1 Introduction

Mehmet: I am going home.

Karolina: Are you going to Turkey?

Mehmet: No, I am going to my normal home, where I sleep and eat.

(A conversation with a shop assistant of Turkish descent, field diary)

This paper, an outcome of extensive research on Turkish communities in Norway, in particular in the city of Drammen, attempts to further the conversation started in a small corner shop, by discussing the process of uprooting the deeply rooted ‘home’ in its very construction and meaning (Morley 2000) in the narrations of the descendants of Turkish immigrants to Norway.

In common discourse, the concept of home has been traditionally understood as a rooted and fixed place and this approach persists in current popular debates on migration in Europe, wherein the simplicity of an autochthonous belonging to the places of origin prevails (Geschiere 2009). In contrast, the sedentarist approach to cultures and the idea of the isomorphism of culture, space and place (Malkki 1992; Gupta and Ferguson 1992) was challenged in the social sciences, and described as outdated in relation to the global mobility of people. In light of this postmodern break with a bounded idea of cultures and identities, this paper aims to analyse the multiple meanings of home by new-homeland born children, and grandchildren of immigrants.

While the meaning of home in a context of return migration of a so-called second generation has been addressed by the researchers (Christou 2006; Grasmuck and Hinze 2016) to the best of my knowledge, the reflections on home in a new homeland has focused mainly on first generation immigrants (e.g. Boccagni 2014, 2017; Erdal 2014; Smith 2014; Dyck 2018; for an overview see Mallett 2004). In contrast, this paper presents evidence of how people born and/or raised in a new homeland in immigrant families conceptualize home, highlighting people’s emotional and practical balancing acts between the ancestral country of origin and the place they live in. Empirical evidence is structured into a model of a transdimensional home, which aims at presenting that the unique idea of home is created and negotiated on the intersection of its different dimensions, as well as grasping the dynamics between and within them.

The paper starts by placing the study within the extant literature on home and presenting the context and methodology of the research. It then moves to the conceptualisation of home through its dimensions identified in the narrations of the respondents. The paper concludes by developing an empirical model of a transdimensional home.

2 Home(s) on the move

Transnational connections and a growing relational complexity between identities and places have forced a redefinition of the traditional understanding of home. Rather than being a fixed and unproblematic idea or place, home has been approached as a processual experience (Omata 2016), “a relational, incomplete achievement” (Boccagni and Brighenti 2017, p. 4), and journeying (Mallett 2004), while the practices around home were referred to as “a progressive home making” (Cancellieri 2017, p. 51). Ahmed et al. (2003, p. 1) suggested rethinking home by breaking with “the naturalization of homes as origins” and the “romanticization of mobility as travel, transcendence, and transformation”. They claimed that “being grounded is not necessarily about being fixed; being mobile is not necessarily being detached” (Ahmed et al. 2003, p. 1), suggesting that home and migration are not contradictory. Home therefore lost its essentialist and bounded dimension and set on a journey with migrants and refugees, being recreated in new and foreign places. At the same time, a rooted idea of home as an ancestral origin survived and maintained its strong position in both the sentimental memory of diasporic communities (Brubaker 2005) and a common discourse, reproducing a binary approach of either being in the (ancestral) homeland or being foreign. This view may, however, be confusing. Scholars within transnational studies have addressed the problematic character of clear-cut dichotomies between ancestral and new homelands as irrelevant e.g. for people settled in third countries prior to migration (Jeffery 2010), pointing out the necessity of approaching migrants' practices through the lens of a transnational social field perspective and beyond methodological nationalism (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), rather than viewing them as bounded to the national territory. What is more, studies within the so-called “home-migration nexus” (Boccagni 2017) have opposed the idea of fixed boundaries of homes as a must, suggesting it being “simply unknown in many contexts of emigration, as well as in different civilizational patterns” (Boccagni and Brighenti 2017, p. 4). In fact, in relation to the first generation immigrants' experiences of home scholars proposed to approach home with an attention to the dynamic between home(s)' spatial and temporal dimensions (Boccagni 2018; Kim and Smets 2020).

This paper aims at joining the debate on the processual and plural character of home in a context of migration with a case study of the descendants of first generation immigrants from Turkey to Norway. By doing so, it addresses the dynamic between home-making practices in ancestral and new homeland homes from an under-researched perspective of those representing a so-called second and third generation, attempting to exemplify how their experience of home differ from the one known from the research on first generation immigrants.

3 Methodology and context

The Norwegian Turkish community in Norway is not particularly large compared to the one in countries such as Germany, France, or the Netherlands, with a population of 23,953 (SSB 2019). Nevertheless, the concentration of people with a Turkish background in particular locations such as Drammen, where the data to this study was collected, makes for their visible imprint on the local spaces they inhabit. Migration of Turks to Norway was a part of the post-war labour mobility from Turkey dating back to the 1960s, even if it only started at the end of the decade in Norway. The city of Drammen hosted its first Turkish “guest workers” between 1967 and 1970 (Nikielska-Sekula 2018). Turks in Drammen were recruited to perform low profile jobs, many of which were provided by a local paper mill. They originated from rural areas in Konya province (central Anatolia, Turkey), known for its conservative attitudes towards religion. Today, the Turkish minority in the city constitutes a heterogeneous group representing different religious backgrounds, comprising Sunni Muslims and Alevis, and various places of origin. While rural villages situated in Konya province prevail, people originating from other localities in Turkey are settled there too. The descendants of first generation immigrants belong to various socio-economic classes, and the local government has representatives of Turkish background.

Drammen is a mid-sized city situated in the Eastern region of Norway, around 40 km south of the capital city of Oslo. Thirty-four percent of its population (SSB 2019) has an immigrant background. The majority (13.5%; 2200 people) of inhabitants with immigrant backgrounds are of Turkish origin. This group is relatively well settled: 62% of Drammenian Turks have lived in Norway for more than 21 years (Høydahl 2014).

The findings presented in this paper are based on 12 in-depth interviews with descendants of Turkish immigrants from post-war labour migration who settled in Drammen. The interviews were conducted in 2013 and 2014 and was a part of a bigger projectFootnote 1 (Nikielska-Sekula 2018). As Turkish communities in Drammen are considered by local researchers and journalists as unapproachable, it took me a significant amount of time and effort to gain access. My positionality in relation to the members of these communities can be described as ‘an insider by proxy’ (Carling et al. 2014), owing to my status as an immigrant from Poland living in Norway, with an extensive experience of studying and working in Turkey in the past. This influenced both research and analyses: (1) the former through prompting respondents' critical attitudes to the Norwegian society and a greater openness about values and customs traditional in Turkey, and (2) the latter through my in-depth understanding of the complexity of Turkish customs in relation to a modern Turkish society along with a non-transparency of the values and customs traditional in Norway and present in respondents' narratives.Footnote 2 The position of ‘an insider by proxy’ facilitated contacts with newly-arrived first generation Turks who served at the beginning of the study as gate keepers. Their connection to the Norwegians of Turkish descent was, however, limited. This further influenced the number of informants, and the lack of access to their houses.

The interviews were conducted in NorwegianFootnote 3 in public spaces of Drammen and private premises of ethnic facilities. Respondents to the study, 5 males and 7 females, were aged between 18 and 35 years old and lived in various districts of Drammen. All were either employed or involved with studies. Their jobs ranged from low skilled to professional, some had their own businesses. 6 had Alevi religious background, 6 were of Sunni background. All respondents were classified as Norwegians of Turkish descent. This is defined as people born and\or raised in Norway who were either the children of two immigrant parents with a Turkish background (first generation Norwegians of Turkish descent), or the children of at least one first generation Norwegian of Turkish descent (second generation Norwegians of Turkish descent). This categorization was created to avoid calling people who never experienced migration immigrants, and to simplify complex intergenerational relationships. Instead, members of Turkish communities in Norway are generally called in the paper “Norwegian Turks”, not “Turkish Norwegians” to comply with their primarily declared identification as Turks. The sample of my research was too small to draw inter-generational comparisons, and no trends characterizing narrations of first and second generation Norwegians were identified, neither was it possible to identify differences along the socio-economic class and age lines therefore I do not address these issues. Nevertheless, religious background and gender proved important in differentiating experiences in some of the dimensions of home and these are highlighted in the analyses.

The names of the respondents were changed, age is approximate, the names of the villages of their origins are hidden and sensitive information is removed from the quotes. Informed consent was obtained from the participants to the study.

The research was situated within the tradition of qualitative methodology and supported by Clarke’s (2005) Situational Analyses, an inductive method assuming creation of the theoretical models based on the empirical findings. All interviews but one were recorded, one, aligned with the will of the respondent, was hand-scripted. Interviews were coded in MaxQDA software, according to the threads raised by the participants. Thematic coding was employed (Bryman 2012). Codes were grouped in categories and this paper presents the findings covering the threads related to the issues around home-making.

4 Conceptualising home through its dimensions

There is an agreement that home is processual, rather than fixed, multiple rather than singular (Boccagni 2017). Home is more than a mere locality (Fortier 2003, p. 121) or dwelling. Nevertheless, there is also an agreement that home involves some form of spatiality and materiality. Home is “located in space, but it is not necessarily a fixed space” (Douglas 1991, p. 289). The definition of home that this paper utilizes is the one by Boccagni (2017, p. 5), who states that home “refers to a set of social practices, values and symbols that, while setting specific, can be transferred and reproduced into different settings over time”. Moreover, inspired by Boccagni's (2017, p. 3) concept of homing, understood as “a process through which people negotiate a sense of home vis-à-vis their external circumstances”, throughout the paper I refer to the practices of homing: intended or unintended actions of actors that result in making “meaningful home-like settings, feelings and relationships” (Boccagni 2017, p. 26).

Aligned with the Situational Analyses method, I used my data to distinguish eight dimensions of home referred to by my respondents throughout the interviews: spatial, material, relational, sensorial home, home as origin, home as routines and protection, gendered relationships at home, and rejection from home. Below, these categories are empirically substantiated and grounded theoretically in the extant literature within the home-migration nexus, and their trandimensional character is highlighted.

4.1 Spatial home

If home is about “how (…) bodies reinhabit space” (Ahmed 1999, p. 342), and “a special kind of relationship with place” (Boccagni 2017, p. 4), the spatial aspect is inherent in home-making. Locations in both Norway and Turkey were referred to by the respondents as places that constituted everyday experiences of home. Norway on a more regular, everyday basis, Turkey on the occasion of summer (and other) visits. A city of Drammen, where respondents lived, often with specific reference to the districts respondents grew up in, was the most popular meaningful location among the respondents, followed by chosen places in Turkey. While a similar dual connection to the ancestral and new homeland is present in the extant literature on home making by first generation immigrants (e.g. Boccagni 2018; Kim and Smets 2020), approaching these homes through the temporal lenses highlights the difference in the experiences of home by the descendants of immigrants settled in a new homeland. For the first generation immigrants the dynamic between “then” and “now”—pre- and post-migration period, is vital and influences the spatial experiences of homes (Boccagni 2018). For the descendants of immigrants, in turn, the “then”—a pre-migration period, does not exist and the homes in Turkey and Norway are interconnected along the temporal lines.

References to the Norwegian city of Drammen and its districts as homely were much more common among the respondents than references to Norway as a whole. Aligned with a multi-scalar approach to home (Blunt and Dowling 2006), I contend that the home in Norway was experienced and exercised primarily on a micro level of a household and a meso level of local diasporic communities of Turks and the socio-material environment of Drammen, rather than on a macro level of a nation. Such primary identification with the local in new homelands is consistent with the findings of scholars researching people of Turkish descent born and raised in Germany (Çağlar 2001; Ehrkamp 2005). The findings presented in this paper confirm that a micro and meso scales of home are more significant than a macro level in conceptualising homes in a new homeland by the descendants of immigrants. In contrast, remarks made by the respondents regarding Turkey as home were firstly references to the nation as a whole, placing home-making processes on the national scale. This broad identification of the nation as home, however, was later in conversation replaced by the everyday experience of home in tiny locations in central Anatolia, from where respondents’ ancestors originally came, revealing the level of a household and a village community. This was especially true for Sunni respondents, whose relationship with Turkey was stronger and more straightforward than the one of those of Alevi background.

Alevi respondents tended to have a stronger relationship with Norway than Sunni respondents, referring to Turkey as their second home—a reflection absent in the statements of Sunni Turks, the majority of whom avoided gradation between localities in Norway and Turkey. The statement of Ilke portraits a crucial difference between Sunni and Alevi respondents:

I like Drammen very much. This is my city. (…) I feel at home here. However, I also wrote Turkey—Izmir. This is my second home. My mother and father are from Turkey, so I am part of that. (Ilke, 25, female, Alevi)

Turkey, for her, remained the ancestral homeland rather than everyday home, and the locality in the country she mentions is not an Anatolian village of her ancestors, but a modern urban centre, a destination of holiday visits of all Alevi respondents, and a place where their extended families, who remained in Turkey, live.

Some Alevi respondents expressed no identification with ancestral villages in Konya, explicitly marking the striking difference between the habits common in the province and those common in Izmir. “Everyone in Konya is very religious. (…) Izmir is similar to Norway though. People are modern. (…) Izmir suits me better than does Konya” (Elifcan, 19, female, Alevi). Scholars have demonstrated that suffering and trauma may erase a meaning of a place as home (Perez Murcia 2018). The relationship between the Sunni and Alevi Muslims in Turkey is saddled with a negative heritage. The Alevi pogroms in the past (Özyürek 2009, p. 237) and little government support (Özdalga 2012, p. 213) in contemporary Turkey might have influenced their strong attachment to Norway, where the Alevi community can freely follow its liberal version of Islam. This may also explain the rejection of conservative and predominantly Sunni Konya in favour of other modern Turkish cities. In case of Alevi Norwegians of Turkish descent, the knowledge of the experiences of Alevi discrimination in Turkish Konya was partly inherited from the ancestors and partly a result of the Alevi portrayal in media, presenting that exclusion of the places associated with trauma from the definition of home may be recreated in a multigenerational perspective.

4.2 Material home

In a context of migration, the relationship between the subject and the space of home is more complex than the mere act of “entering” the space (Ahmed 1999). Home involves the interplay between the presence and the absence in a special way. Regarding Ecuadorian migrants settled in Trento, Italy, Boccagni (2014) suggests that the absence of migrants in their villages of origin in Ecuador is contradicted by the feeling of their presence through the existence of their newly built houses. The same is true for the villages of Sunni Norwegian Turks' origin in Konya province in Turkey, whose landscapes are defined by the contrasting local dwellings made of stone, and large size and distinct houses that mark the presence of those who are constantly absent, adding a material and a place-based dimension to the spatial home. The Alevi village, instead, is empty of such dwellings, clearly lacking a material infrastructure to serve as home of their own for Norwegians originating from here. It connects to the differences between approaching localities in Turkey as homes between Sunni and Alevi respondents described in a previous section and further leads me to a claim that having a house in Turkey often supports and legitimizes belonging to the country. The annual journeys of many Norwegian Turks to Turkey have become a tradition facilitated by home ownership, and while these trips signify a vacation, they have a symbolic meaning of returning home too.

While home ownership in Turkey was predominantly common among Sunni, in relation to Norway, Sunni and Alevi respondents were equally concerned with owning the house, pointing out the practical aspects such as profitability. The interplay between house ownership issues and feeling about a particular place as home-like is well described by Burak:

By « at home » … I meant my house. But sure you can interpret it more like « feeling at home » too. I have a house in Turkey too. My own apartment. (…) So Turkey is also home. I don't care [whether it is Norway or Turkey] as long as [the house] is my own. (Burak, 37, male, Sunni)

The trend to own a house may have been influenced by structural factors. Norwegian policy, has prioritized house ownership over renting since the 1940s. It is estimated that 77% of Norwegian households own a house, and between 90 and 95% of Norwegians have owned a house during their lifetime (Sørvoll 2011, p. 22). Renting is not popular, and some scholars claim that ethnic discrimination is evident in the rental market (Sørvoll 2011). Home ownership was therefore important for the respondents in relation to the locations in Norway, and, for Sunni respondents, in Turkey, presenting the inter-connection between the spatial and material aspects of home.

4.3 Relational home

While spatial and material dimensions of home constitute important elements of respondents' definition of home, alone they are not enough to make a place into home. Massey (1994, p. 168), in relation to the process of creating places, contends that place is a moment in space “formed out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location”. Places, including homes, therefore gain their meaning from the (social) spaces attached to them and the relationships occurring in them. If the notion of home as a place that materialises certain social spaces, as Massey (1994) proposes, is accepted, home may be regarded through the lenses of social relationships that constitute it. My findings, aligned with other research (Allen 2008) proved that social relationships had the power of changing localities into homes.

Karolina: What makes home for you in Konya and in Drammen?

Ayşe (32, female, Sunni): When I am with my family, my children, my husband, the closest family. In Konya there are my mom and dad.

Norwegian Turks have very rich family lives with dense contacts with the extended family members (Nikielska-Sekula 2018). Many claimed that what makes Norway home for them is the presence of these social relationships. What is more, the yearly trips to Turkey are done with the accompaniment of the family members rather than alone. I suggest that what makes places in the ancestral homeland home for the respondents is temporal materialisation of the social spaces attached to the home in Norway, making for the “portability” of home (Boccagni 2017, p. 12). Interactions with locals enrich the experience of Turkish homes, but they fall short of forming these places into homes for my respondents. I substantiate this statement by the fact that many respondents admitted that they started considering localities in Turkey home when their parents migrated there upon retirement. For some, such migration diminished the feeling of home in Norway. Following from this I argue that homes in Norway and Turkey are filled with often very same social relationships, proving the continuity of home-making in the two locations. This further relates to the idea of a transdimenstional home: the spatial aspects, overlapping with the material elements of home, gain their meaning upon the presence of “portable” social relations that travel between localities. The individual experience of home is gained on the intersection of these, and other dimensions discussed below. The focus on social relationships primarily developed in Norway (family) as crucial for feeling at home in Norway and in Turkey differentiates the experiences of home of Norwegians of Turkish descent from those of first generation immigrants. The latter may relate to the social relations from a pre-migration period in conceptualising homes in Turkey disconnecting these spaces from their life in Norway, which is not the case for my respondents.

4.4 Sensorial home

Ahmed (1999, p. 341) defines home in terms of sensory experiences. After Brah (1996, 192), she calls it “the lived experience of locality” that enables the recognition of particular sensory stimuli as home-like or foreign in any location. Home, therefore, involves familiarity (Hage 1997, p. 102; Boccagni 2017, p. 1), and constitutes a lived experience, which can be manifested in sensory stimuli recognising things as home-like of foreign. Such familiarity was voiced in relation to Drammen, socio-cultural rules in the city and its landscapes. Sensory stimuli of home overlapped with previously discussed dimensions, strengthening the feeling of home in Drammen. Kemal stated:

The most important landscape for me is [the district in Drammen], because this is where I grew up. All my friends are from [there], and I feel at home there. For example, if I drive to Oslo, I feel like I am in a foreign place. However, when I start driving towards [the district in Drammen], I feel at home. (Kemal, 29, male, Alevi).

Interestingly, little home-like stimuli were reported by Norwegians of Turkish descent towards homes in Turkey, in contrast to the statements of first generation immigrants, which are not discussed in this paper. Rather, unsurprisingly, the home of the childhood with familiar landscapes, smells and tastes were attached to the localities in Norway, which reveals another difference in experiencing home between immigrants and their new homeland born descendants.

4.5 Home as origin (and destination)

In the context of spatial mobility, Ahmed (1999, p. 343) claims: “[t]he journeys of migration involve a splitting of home as place of origin and home as the sensory world of everyday experience”. This paper aims to present that the ancestral homeland for the descendants of immigrants may personify both, an everyday experience of home, as presented in the dimensions of home described above, and a fixed idea of origin, relating to an imagined, idealized place of autochthonic origin dating back several generations (Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Galip 2015, pp. 120–121).

Can's statement exemplifies the essentialist idea of origin: something that is expected to be passed to next generations and constitutes an important element of the identity:

There is a small village there [in Turkey], where my grandparents live in and where mom and dad grew up. We usually go there every summer (…). It is very important to me to know where I actually came from. And, just as my parents did, I am going to teach my own children where are their real roots (Can, 25, male, Sunni).

While Can, in the interview, reflected on particular localities in Turkey as an arena of everyday experiences of home, here he presents a particular Turkish locality through the lenses of home as origin and referring to the phenomenon of autochthony, which is understood as being “born from the soil” (Geschiere 2009, p. ix), perpetuating an essentialist idea of real roots. He even goes further, presenting his identification with Turkey as a matter of blood ties, that, in his case makes viewing ancestral homeland not only as an origin but also a destination:

If someone told me that I could stay either in Turkey or in Norway, I would choose Turkey, because that is where my blood originates. (…) and I’d rather die in Turkey than here. I’d rather be buried in my own country (Can).

This statement was exceptional among Norwegians of Turkish descent, but ancestral homeland as a posthumous destination is a quite common theme among first generation immigrants from Turkey to Norway.

Presented idea of home as an essentialist origin is aligned with how the diasporas approach ancestral homeland (Galip 2015). It is however worth mentioning that the respondents were able to move with no contradictions between such essentialist conceptualisations of homes in Turkey and “home as the sensory world of everyday experience” (Ahmed 1999, p. 343).

4.6 Home as routines and protection

Boccagni claims that the practices of homing enhance the home-like feelings in particular locations (Boccagni 2017, p. 23). These involve everyday routine activities such as cooking, sleeping, and cleaning. Food in relation to home played a special role for my respondents:

“Home is where you get food and love. (…) It is more the idea that you come home and you are safe, you have food, and you can eat it” (Cansu, 26, female, Alevi)

Several researchers have argued that home involves some amount of security (Hage 1997, p. 102; Boccagni 2017, pp. 13–15). Described routine activities, necessary to carry on with life, provided such a sense of protection. Despite their very trivial nature, their presence was necessary to make daily performances of the respondents in the public possible. The idea of security at home was therefore framed here within the everyday routine activities and overlapped with spatial and material dimension, strengthening especially the feeling of home in the localities in Norway, where the routines were present in everyday home experiences.

4.7 Gendered relationships at home

Speaking about routines and protection, the question of gendered relationships as part of the practices of homing comes to the fore. As feminist authors pointed out homes are for many arenas of experiencing violence, harassment, and suffering that refer to all but protection (Young 1997, Mallett 2004). Moreover, homes have long been places of gender discrimination in relation to the unequal distribution of house chores, and the victims have predominantly been women. Home, therefore, is not always an idyllic place. The ideal home often differs from the actual home (Boccagni 2017, pp. 13–15). Home may therefore involve power imbalance, and this was also identified in my research.

Generally, female respondents were more conscious of the inequalities between genders if it came to certain practices that making a place into home required such as cooking and cleaning, revealing the differences between genders in approaching home. Ayşe stated: “I know I should be resting at home in the weekends, but [because of the house chores] I rest only when I come to work on Monday”. She complained about her husband not participating in performing chores and having high expectations regarding meals she cooked, despite her being a sole breadwinner at the time of the interview. Men mostly tended to take female predominance in performing chores for granted, having no reflections about the inequitable distribution of them, even if some male respondents admitted an active participation in house chores.

Experiencing present or future homes as an arena of hard and unpaid work was present in the statements of female respondents, all of whom but one had a spouse “imported” from Turkey. The practice of importing spouses made it difficult to equalize the division of house chores, against the dominant discourse of gender equality in Norway, creating frustration due to expectations of females who, socialized within the spirit of gender equality, had to confront it daily with a more traditional understanding of gender roles popular in Turkey. The experience of home as an arena of unbalanced power in gender relationships is worth acknowledging. In light of it, the sensorial experiences of homes conveying tastes of food and scents of clean clothes calls for reflection on who performed the labour of these “smelly, touchy, and tasty” homing practices, at what costs, and how performing (or not) this labour influences the experiences of home on its other dimensions.

4.8 Rejection from home

Scholars in various contexts exemplified that “engagement with spaces of belonging (…) are also characterized by inclusion and exclusion” (Collins 2009, p. 839). Experiences of home by Norwegians of Turkish descent include the one of exclusion and rejection from home on the national level in pursuance with the notion of a multi-scalarity of home (Blunt and Dowling 2006). This happens both in Turkey and in Norway from the side of “native” inhabitants. Ayşe's statement describes the problem well.

I do not feel at home in Turkey, because (…) [Turks in Turkey] say that you are from abroad. (…) [In Norway] even if one forgets that one is foreign, the others will never forget it. (Ayşe)

The use of the Turkish language by the descendants of immigrants often becomes an excluding factor in the ancestral homeland, even though it constitutes an important dimension of home in Norway. Turkish marks a clear boundary of ethnicity and strengthens the sense of belonging to the Turkish community in Norway, but the version of the language used by Turks abroad has not undergone the same changes as the Turkish spoken in Turkey and may sound old-fashioned or foreign. Fatma, who declared a strong attachment to Turkey, admitted:

I feel at home more in Norway than in Turkey. I feel foreign once I am down there [in Turkey]. If you (…) did not know that I was from Turkey, you would not guess I am foreign [in Norway], because you cannot hear it from my language. However, when I am in Turkey, then immediately, “Do you come from abroad?” (Fatma, 30, female, Sunni).

Ayşe and Fatma’s stories show that others—both Turks and Norwegians—create and enforce a sense of non-belonging, confusing their either consistent experience of, and smooth negotiations between the multiple homes. The binary opposition between the new and ancestral homeland, enforced by both diaspora communities and a mainstream society, enhances the feeling of a non-belonging and perpetuates rejection as an immanent element of experiencing home by new homeland born descendants of immigrants.

5 Discussion: towards a transdimensional home

I presented various dimensions in operationalising and experiencing home by Norwegians of Turkish descent linking them with previous works within the home-migration nexus and pointing out how respondents' experiencing of home differ from that of first generation immigrants. While described dimensions have become distinct categories for the purpose of clarity of this academic text, in the declared experiences of the respondents they did not exist separately from one another, being rather interconnected, or overlapping, as I attempted to indicate in a previous section. To address these, I propose to frame the empirical evidence into a model of a transdimensional home. The trans- lenses added here to theoretically grounded and empirically substantiated dimensions of home presented above serve to grasp the dynamic between different elements of a complex experience of home, including various locations, social relationships, sensory stimuli etc. (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Model of a transdimensional home: home occurs on the intersection of dimensions. The vertical lines symbolise the changing intensity of the dimensions according to the circumstances. The horizontal line refers to the individual experience of home across the dimensions and with reference to their gradated intensity at a particular moment in time

Full size image

The model of a transdimensional home refers to approaching home as occurring on the intersection of different dimensions intensity of which is changeable and adjustable according to the current circumstances. While some dimensions may be tuned down in particular settings, they still influence the overall conceptualisation of home or, more precisely, homes of the descendants of immigrants. The model draws attention to a back and forth movement between the localities marked as homes, differentiating the experiences of the descendants of immigrants from those of their immigrant ancestors. It also highlights the changing intensity and importance of the elements of dimensions according to the circumstances, at the same time acknowledging the constant presence of all of them.

A purpose of this model is threefold. Firstly, to provide lenses to analyse a dynamic between the dimensions of home by the descendants of immigrants. Secondly, to highlight interconnections and move beyond contradictions in the conceptualisations of home in the ancestral and new homeland. Finally, to acknowledge specific circumstances of home-making by the descendants of immigrants, which are underrepresented in a current scholarship within the home-migration nexus that focuses theoretically and empirically primarily on the experiences of home by first generation immigrants.

Regarding the first purpose, proposed model highlights the coexistence and mutual influence of the dimensions of home, a fluid border between them, and how the dimensions come to the fore or are tuned down according to the changing circumstances. As indicated throughout the paper often one dimension of home alone is not enough to make for a full experience of home. Social relationships attached to spatial and material aspects of home influence significantly the way places are experienced. Performance of the routines that provide both protection and sensory experiences of home are dependent on the presence of people who provide for them, while house ownership legitimates particular places as homes. What is more, some dimensions of home overlap with others. Turkey as an idea of an essentialist home is difficult to be separated from Turkey as an arena of a processual experience of home in constant making during the summer visits. Finally, it is not that all the elements of the dimensions of home are present in their full swing at all times. Their intensity depends on the current circumstances. Extended families in Turkey make for the experiencing home in the localities in ancestral homeland, but are less significant in relation to homely localities in Norway. Discourse of Turkey as a real origin comes to the fore in relation to Turkish homes but is significantly tuned down when talking about homes in Norway—where, in turn, the presence of close family gains meaning. All these indicates the dynamic of the interactions between the dimensions, but also a dynamic within the dimensions broadening the understanding of the processes behind the conceptualisations of home as processual, changeable, and constantly negotiated according to the surrounding circumstances. The processual character of home is also true for the essentialist idea of the ancestral homeland, which undergoes changes during the life course, even though it still represents “the primordial” or “ancestral” in actors' understanding.

With regard to the second purpose, some elements of the dimensions of home presented in the empirical section are mobile. Travelling between Norway and Turkey involves the accompaniment of extended families settled in Norway—the same people who make home in Norway also make home in Turkey. Approaching experiences of home across dimensions and with the attention to the actual mobility of their elements enhances making connections between the localities in different countries by focusing on which elements of home-making actually transcend the borders. This further enhances understanding of home-making beyond the lenses of methodological nationalism, and as a practice embedded in a transnational social field (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). Moreover, the model enables going beyond seeming contradictions between individual dimensions of home expressed by the descendants of immigrants. Besides the ancestral—new homeland opposition, I refer here especially to the rejection from home on a national level that accompanies experiences of home both in Norway and in Turkey, and that exists simultaneously with the recognition of Turkey as home on a national level. The argument that I want to make here is that Norwegians of Turkish descent managed to negotiate between different dimensions of home without contradiction and all these dimensions together make for their unique experience of home. In other words, all the dimensions, by their constant presence, influence experiences of home(s) at all times, even if they seem tuned down.

Finally, in case of the descendants of immigrants, the past\present division in experiencing home that relates subsequently to pre-and post-migration period and is widely utilised in theorising home in a context of migration is irrelevant. The model of a transdimentional home goes beyond the temporal lenses adequate for first generation immigrants, allowing approaching experiences of home on various dimensions as simultaneously developing during the life course, and beyond the interruption by the actual migration.

The transdimentional lenses give therefore an opportunity to look upon various dimensions of home as non-contradictory, influencing one another, and through a perspective adjusted to the experiences of home by the descendants of immigrants.

6 Conclusion

This paper presented the way Norwegians of Turkish descent conceptualized home, defining it through its dimensions: spatial, material, relational, sensorial, home as origin, home as routines and protection, gendered relationships at home, and rejection from home. By structuring the findings into a model of a transdimensional home, it aimed at presenting the dynamics between different dimensions of home specific for the descendants of immigrants. The way Norwegians of Turkish descent conceptualized home differed from what we know about home-making by first generation immigrants from the extant literature. Firstly, Norwegians of Turkish descent have never left the ancestral homeland behind in a way their ancestors–immigrants did. They rather approached it in second place, and referred to it as a second home throughout narrations, even if the idea of autochthonous origin in Turkey was maintained. Consequently, a popularised phrase of uprootings (from the ancestral homeland) and regroundings (in a new homeland) (Ahmed et al. 2003) in relation to home making by first generation immigrants is not relevant for the descendants of immigrants. Secondly, scholars have argued that one way of seeing home is in terms of beginning (Boccagni 2017, p. 70). While for first generation immigrants, the home as beginning is usually located in the ancestral homeland, the beginning of Norwegians of Turkish descent was rather related to their childhood homes in Norway. Finally, following from the above, the sense of home as an everyday experience and sensory stimuli was primarily related to these childhood homes in Norway. The idea of ancestral origin as homeland was built later in the life course through summer visits and the idealized narrations inherited from the ancestors. The making of home in Turkey was negotiated in relation to the homely experiences and social spaces attached to the home in Norway. In other words, Norway remained the reference point when assessing localities in Turkey as home-like or foreign, not the other way around.

The implication of these findings for the research within the home-migration nexus is the acknowledgement that the experiences of home by the descendants of immigrants should not be analysed through the same theoretical lens as the one applied to first generation immigrants' conceptualisations of home. As indicated, the homes of the descendants of immigrants are not created along the same temporal lines as those of the newcomers. Their experience of home cannot be thus regarded as linear against their life course: from the ancestral to the new homeland, but rather a back and forth experience. A model of a transdimensional home presented in this paper aimed at grasping these nuances and may be useful in further research on home making by the descendants of immigrants, allowing to go beyond the cliché contradictions between the ancestral and new homeland that in the experiences of the descendants of immigrants are not separated by a turning point of the actual migration. Still more research is needed to include a perspective of the descendants of immigrants in the conceptualisations of home in a context of international migration. The model is flexible and able to accommodate new\different dimensions should they prove significant in further research.

A more broad contribution to the ethnic and migration studies of this paper is the suggestion that researching homes of the descendants of immigrants through a proposed lenses of a transdimensional home and with an acknowledgement of a non-linear relationship between the new and ancestral homeland in their experiences can provide a better insight into the life-words of this group, allowing to go beyond a popular discourse of in-betweenness, highlighting instead balancing acts of the actors between various socio-cultural groups and spatial locations they relate to. Descendants of immigrants settled in the new homelands are often portrayed as being “between two cultures”. Such approach misses the spatial dimension of actors’ lives and their ability to master negotiations between the “two cultures” that makes them located, rather than dislocated. Moreover, it ignores the fact that human daily routines are defined spatially and assumes the existence of homogeneous cultures between which one may be stuck. Going beyond the lenses of in-betwenness highlights the importance of the relationship between body, mind, and the physical locality the body is situated within, which is a starting point for possible transnational and trans-local actions. Focusing on the experiences of home by the descendants of immigrants, understood as spatially attached social practices, values and symbols (Boccagni 2017), and beyond the linear lenses, enforces such located and nuanced perspective.