Homescape: Safe space for transmigrant families multisensory identity
What is it about?
Newly redefined term viewing the home as a subversive agentic space where transmigrant and immigrant families can represent their identity through multisensory discourse resources (sights, smells, sounds, tastes and touch of objects, artefacts). The study investigated the experiential, non-interactional multisensory discourse resources in the homescape. The homescape extends from the Linguistic Landscape and houses temporal and spatial components, which occur over time. The yearlong ethnographic case study of three Nepalese families (two transmigrant Ghurkha families and one immigrant family) included 150 hours of observational data triangulated with qualitative interviews. Findings highlighted that experiential multisensory discourse resources are threads of identity in the home that have yet to be fully recognized as research evidence by ethnographers in the home context.
Why is it important?
This concept enables researchers to move away from colonial Western, objective language-centered data. It is overlooked multisensory data which is emotional and connects to a sense of a persons identity.