ABSTRACT
What does it feel like to be displaced? What material things are important to people when they have to move, and why? What are the smells, tastes and textures of forced migration and of unfamiliarity, and how does the body and its comportments adapt to new ways of being? Why should such questions be taken seriously? Focusing on forced relocation, this chapter touches on such questions by approaching migration and diaspora as not only culturally inflected, but material, embodied, sensorial and emotional. This perspective foregrounds the ways in which migrants perceive, imagine, engage with, make and re-make their worlds . . . and are made and re-made by them. Not only do refugee groups undergo different migrations, but even within one population, family or even individual, there may be many kinds of experience. Exploring these is valuable in itself; it also enables more nuanced interpretations of displacement’s widely attended-to economic, social and political elements. It may also, enhance policy-making and applied work.
