Imagining a Home in a World of Flux: Challenging Individualisation and Transnational Belongings

Article attempts to discuss the significance of individual consciousness, people’s motivation to pursuit their ends and the extent of their freedom from exterior influences, while focusing on relationship between migration processes and belongings among diasporic groups. It draws on insight from the indepth interviews with migrants who are a part of Slovene and Irish transnational diaspora, and thus aims to represent certain transformations in social reality embraced by the ideas of individualisation, while being simultaneously aware of particular weaknesses of those ideas. The focus is on their conceptualisations and perceptions of home, as a useful concept in considering individualisation that undermines the traditional meanings of tradition, family relations, ethnical and national belongings. What seems to be important is that in the era of increased individualisation, traditional social categories remain salient although contested and social forces still represent influential components inmigrants’ negotiation of the selves and the others. The conceptual lens, which could capture the contested relation between agency and structure in migrants’ live, is that of transnational social fields.