Detour: Bodies, memories, and mobilities in and around the home

ABSTRACT

The word detour denotes taking adifferent direction and/or adeviating pathway– especially from aconsidered norm. While the connotations of taking adetour are not always negative, the idea of movement away from, or against an assumed trajectory indicates achange in direction. In this paper, we pursue both what prompts this changed direction and the products of the detour itself. We follow the detours of Sri Lankan refugees and asylum seekers enacted during walk-along and in-depth interviews in their homes in Sydney, Australia. The walks provided opportunities for ‘talk’ with ‘encounter’; the embodied, emplaced, and habitual movements of the participants illuminated the interplay of memory with place. Their mobilities– across borders or through routine movements in everyday spaces– opened multiple conduits of encounter. We use the notion of detour to think with and think through their facilitating and ensuing mobilities, and their relationship to memory, identity, and place. Our theorisation of detour pushes mobilities scholarship further, by engaging with bodies, memories, and homes across multiple spatial, temporal, and lifecourse trajectories.

KEYWORDS:

• Detour
• memory
• Sri Lankan refugees
• home
• mobility

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Scholarship. Our deepest thanks go to the participants for opening their homes to us and sharing their deeply personal stories. We also acknowledge the anonymous reviewers and journal editor for their comments and editorial guidance that strengthened this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Defining ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ are contentious in Australia. Asylum seekers flee their home country and apply for protection in ahost country, while refugees already have their application approved on arrival. Both refugees and asylum seekers cannot return home due to fears of persecution. However, in Australia, public, media, and political rhetoric around the term ‘asylum seeker’ has been used to undercut their legitimacy to live in Australia. In this paper, we use the word ‘refugee’ to refer to both refugees and asylum seekers.

2. The participants who partook in this research have multiple ethnic and religious backgrounds. As authors, our positionalities and experiences of conducting research with war-affected participants also play acritical part in conducting, analysing, and writing this research. For more detail on our positionalities and research experiences, see Drozdzewski (2015) and Ratnam (2019b).

3. All names used in this paper are pseudonyms.