers and the wider public, the project has created new solidarities and disseminated research-informed scholarly and cultural outputs that contributes to this reconfiguring and to new understandings about migration and integration in Denmark, Sweden and the UK.
- Across the three sites, MaHoMe demonstrated the importance of recognising multiscalarity in home-making and the limitations of reductionist integration policies.
- Working with over 160 migrants and NGOs the project produced films, exhibitions, toolkits, and a digital platform, fostering solidarities and generating knowledge with direct policy and societal relevance.
- Overall, the project advanced methodological and conceptual insights into home and migration while creating cultural and scholarly outputs that connect research with public engagement.
Key outputs
Lloyd, F., Narvselius, E., & Padovan-Özdemir, M., (eds) of (forthcoming 2026), Aesthetic methodological interventions in migrant homemaking amidst divergent integration politics in Denmark, Sweden and the UK.
Padovan-Özdemir, M., Wilkins, A. & Narvselius, E., Policing Migrant Homemaking: Narrative Configurations of the Migrant-Home Nexus, Routledge (Forthcoming, 2026, open access).
MaHoMe, Making it Home: Re-Configuring Migrant Homemaking Together, 24 May 2024, Kingston University London, UK. Conference, Workshop, Exhibition & Long Table.
Philip Dodds, P., Lloyd, F., & Padovan-Özdemir, M. (2022), Collective autoethnographic montaging of the politics of migrant homemaking
Narvselius, E., Padovan-Özdemir, M. (2022) ‘Utilitarian and Exclusive Humanism: Conditioned Welcoming through State- Sanctioned Migrant Home-Making’, in Ukrainian Refugees and the Nordics: Research-led best practice on how to cater for Ukrainian refugees arriving in the Nordic Region (NordForsk, Oslo, April 2022, pp.48-54).
Exhibitions
MaHoMe Exhibition: MAKING HOME, Gotlands Art Museum, Sweden, 3 March–1 May 2024.
MaHoMe Exhibition: ‘On the Move: Mobile Phones and the Tapestry of Home’. Beaconsfield Gallery, London, U.K. 1–16 March 2024.
Film
Fatehrad, A. & Norberg, A. (2024) ‘Home Away From Home’.
Al-Hudaid, N. & Narvselius, E. (2025) ‘Swedish Homes don’t Look Like Us: Migrants
Homemaking in Sweden’