'Thanks to London and to God': living religion transnationally among Brazilian migrants in London and 'back home' in Brazil

PhDThis thesis explores the role of religion in the everyday, transnational lives of Brazilian migrants in London and on their return to Brazil. It contributes to an emerging body of work that recognises the importance of religion within transnational processes and foregrounds the experiences of Brazilians in London, a growing yet still largely invisible new migrant group in London. While the study explores the role of religious institutions in the transnational lives of Brazilian migrants, it works with the notion of religion as lived experience to give due weight to the perspectives of migrants themselves. It examines the ways in which migrants negotiate their religious beliefs and practices in different places and create new connections between them. The study draws on a qualitative methodological framework, which included 78 in-depth interviews with Brazilian migrants in London and on their return to Brazil, religious leaders, and migrants’ family members. It also involved extended participant observation in one Catholic and one evangelical Protestant church in London, as well as at community events and in migrants’ domestic spaces in London and five ‘sending’ towns in Brazil. Empirically, the project reveals some of the ways in which religion functions transnationally through examining how religious institutions and their leaders adapt to new contexts, and how religion becomes a crucial resource for migrants at all stages of their migration experience, including on their return. With reference to migrants’ own stories, it explores the ways that they draw on religion to cope with particular challenges related to migration, but also how engagement with the spiritual enables migrants to give meaning to their experiences. The thesis develops the concept of transnational religious spaces to highlight the ways in which religion permeates the spaces of transnationalism and functions within and across multiple scales, including the global, the local, the institutional, the individual, the corporeal and the virtual. These spaces incorporate those who migrate, those who return ‘back home’, and migrants’ families who experience the absence of their loved ones. Yet while transnational religious spaces can enable migrants to create alternative spaces of belonging, I argue that they can also be exclusionary, creating new barriers at the same time as opening up existing ones. I also propose a related concept of religious remittances whereby changing religious practices and beliefs are transferred across borders, adapting to new contexts

Home-city geographies: urban dwelling and mobility

Developing an agenda to conceptualise the connections between the domestic and the urban, this paper focuses on urban domesticities (homemaking in the city), domestic urbanism (the city as home) and the home-city geographies that connect them. Home-city geographies examine the interplay between lived experiences of urban homes and the contested domestication of urban space. Reflecting the ways in which urban homes and the ability to feel at home in the city are shaped by different migrations and mobilities, the paper demonstrates that not only home and the city, but also urban dwelling and mobility, are intertwined rather than separate

On stories, storytelling, and the quiet politics of welcome

Focusing on a collaborative storytelling project with refugees and asylum seekers in the London borough of Waltham Forest, this paper explores the potential offered by creative storytelling and story-sharing for providing alternative narratives and spaces for inclusion, welcome and mutual care against a backdrop of hostility and exclusion. It challenges tendencies within prevailing discourses to either treat asylum narratives as ‘bogus’ or to essentialise individual refugee stories through the prevailing tropes of ‘victim’ or ‘hero’. Instead, we draw attention to the actual process of making, telling and sharing stories between refugees and local residents, in the Global Story Café project led by Stories & Supper. The paper examines how the spaces that emerged through sharing stories with refugees and asylum seekers in a series of creative workshops and targeted storytelling cafes with public participation opened up possibilities for what we refer to as a quiet politics of welcome – a form of welcome that moves beyond notions of charity or sympathy, disrupts perceived host-guest binaries and instead demonstrates the importance of ‘being with’. The paper highlights the need for more engagement and understanding of these ‘quiet’ acts of welcome, which can provide insights for challenging the overriding discourses about, and practices towards, refugees and asylum seekers

Globe’s encounters and the art of rolling: home, migration and belonging

This article explores the multiple and multifarious encounters of and with Globe, a 1-metre-diameter copper spherical sculpture hosting four cameras that has been rolled by the artist Janetka Platun and others in London, Shrewsbury and Delhi. Situating Globe in relation to Janetka’s art practice and the wider ‘art of rolling’, and extending broader debates about globality, encounter and relational aesthetics, the article argues that Globe’s journeys generated ‘meaningful content’ beyond an aesthetic moment of interaction by inspiring people to share stories, ideas and reflections on home, migration and belonging through their encounters with her. Globe’s encounters were inspired by curiosity, often sparked by her materiality, mobility and ‘globe-ness’. Rather than merely act as a prompt for people to reflect on home, migration and belonging, Globe has also been marked by her own journeys and encounters, reflecting their unpredictable and often transformative nature

‘Tales from other people’s houses’: home and dis/connection in an East London neighbourhood

This paper explores what it means to live together in the city through a focus on home and urban public space in East London. It develops a conceptual framework for understanding home as a site of dis/connection – both connected to and disconnected from – the wider estate, street, neighbourhood and city. Drawing on a series of home-city biographies with residents living on different housing estates, we explore what makes a city ‘liveable’ for its diverse residents within and across domestic and public spaces; how home-city dis/connections shape ideas and experiences of living together; and the importance of sensory, material and social contexts of home in shaping residents’ dis/connections with neighbours and the wider neighbourhood. By taking seriously the practices, experiences and imaginings of home as a site of urban dis/connection, we argue that urban scholars can gain a fuller picture of what it means to live together in the city, and understand and challenge inequalities, exclusions and prejudices that shape urban lives

The 'living of time': entangled temporalities of home and the city

This paper explores the entanglements between urban and domestic temporalities in order to understand what it means to live in the city. Inspired by the film Estate: a reverie (Zimmerman, 2015a), and drawing on a series of home-city biographies, this paper explores the ‘living of time’ through the memories, experiences, and narratives of residents living on different housing estates near Kingsland Road in Hackney, East London. We address two key questions: how are residents' experiences of urban living shaped by multi-layered and entangled temporalities of home and the city? What can an understanding of the urban and domestic 'living of time’ reveal about temporality, home and the city? We explore the ways in which entangled and multi-scalar ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ (Clifford, 1997) chart migration, housing and family histories for urban residents which, in turn, shape and help to articulate narratives of domestic and urban change in terms of stability and instability. We then turn to the overlapping and/or contested temporalities of urban and domestic lives, whereby residents’ home lives – and their wider ideas about the estate, street, neighbourhood or city as home – are affected by processes of urban change in complex and often contradictory ways. Finally, we investigate the ways in which home-city temporalities have shaped, and are shaped by, people’s hopes and fears for their future homes. Urban dwelling is shaped by multiple and multi-layered temporalities, intertwining the past, present and future, generations and life courses, and housing, family and migration histories. The urban and domestic ‘living of time’ reveals how residents adapt to, negotiate and at times resist processes of change and continuity at home and in the city

Home and the city

This chapter develops a critical geography of urban homes and the city as home. Building on Chapter 3’s focus on home on a domestic scale, encompassing home, housing, and households and the normative values of ‘homeliness’ often attributed to suburban homes, we consider homemaking in the city. We explore urban politics and processes that shape urban homes and homemaking; the ways in which cities and urban life can be understood in relation to the homes and domestic life within them; and the idea of the city itself as home. Following Blunt and Sheringham (2019), we argue that the study of home should extend beyond the domestic dwelling and/or interior to consider the context in which urban homes are located – including housing estates, streets, neighbourhoods, and the wider city – and that the study of home is crucial to understand what it means to live in the city. Whilst we refer to examples of urban homes throughout the book, this chapter focuses on the ways in which the material and imaginative geographies of home and the city have been understood and experienced in relation to each other. Throughout the chapter we address the intersections of identity and power and the multi-scalarity of home through the mutually constitutive relationships between home on urban and domestic scales. We do so by exploring ‘urban domesticities’ (homemaking and ‘unmaking’ [Baxter and Brickell 2014] in the city), ‘domestic urbanism’ (the city as home), and the ‘home-city geographies’ that connect the two (Blunt and Sheringham 2019; see Box 4.1 on urban rooms with a view). Reflecting the ways in which urban homes and the ability to feel at home in the city are shaped by migrations and other mobilities, we also explore the ways in which home and the city – and urban dwelling and mobility – are intertwined (see Chapter 6 for more on home, migration, and diaspora)

Everyday transnationalism: religion in the lives of Brazilian migrants in London and Brazil

While migration from Brazil to London is by no means insignificant, London’s Brazilian community remains largely invisible within existing migration research and within the public consciousness. Such invisibility has been put down to various factors including the recentness of the flow, the tendency for migration research in the UK to focus on communities with direct colonial or historical links to Britain, the fact that many Brazilian migrants are undocumented and so choose to keep a low profile (Evans et al. 2007), and finally, the fact that, compared with many other migrant groups, there exist few examples of institutional or informal support networks to mobilize or unite the community. Yet there is little doubt that London’s Brazilian community has grown rapidly in recent years, evident through the emergence of a growing number of Brazilian shops, restaurants, and, perhaps most significantly, a diverse range of religious institutions. This chapter explores the role of religion in the lives and imaginations of Brazilian migrants in London, their families “back home” in Brazil, and, furthermore, how it enables them to create and maintain links between the two. Conceptually, the relationship between religion and migrant transnationalism is one that has, until recently, been largely overlooked within academic research

Sharing stories and the quiet politics of welcome’

Blog pos