Situated belonging as everyday practice in a semi-public Youth Living Room for undocumented young city dwellers

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how everyday practices in a day shelter for undocumented youth interfere with binary narratives of belonging versus non-belonging. Tapping into scholarship on a home in the face of displacement and marginalization, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the so-called ‘Youth Living Room’ in Amsterdam. Caught up in migration management, the undocumented young people present here experience structural exclusion and are cut off from welfare arrangements in the Netherlands. But while their precarious situation was reinforced even further under COVID-19 measures, in the Youth Living Room, undocumented youths engaged in mundane practices that incited feelings of belonging. In the absence of a house and faced with the closure of public space, the Youth Living Room as a semi-public place accommodated ‘homemaking practices’. These homemaking practices, I argue, attest to the complexities of belonging and rather suggest alternative orderings to a dichotomized politics of belonging; this paper shows that homemaking practices in this semi-public shelter alert us to the inherent situatedness of being at home in society. Situated belonging then challenges our political imagination to ask what collective practices of homemaking we want to engage in.

KEYWORDS:

• Homemaking practices
• situated belonging
• undocumented youth
• everydayness
• Amsterdam

1. Introduction

It was a beautiful spring day when I sat down with 22-year-old Yoro on a picnic blanket from where we watched over the IJ River in the city of Amsterdam. The two of us had met elsewhere weeks before, in the so-called Youth Living Room (jongerenhuiskamer in Dutch). This day shelter was facilitated by a small, local foundation and functioned as a gathering space for undocumented youth like Yoro. Given the unstable living situations and uncertain futures that Yoro and his peers face, I was curious to learn what the Youth Living Room had to offer for young people in situations of such extreme marginalization. With this in mind, Yoro his answer struck me in its mundaneness when I asked him to describe to me what a day ideally looks like at this point of his life as he replied cheerfully: ‘That’s a nice one. Yeah … when I wake up, first thing I do: I drink coffee’. He started to laugh out loud, not considering his intuitive answer valid at first. Then, he seemed to change his mind, altering his voice to a serious tone: ‘Everybody does that you know … ’

Yoro emphasizing that he enjoys a morning coffee just like ‘everybody’, carries particular meaning given the precarity of undocumented youth. The enforced exclusion they face fosters a sense of being ‘nobody’ because one’s rights, visibility and social membership are heavily curtailed and obscured. Later in the interview, Yoro expressed pain and frustration about this exclusion, as when he said, ‘Everything is connected to this document system – I don’t get it! You have eyes, I have eyes. When you talk to me, I talk back: we are all the same’. While Yoro emphasized our shared humanity, the positioning of non-belonging that undocumented people face was reinforced by pandemic measures aimed at containing the COVID-19 virus during my fieldwork in 2021.¹ Support for those without a house to retreat to initially was hardly addressed in these measures that included the call to ‘stay at home’. One of Yoro’s peers, 20-year-old Moosa, described the sense of being stripped of one’s humanity that this blind spot caused on his side: ‘They said everyone should stay home [under the pandemic mandate] to stay safe from COVID; then we are not safe because we do not stay at home. We have no home’. This intensification of structural marginalization combined with increasing concerns about youth well-being in general under pandemic measures – concerns that later proved founded on a global scale according to international research (e.g. Courtney et al. 2020; Liang et al. 2020) – led the Amsterdam municipality to eventually grant emergency decrees to projects supporting youth growing up in ‘vulnerable situations’ (letter from the Amsterdam Municipality, 5 November 2020) in an attempt to diminish youth isolation and rising mental and social problems for this category considered to be under potentially higher-risk during crises (Silliman Cohen and Bosk 2020). One of the projects granted such a decree forms the case study of this paper; the Youth Living Room for undocumented youth in Amsterdam.

The vulnerability that these youth are exposed to is crucially related to living an undocumented life. How many undocumented people reside in the Netherlands, and more specifically undocumented young people are unknown – estimates are uncertain as the latest governmental figures range between 23.000 and 58.000 (Heijden et al. 2020). Undocumented people are not considered political agents but are excluded from the political realm as de facto non-citizens (Kalir and Wissink 2016). They are not represented in local demographics rates, nor are they included in statistics on homelessness. Their illegalized status, constructed in bureaucratic infrastructures of sovereign states that figure as knowledge practices (Wissink 2021), renders them statistically invisible: they literally do not count. This shows the paradox of being undocumented, as people in their daily movements get caught up in the very politics that exclude them – there is no such thing as a ‘natural life’ outside of the political as Agamben (1998). Indeed, the undocumented community is part of society by their exclusion (Agamben 1998; De Genova 2002). In the state narrative, illegalized bodies like those of the undocumented young people in the Youth Living Room get positioned as opposed to ‘bodies-at-home’, to borrow Sara Ahmed’s (2007) words. Or, to build on Yuval-Davis’s work on the politics of belonging, they are positioned on the non-belonging side that is needed for a political project wherein the belonging of particular collectivities is constructed (Yuval-Davis 2006, 197).

Yuval-Davis makes a distinction between belonging as a sense of feeling at home on the one hand and the politics of belonging on the other hand. The latter, she argues, ‘comprises specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging in particular ways’ (Yuval-Davis 2006, 197). McNevin highlights the relationality of such constructions, defining the politics of belonging as a politics that ‘frames how one is positioned with respect to others and the agency one enjoys in that context’ (2006, 135). The migration management of these undocumented youths is caught up in represents such a project, making differences between legalized and illegalized bodies on national territory ‘a normative distinction embedded in a particular political project’ (Walters 2010, 88). The Youth Living Room allows for an exploration of how feeling at home and the ‘politics of belonging’ (Yuval-Davis 2006) that undocumented people are subjected to as part of a political project become intricately related to one another in the everyday life of undocumented youth. When one is, as Yoro and Moosa put it, not included in the category of ‘everyone’, daily practices that ‘everybody’ engages in carry particular significance. To explore that significance, this article looks into practices of home in the Youth Living Room, how they are shaped and what they look like among youth facing extreme marginalization – in this case, due to their presence of being illegalized. Understanding home as a matter of doing, it constantly has to be made in arrangements and through practices that are formed in relational networks in the present. What is it then that makes a home in positions of enforced non-belonging?

Having sketched the distinction between feelings of belonging and the politics of belonging, the article first continues with a methodological note on the ethnographic approach of this research adding to anthropological studies into everyday life, wherein the researcher typically immerses oneself into the daily rhythm in the field. The second follows a discussion on ‘home’ as a practice shaped at the intersection of affectivities, materiality, and space, and the potentiality of semi-public spaces to accommodate this intersection. Then follows an empirical exploration of the particular practices of homemaking in the Youth Living Room, the recurrence and importance of which became notable through ethnographic immersion: proximity to each other; hospitality toward one another; and collective everyday rituals of the home. Fourth, the article explores how these homemaking practices interfere with binary views on belonging. The latter appears at odds with everyday life as put forward by the homemaking that undocumented youth engaged in. Therefore, the paper suggests in conclusion that the notion of situated belonging allows for more insight into the complexities of everyday belonging.

2. Methods in the margins

The Youth Living Room was initiated by a local foundation, here referred to by its pseudonym, ‘Solidarity’, that maintains years of experience supporting undocumented people in the city of Amsterdam. It was run by a handful of mostly white and female, paid staff and assisted by a more ethnically mixed group of volunteers including people who recently received a refugee status. Soon after the introduction of containment measures in the spring of 2020, they realized that a locked-down society further increases the invisibility of undocumented young people on their social radar. To attend the gap left by authorities, Solidarity arranged access to an unused space in a social work organization’s building – a former school gym with high ceilings, rather cold and dim with colored lines on the hard, grey-blue floor and windows too high up to look through. Solidarity collected some old furniture like couches and a coffee table but also a ping pong table and a football. This collection came to be known as the Youth Living Room, the day shelter where the anthropological fieldwork for this study took place between February 2021 and July 2021.

The Youth Living Room is open twice a week. Each afternoon, a stable core group of twenty-to-forty people youth visited the space. Youth initially arrived through the foundations’ network, and their number grew gradually as word spread. They had various African backgrounds but the majority was Eritrean, most of them still caught up in migration procedures, hoping to eventually be granted refugee status. The eldest was 26, most were around 20. All were registered as at least 18 years old by the authorities, sometimes against the statement of these youngsters themselves. Registered as 18 and above, they did not qualify for the support and shelter available for undocumented youth referred to as ‘unaccompanied minors’, a state-imposed category that gets widely reproduced in civil society and research. Subsequently, such exclusionary categories are internalized by the youth themselves, as illustrated by the reply of a youngster in the Youth Living Room whom I requested for an interview: ‘if your research is about youth, why interview me? I am undocumented’. Being undocumented renders these youth their layered positionality invisible. Their belonging to the category of youth, among others, is structurally and stubbornly dismissed. They were excluded from social services such as youth care while facing homelessness, highly insecure futures and lacking supportive social networks like family or school. One concrete example of the consequences that this carries is that at the time of the fieldwork, many of the youth in the Youth Living Room could only find a place to spend the night at the so-called COVID-emergency shelter located in a huge sports hall The hall was inaccessible for me but according to the youth their stories and pictures, the arrangements in the hall made it impossible to adhere to calls for social distancing. The youth slept in rows of single beds in an open space among dozens of adult homeless people. Everyone had to pack their stuff and leave every morning only to be able to return in the evening, having to fend for themselves in the locked-down city during the day – were it not for the Youth Living Room.

To examine the everyday life of these young people in the Youth Living Room, ethnographic methods were used because they allow for a ‘sustained immersion in the lifeways of the group studied’ (Caughey 1982, 224). As a ‘way of knowing’, such immersion tells us ‘more than we knew to ask’ (McGranahan 2018, 7). Participant observation is key here, which enabled me to build trust among those present, to notice group dynamics and interactions and to take material resources as part of daily practices into account. Given that ethnography’s ‘unique contribution is in that space of excess’ (McGranahan 2018, 7), the homemaking practices analyzed below were not identified before the research. Rather, the recurrence and importance of these practices became noticeable by being embedded in the field. This observation was further strengthened by the reference to these practices by interviewees during interviews in which the focus lay ‘on the fabric and routines of their everyday lives’ (Mayblin, Wake, and Kazemi 2020, 109).

The far reaching access that ethnographic immersion requires was granted based on my yearlong relationship and involvement with the foundation running it. Such investment is not uncommon when working with marginalized youth and their support organizations (see Gallagher, Starkman, and Rhoades 2017, 218). On fieldwork days, I lend a hand in paying attention to social needs and I covered group lunches from the research budget. Aside from these sorts of social and financial investments being crucial in matters of access, it is also an ethical consideration to ensure these kinds of structural time investment and attention. In research that includes entering the lives of young people whose position is characterized by heightened marginalization, care is required. This also affected my positionality in the field. Although foundation staff knew I was doing fieldwork it was not always possible to verify if my position was clear to all young people, especially those with whom I did not share a verbal language. Used to seeing plenty of new faces, and as a white woman much alike the paid staff of Solidarity, at times I might have been seen as a volunteer or staff indeed. Knowing the youth to be dependent on them to obtain resources, my positionality toward these youth was fragile as I had to take care they were not sharing with me out of misplaced reciprocity. Taking into account that my position as a researcher could not always be clear for everyone present, I made sure not to gather any personal data nor did I record group conversations during my visits to the Youth Living Room.

However, my presence in these moments was crucial because it enabled me to identify key figures to invite for interviews which were all recorded and transcribed. All interviews were preceded by an explanation of its intention and the informed consent of interviewees for both the interview and its recording. To facilitate an environment to speak freely and to clarify my position of not being part of the staff, interviews with youth were always held outside of the Youth Living Room space. Moreover, pseudonyms are used for all research participants for privacy reasons. The ‘technique of interviewing’ came with its own limitations though (Pols 2005). Besides sharing verbal language as a requirement, the selection criteria for interviewees also meant to take into account the mental investment that an interview naturally requires, especially so because undocumented people often went through traumatizing interrogations in their migration procedures. All data was saved on a protected server in line with ethical guidelines for qualitative research. Transcripts and fieldwork notes were coded using qualitative data software (MAXQDA). Eleven semi-structured interviews in total were held with people regularly present in the Youth Living Room: two Dutch females employed by the foundation, a male volunteer and eight undocumented youth who were all men. The latter requires some elaboration.

Even though the Youth Living Room was open to all genders, the majority of participating youth were young men. This illustrates both migration decisions and classifications of who deserves shelter to be gendered. Young men tend to be overrepresented in migration rates and women and children are more likely to be categorized as vulnerable (which is an elaborate debate in itself, see, for example, the work of Bonjour and Cleton 2021 and Ticktin 2011). Moreover, there also is an underrepresentation of girls in Dutch youth work more generally (Boomkens et al. 2021, 225). Yet another contributing factor to this gender imbalance in the interviews is the mentioned selection criteria based on verbal language skills; in this case, the English language which the minority of the boys and none of the few girls spoke well possibly reflecting global gender inequalities in schooling opportunities. The engagement of girls in the recurring homemaking practices could, however, be included in the research through immersed participant observation.

3. Undocumented homes, unlikely home-makers?

If feeling at home incites our sense of belonging, to refer back to Yuval-Davis, it is unsurprising that a healthy home that provides safe relationships is considered crucial for youth resilience (Twum-Antwi, Jefferies, and Ungar 2020) and youth well-being (Hoolachan 2020). The undocumented youth engaged in the Youth Living Room are faced with the absence of a stable home while far away from their home country. Having to face homelessness does however not rule one out of creating a home (Hoolachan 2020, 1). Neither does displacement (Brun and Fábos 2015, 15). ‘The arrangements and practices that make home and make one feel at home can be distributed across locations and brought along; it is possible to be at home outside of a home’ (Ceci, Moser, and Pols 2020, 310). What it is, then, that makes a home has been widely discussed, as we will briefly go into before turning to the empirical exploration of everyday practices in the Youth Living Room.

The notion of ‘feeling’ at home first of all brings us to home as an affective place. Homemaking comes with affected bodies, understanding affect as everyday investments and attachments (Seigworth and Gregg 2010). Home practices mobilize affectivities on the side of the homemakers. Yet, while the affect and the emotions invested in a home for long have been broadly recognized (see also Lawrence 1987), Duyvendak (2011) notes that ‘things are self-evident because they are so familiar’ (27) when at home, which makes that ‘ “feeling at home” does not lend itself to easy investigation’ (40–41). The most obvious familiarities are the most difficult to grasp, it seems, and therewith run the risk of being overlooked until they lose self-evidence. In other words, ‘we might only notice comfort as an affect when we lose it, when we become uncomfortable’ (Ahmed 2007, 158).

In addition to affectivities, several authors alerted us to the importance of the materiality that goes into making a home. For example, Duyvendak (2011) draws attention to the material aspect of home construction, showing mobile people’s attempt ‘to particularize one’s material world’ in what he calls ‘mobile home strategies’ (2011, 13). Douglas suggests that the importance of materiality in homemaking not only lies in ‘stuff’ but also in the setting wherein that stuff may be orchestrated according to one’s own preference: ‘Home is located in a space, but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a boat, or a tent’ (1991, 289). A sense of home is thus not bound to the materiality of a house.

The spatial aspect of a home has been widely emphasized, too. Douglas notes that ‘home starts by bringing some space under control’ (Douglas 1991, 289). Parsell echoes Douglas when stating ‘control over a space is important to people’s understanding of what it means to be at home’ (2012, 160) while also noting that feminist scholars rightly highlighted the subjective association between control and the domestic home as a place of abuse and oppression. The practices of home discussed in this article however exactly attest to home beyond the demarcation of the domestic. Just as home is ‘ … not just one place. It is locations’ (hooks 2015, 36), practices of home play a key role in public spaces, too, as authors pointed out the importance of ‘homemaking in the public … to embed a sense of home into the public space’ (Boccagni and Duyvendak 2021, 2). In this vein, Fenneke Wekker (2020) showed how Dutch policymakers committed to stimulating feelings of home in neighborhoods and cities, in the belief that it would stimulate the inclusion of so-called vulnerable inhabitants. The potential for people to engage in homemaking becomes an indicator of positions of belonging. Just like the self-evidence of familiarities that bring about feelings of home that Duyvendak alerted us too, those positioned at home in our society, the ‘body-at-home’, finds comfort in how things are ‘in place’ (Ahmed 2007, 153).² The specific homemaking that public places allow for reflect who is accommodated to feel at home in that specific place – and who might not, already sensitizing us to the political dimension of potentialities to make oneself feel at home.

4. Collaborations in making room to live

Equipped with these insights we turn to an empirical exploration of everyday practices that took shape in the particular affective, material and spatial arrangements of the Youth Living Room.

When asked about the biggest challenge for the youth in the Youth Living Room, Kyra who has worked with the foundation for years, replied without hesitation: ‘the feeling of being excluded, of not being allowed to be anywhere’. Contrary, in this shelter ‘they are allowed to be’, she says. Valerie, coordinator of the Youth Living Room and the Solidarity director, explained that the physical location of the shelter enables the foundation to offer both support upon request as also to spend time with the youth: ‘If they do not have questions we just sit next to them and play a game or chat’. These resources of sociality, space and material – utensils, furniture, sports equipment – that were first brought together by the foundation provide youth with the possibility to shape their daily life rather than being subjected to others’ schedules or rules. Illustratively, one afternoon a coordinator approached some of the youth who are hanging on the couches and asked, ‘Who wants to take a hiphop class? We have a very nice teacher!’. In response, all heads shake in denial. They felt no pressure to join and preferred instead to remain where they were, finish their coffees, and play some football at their own pace.

The possibility to shape one’s own day in the Youth Living Room was remarked upon by youth themselves in interviews, too. According to Yoro, introduced earlier, the place makes it possible to relax without obligation, to simply chill ‘the way you want to chill’. Likewise, 18-year-old Osmin vividly remembers his first visit: ‘My first time there, like, I was doing everything I want and no one stopped me. So, it is just like, wow! It is amazing! … Yeah, like, I was playing football inside, I ran everywhere … I was expecting rules. But there were almost no rules’. To experience the liberty to move freely is what stood out to Osmin. The value of this is recognized in professional Youth Work (see, for example, Sonneveld et al. 2020, 2). But living in a shelter, Osmin was not used to a place where he did not need to abide to dictated rules; on how to behave, what and when to eat, or what time to be inside. Osmin put this unfamiliar freedom over his own movements into words as follows: ‘[The Youth Living Room] is a place where everyone like me feels free and feels like home’. The freedom that Osmin experienced is not so much a situation of unbridled chaos but rather should be understood in light of the disciplinary settings that he grew accustomed to. Whereas a place where one is not controlled or required to ‘do’ anything but can ‘be’ on one’s own terms is exactly the openness that practices to make a home require.

What practices, then, did arise out of this sense of freedom, in other words, the potentialities available in the Youth Living Room? The following ethnographic vignettes depict several afternoons to draw out three interrelated practices that recurred every afternoon in the Youth Living Room and, as ethnographically could be traced, formed the social rhythm in the shelter.

Proximity as homemaking

It is a sunny Thursday afternoon. From different corners of the city youth arrive at the Youth Living Room. Semhar is one of them. ‘Family!’ he shouts out by way of greeting Yoro, who arrived earlier. Yoro pauses his table tennis game to turn to Semhar. “Family!” he responses. While exchanging big smiles the two young men shake hands and share a hug

Like Semhar and Yoro, youth who frequently visit the Youth Living Room greet one another upon arrival. Everyone’s presence is acknowledged, the significance of which is further emphasized by references to one another as family. This indicates the proximity that is created through the relations in the context of the Youth Living Room. This use of the family metaphor in youth spaces has been observed among youth with unstable family ties by others, too (Nolas 2014, 33). The proximity that speaks from the family reference to describe social relations formed in the shelter was not only created among youth but also between youth and workers from the foundation.

Selassie has one of his trouser legs rolled up when he arrives. He hobbles to the couch corner and plunks down, but not for long. Valerie approaches him. Selassie shows her an abrasion wound on his lower leg. In return, he receives caring attention: A hand on his shoulder, a compassionate ‘Ooohhh’. Enough for Selassie to stand up again and join the football game.

Selassie would not have needed to seek medical care for his scratch. At the same time, he does need soothing attention, and some caring engagement for the superficial wound. Selassie could navigate toward this through the presence of Valerie, whose availability is arranged in a casual presence. This social proximity to be mobilized in anticipation shows how the openness of the Youth Living Room allows for relationships that can not only meet Selassie’s needs but that are formed according to his own desired movements, too.

Hospitality as homemaking

A frail young woman who always takes charge of the coffee ceremony in the afternoons arrives at the venue. Her name is Bilen. “I need coffee!” Yoro calls out as soon as he sees her, his arms wide, “but I’m in Ramadam!” he sighs while theatrically letting his arms drop. Yoro’s behavior makes Bilen laugh but it also smooths the communication between the two youngsters, who are from different countries, with different cultural and religious backgrounds, and do not share a similar verbal language.

In greeting each other, Yoro and Bilen improvise non-verbal ways of welcoming each other, avoiding a sense of non-belonging to be reinforced by the language barrier between them. Moreover, being welcomed is an act of hospitality. Importantly, hospitality goes both ways; being able to welcome, or even host another is a position one can only embrace when feeling in place.

A boy enters the room timidly. Black hat, backpack, and a thick black jacket. He carefully scans the space with attentive eyes. It is his first visit. He copies the behavior of the others, picks up a plate from the central table and serves himself rice and sauce. With his plate full, he finds himself a corner with a free chair but hesitates to start eating. “This food Hollandisch?”, he asks me in a mix of German and English, neither his mother tongue. One of the other boys, Selassie, comes to the rescue. Selassie is fasting himself, and understands the boys dietary restrictions, too – unlike me. The two exchange a few words after which the boy shows visible relief, now certain about the meal ingredients. Without further hesitation, he finishes his plate.

As Selassie takes on the role of the host, he helps a newly arrived peer to feel at ease – in this case with the food being served to align with his dietary requests. Being ‘at home’ is channeled here through eating together and being able ‘to eat what one feels like having’ (Driessen and Ibáñez Martín 2020, 251). But who arguably becomes even more ‘at home’ through this exchange is Selassie himself. The potentialities that lie in the openness of the Youth Living Room allow Selassie to step up to the role of the host, indicating his sense of belonging. Selassie can welcome someone at the table only because he feels at home himself.

Rituals as homemaking

Upon arrival, Bilen immediately begins preparations for the “boon ceremony” – an Eritrean coffee ritual – either alone or with the help of one her three tight girlfriends. Amidst the colored lines on the floor and the hollow sounds Bilen her movements show familiarity. She seats herself on a chair behind a small coffee table surrounded by empty couches. She fills a pan with coffee beans that she places on a portable stove. A burning smell soon fills the former gym, accompanied by the sounds of crackling beans as Bilen rhythmically jostles the pan – back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. When the beans are all black, she lets them cool down a bit. She grinds the beans, puts them in an earthenware pouring pot with water and positions it on the stove. Then she adds ginger powder. She cleans tiny white coffee cups with blue designs in a plastic bucket and carefully lines the cups on saucers that are set on the coffee table. While she prepared the coffee, the couches put around the coffee table slowly became occupied by peers. They chat a bit or scroll on their phones while patiently waiting for Bilen to serve them a cup of fresh coffee, three cubes of sugar included.

For this boon-ceremony, the Solidarity foundation provided the utensils that Bilen needed to shape the ceremony where both youth, paid workers, and volunteers actively took part. Reflecting on the coffee ritual, Valerie says ‘It takes place in any Eritrean household, making it something very homey … I think that it gives a very familiar, homelike feeling’. One of the volunteers present, with an Eritrean background, explained the ceremony as ‘more than coffee, much more! It is about connection and coziness. It is about relaxation, a moment to forget everything, to clear your mind’. He also added that traditionally women prepare the coffee, which Selassie confirms: ‘only girls or women, that is the rule in Eritrea. A man can only drink it’. Explaining a custom from ‘back home’ that traveled to the Youth Living Room together with the youth as home-makers, for Selassie too, the coffee ceremony is much more than ‘coffee’:

It’s not like coffee from a machine … it is beautiful. You sit together, talk about nice things or making jokes … You don’t just drink coffee and leave. That’s what I like about it. Sometimes you go to your neighbors to drink coffee. And now I go from my neighborhood to here to drink coffee

Coffee making is a familiar ritual shaped by the youth themselves, facilitated by buckets and portable stoves that the foundation provided. The confidence in Bilen her movements reflected her to be at home in her leading role in the coffee ritual with her peers. For Selassie, the coffee ceremony is a ritual mobilizing the past, situated in gendered roles reflecting familiarities from his hometown, and creating shifting roles of hosting and being hosted through which proximity to one another gets mediated (for similar observations see Masquelier 2013 on tea rituals among youth, and Van Liempt 2023 on coffee ceremonies among refugees). The coffeemaking becomes an example of everyday rituals of the home: ‘Everyday rituals reflect tastes and bring comfort through their routine. They signal continuity and stability of self’ (Bern-Klug 2011). The coffee ceremony in the Youth Living Room becomes meaningful, then, in shaping daily life rituals or ‘domestic routines’ (Scott 2009) in the face of rather extreme situations of marginalization. The coffee ceremony as a habit from and of home makes those who join, recalling the quote from Ahmed (2007), feel ‘comfortable’ despite their imposed exclusion.

5. Semi-public homes

Rituals, proximity and hospitality as practices became embedded in the everyday life of the Youth Living Room, this semi-public shelter that accommodated affect, material, and space. This particular arrangement turned a former school gym into a place filled with homemaking practices. This potential of semi-public settings, located beyond a public/private divide like the Youth Living Room, has been recognized in other care or shelter facilities, too. In relation to displacement, for example, looking into how home is made in an asylum center, Boccagni shows the importance of paying attention to the ways in which a space ‘is adapted to the routines, needs, and tastes of the residents; how open and flexible it is to the use of semi-public space for informal gathering, playing, praying, and so forth’ (Boccagni 2022, 144). Likewise, Van Liempt and Kox (2023) emphasize the importance of semi-public spaces in cultivating feelings of belonging for newly arrived refugees. Semi-public spaces, Van Liempt argues elsewhere, offer an important site to produce counter narratives to what she refers to as the ‘official response’ to new figures in society, showing that everyday practices in for example community centers are ways for people with a refugee status to ‘emplace themselves’ in the city of Amsterdam (Liempt 2023, 13).

In relation to youth, D’Hoop analyzes ‘the potentialities of spaces’ in a semi-public context (2021, 579). Researching a psychiatric day care center for youth, D’Hoop recognizes the inbuilt community space to allow for ‘the sharing of informal time, outside of planned activities, in spaces accessible to all’ (583). A degree of informality, then, for youth in shelter settings, is crucial ‘to develop closer connections and to find their own familiar modes of being in these spaces’ (2021, 583). Moreover, sharing informal moments with each other makes caregivers more approachable (Ungar 2011, 591). In a Foucauldian spirit D’Hoop contrasts spaces that allow such openness to ‘disciplinary spaces’ (2021, 585) where bodily movement is merely directed by the environment. Disciplinary settings in the context of care for youth, characterized by restricted freedom and control, have been referred to by others as a ‘regulation regime’ (e.g. Clark 2018). More generally it has also been addressed that ‘regular shelters’ offer ‘limited freedom’ (Huber et al. 2020, 522). This is underlined by research that shows that those who transition from shelter to their own house emphasize the importance of their regained freedom (Duyvendak 2011, 67; see also Parsell 2012, 166). In spaces with less deterministic paths, D’Hoop argues, people can potentially be engaged rather ‘than making them act in a clear direction’ (2021, 592).

A semi-public place that allows affect, material, and space to be arranged by those who populate these settings, that sense of ‘freedom’ in Osmin his experience, creates potential to shape homemaking practices like we saw in the Youth Living Room. Youths orchestrated what was in place, and how they related to one another, so that their bodies themselves could inhabit the shelter as a home. As briefly mentioned earlier though, home as a place of safety is not a given. Feminist scholarship for long alerted us to the political meaning of (practices of) home. Young echoes second-wave feminists like De Beauvoir, stating that ‘house and home historically come at women's expense’ but at the same time recognizes that the home with all its connotations and practices carries ‘liberating potential’ (Young 2005, 134). Home might be a place to which certain bodies – women in this case – are relegated as a way of excluding them from public life, Black feminism in particular has long recognized the potential of the home otherwise, for example as a ‘site of resistance’ (bell hooks 1990, 383).

6. Situated belonging

Recalling Yuval-Davis’ conceptualizations of belonging, undocumented people who are positioned as excluded in the politics of belonging that characterizes migration management, can simultaneously engage in everyday practices that create belonging in the sense of feeling at home. This alerts us to the fluidity of belonging. Importantly, the sense of belonging among undocumented youth interferes with the dichotomized imaginary on which political projects of belonging are built. Practices of homemaking carry political meaning in that they make clear how ‘ … ordinary routines are not the daily expression of a habitual way of life culturally inherited so much as a fragile achievement, a hard-won moment of mundaneness’ (Mattingly 2014, 79). Through everyday practice, undocumented youth moved through their daily lives as bodies-at-home inside the Youth Living Room while their political positioning of non-belonging was ongoing simultaneously.

What does this teach us about homemaking practices? Scholarship wherein the agency of undocumented people gets centered gives us some leads. For example, these homemaking practices could be called ‘liminal politics’: ‘the process whereby precarious populations like the undocumented constitute themselves as political subjects by creating, using, and appropriating in-between spaces’ (Swerts 2017, 382). It could be argued that young undocumented people in the Youth Living Room successfully contest the political rejection of them as political actors (Kalir and Wissink 2016). A similar argument has been made about protests by Sans-Papiers in France (McNevin 2006). In a similar vein, Engin Isin refers to claims to political belonging in ways that are not confined to the state as ‘acts of citizenship’ (2009) regardless of one’s legal citizenship status. But without ignoring the value of studies that acknowledge the agency of undocumented people, there seems to be a risk to overburden those in the most marginalized positions with a responsibility – or possibility at least – to contest that very marginalization themselves. Also, and more important for this paper, the logic behind these arguments can also easily fall prey to the very binary views on who is in or out, to-belong-or-not-to-belong, that this paper aims to complicate.

The homemaking practices discussed here exactly emphasize the inevitable complexities of belonging in everyday life. Home, we learned, is arranged in a temporal space mobilized by relational practices, while the possibilities to engage in homemaking are unequally distributed. Although this situated character of home is intensified for those in positions of extreme marginalization like undocumented people, situatedness is inherent to homemaking for all when understood as an ongoing practice. In other words, homemaking practices become meaningful for understanding the ever-situatedness of being at home, which is magnified by but not limited to a position of exclusion. As such, this paper sheds light on everyday practices that matter for who gets positioned as belonging or not within the collectives that form our societies. In sum, the homemaking practices that took shape in the particular arrangements of the Youth Living Room alert us to belonging as intrinsically situated.

Situated belonging proposes a move away from simplified depictions wherein the question of to-belong-or-not-to-belong takes center stage. The practices in the semi-public Youth Living Room show that belonging and non-belonging positions exist alongside each other instead of excluding one another. The relevance of these homemaking practices, as this article shows, lies in understanding belonging beyond a dichotomized opposition and as temporal and situated despite a political resistance to such ‘fluid and hybrid forms of belonging’ (Hall 2013). Imposed political divides between belonging and non-belonging communities are distinctions that political imaginations might built on but that are not reflected as clear-cut in our everyday lives. Indeed, the meaningfulness of homemaking in the Youth Living Room reaches beyond the youth involved in these practices. Their practices are meaningful, too, in that they suggest different orderings. Therewith, a situated understanding of belonging as put forward here, calls for an empirical exploration of the complexities of belonging in everyday life beyond dominant political and legal narratives.

In this paper that empirical exploration showed that homemaking practices in the Youth Living Room changed the commonality that brought youth together. The loss of the home they left and the exclusion as undocumented people that followed might have been what they had in common. As hooks describes: ‘At times home is nowhere. At times one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation’ (2015, 36). Yet, a shared space accommodating homemaking practices showed to allow ‘migrant subjects to remake what it is they might yet have in common’ (Ahmed 1999, 346, italics in original). The meaning of these homemaking practices lies in the youth building commonalities beyond the politics of belonging – them versus us – that reproduces their exclusion as undocumented people, – by positioning themselves as bodies-at-home in the here and now. Not only does this affect the lives of the young people in the Youth Living Room but they also carry a political effect. Tapping into alternative and more fluid narratives of belonging complicates these dichotomized views of ‘them’ and ‘us’. The homemaking practices by undocumented young people put forward a situated understanding of belonging that challenges our political imagination. They redirect the question of who among us is at home to ask ourselves instead: what politics of homemaking do we wish to be engaged in.

Acknowledgements

I am highly indebted to all youth in the Youth Living Room, to Solidarity, and especially the interviewees whom I cannot mention by name here. I wish to thank Femke Kaulingfreks, Else Vogel, Willemijn Krebbexk, Felice Plijter, Anouk de Koning, Annemarie Samuels, Arantxa Ortiz and Levi van Dam for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. Last but not least, the anonymous and generous reviewers of this article enabled me to improve the article significantly. The research would not have been possible without the NWA Route Toward Resilient Societies and Tilburg University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research received support from the organization for Dutch Scientific Research (I), Grant number NWA.1418.20.017, Subproject 3, under which the Data Management Plan covering ethical considerations was submitted by Tilburg University.Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek

Notes

1 The COVID-19 virus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020, after detecting the first cases in China at the end of 2019, see www.who.int/europe/emergencies/situations/covid-19 (accessed 18 May 2023). Among containment measures taken by the Dutch government were so-called ‘lock-down’ periods imposing far reaching restrictions to public space and social life between 2020 and 2022, among which the introduction of a curfew in January 2021 (https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/coronavirus-tijdlijn, accessed 20 September 2023).

2 Ahmed argues so in relation to Whiteness in public places but her analysis is helpful in the case of other normativities too – and Whiteness matters for European migration management as well (e.g. Bhambra 2009; Vries and Spijkerboer 2021).

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