Home Across Borders: Stories of Sri Lankan Migration to Australia

This book studies how transnational migrants create a sense of home in their host countries. It draws on case studies of Sri Lankan migrants living in Australia to argue that ’home’ is an existential experience rather than a fixed entity. The author looks at how the sense of home arises as a fresh category which is critical in defining one’s existentiality in the host society.

Going beyond the conventional methodological approach of an ethnographer objectivizing other’s sense of home into fixed categories, the book attempts to foreground the immigrant’s articulation of home which evolves parallel to their being. It reveals how three important aspects of our lives - time, space and memory - intersect with the trajectories of migration. The author also delves into the ways in which migrants engage in building a home as a way of creating materiality in their dwelling practice.

Unique and compelling, the book will be highly useful in studies of diaspora, globalisation and transnational migration. It will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of anthropology, migration and transnational studies, as well as sociology and other related disciplines.

Jagath Bandara Pathirage completed his first degree in sociology at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. He did his MSc in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, UK and PhD at Charles Darwin University, Australia.