Journal of International and Advanced Japanese Studies, Volume 14 (2022)

Research Note

“Half-Place, Half-Consciousness”: The (re)construction of Home andidentity among migrants
Nina ŽDANOVIČ1

Abstract
This paper investigates the changing relationship with Home and the development oftransnational identities among migrants in Japan. A qualitative approach involving in-depthsemi-structured interviews was implemented with 12 graduate students at a Japanese
university. The research reveals that maintenance of signiﬁcant relationships and family
traditions through virtual spaces and the migrant’s concept of Home are in a dynamic
relationship. Home becomes a deterritorialized space, and the physical location of it
becomes less relevant. As a result, the deterritorialized sense of Home creates space forthe development of transnational identities.
Keywords: Transnational Identities, Transnationalism, Home, Mobility, Identity
1. Introduction
In an era of globalization and unprecedented migration, “Home” can easily become afuzzy concept; as we become attached to multiple localities, our families become
dispersed, and our notions of belonging expand (Bier & Amoo-Adare 2016).
Discussing Home and belonging in the post-digital revolution era is particularly
important, as clear-cut categories, such as us/them and here/there are getting blurred.
Simultaneously, loyalties, values, social capital, and identities become multifaceted.
Migrants’ identities and senses of belonging are being constantly reconstructed
through their involvement in different social realities of multiple geographical locations(Vertovec 2001). Such synchronous involvement has been further enhanced by virtual
spaces, such as the Internet, social media websites, direct messaging, and videoconference applications, allowing an alternative for traditional social interactions.
In this paper, I will examine the changing concept of Home through everyday
communication with family and other signiﬁcant relationships and the development oftransnational identities among migrants. First, I will situate this paper within theexisting literature on Home and transnational identities. Second, I will address theresearch questions and methodology. Then I turn to the analysis of interviews withinternational students to answer the posed research questions, and, ultimately, ﬁnalize
the paper with concluding remarks.
2. Home, family, and transnational identities
What is Home? In migration studies, Home is often used interchangeably with “country oforigin,” emphasizing the state of belonging to one’s nation, country or culture. Another way

1 Doctoral student, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba. Contact:zdanovicnina@gmail.com.
© 20222021 Journal of International and Advanced Japanese Studies, Master’s and Doctoral Program in International and Advanced
Japanese Studies, Degree Programs in Humanities and Social Sciences, Graduate School of Business Sciences, Humanities andSocial Sciences, University of Tsukuba

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to deﬁne Home is to collate it with the term “house.” However, such interpretations ofHome might be conceptually problematic. The former deﬁnition falls under“methodological nationalism,” examining Home and belonging through the implication thatnation is the most important ingredient in the mixture (Metykova 2010; Nowicka 2007).
The latter, on the other hand, has mostly been maintained as a means of selling realestate and therefore fails to acknowledge the complex, multi-layered nature of the concept(Mallett 2004). Modern scholarship agrees that Home is not easy to deﬁne (Ralph &Staeheli 2011; Lucas & Purkayastha 2007; Wiles 2007). Home could be attached to aparticular geographical location, it could be a metaphorical place (Silva 2014), a“constellation of relationships” (Mallett 2004), or a “fuzzy” and ever-changing concept (Bier& Amoo-Adare 2016). It can also be a place of security and comfort that people crave andseek (Taylor 2014), or it might be an unsafe place ﬁlled with fear and abuse (Mallet 2004).
Essentially, Home is an intricate structure of ideas, spaces, identities, feelings, practices,
relationships, and states of being (Ralph & Staeheli 2011; Wiles 2007; Mallett 2004).
In this paper, I adopt Nowicka’s (2007) understanding of Home as a set of relationships,
encompassing bonds with people, daily routines, customary interactions, memories,
myths, and so on. Ralph & Staeheli (2011) see such sets of relationships as primaryelements of Home and speciﬁc locales as secondary. In other words, Home is notnecessarily tied to a particular location, but instead is constructed through relationships,
and then consolidated through the repetition of localized social practices. As transnational
lifestyles become widespread, Home acquires a transnational dimension as well. People
live in the social worlds of multiple countries, develop attachments to different localities,
and feel a sense of belonging in more than one place (Lucas & Purkayastha 2007).
Transnational migrants simultaneously live in more than one place through regularcommunication, ﬁnancial and bureaucratic obligations, building their daily activities andconstructing identities through a constant dynamic relationship with Home (Wiles 2007). At
its core, transnationalism is a type of consciousness that transcends one truth: belonging
to more than one place, identifying as more than one ethnicity or nationality, living
simultaneously in more than one location (Nedelcu 2012; iubrinskas 2006; Vertovec
1999). It transcends national/international, internal/external binaries, and allows people toparticipate simultaneously in more than one locality (Nedelcu 2012). “Being here andthere,” and “neither here, nor there” is one of the key features of transnational lifestyle(Vertovec 1999).
The ability to be “here and there” is further facilitated by the advancement of the means ofcommunication. While transnational families and relationships are not new phenomena
and have been previously sustained through an exchange of letters and phone calls, thespread of information and communication technology (ICT) allowed migrants to connect
with Home instantly. Some studies have been conducted focusing on the impact of ICTs indeveloping transnational identities and maintaining the sense of everydayness with Homeand family. Ahlin (2020) and Alinejad (2019), for instance, covered relationships between
adult migrant children and their parents. Share, Williams & Kerns (2017) presented
intergenerational relationships between parents, children, and grandparents, Nedelcu(2017) researched ICT-mediated grand-parenting, and Pham & Lim (2016) examined
migrant students' relationships with their families. What is common among these studies
is that for transnational migrants, “family” becomes a verb which encompasses theplethora of proactive practices and activities that are shared through, but not limited to, theICTs, and turns into, as Share et al. (2017) refer to it, “doing and displaying” family.
To sum it up, Home is a complex, multi-layered structure built from relationships, routines,
memories, identities, and spaces. As transnational lifestyles become more normalized insociety because of the increasing availability of inexpensive means of transportation and67

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advancement of ICTs, Home becomes deterritorialized as well. As a result, themaintenance of relationships with people associated with Home, “doing and displaying”
family, becomes one of the essential elements of re-constructing the subjective concept ofHome and Home-related identity.
3. Research questions
Based on the observations presented in the previous section, the goal of the current
inquiry is to investigate, ﬁrst, the relationship between migrant students’ processes of“doing family,” and its in uence on the concept of Home. Focusing on the maintenanceof migrants’ close relationships is instrumental in understanding which elements ofcommunication make them feel mutual co-presence, and monitor the shifts in perceptionof what Home is. The second research question addresses whether such practices
contribute to the development of transnational identities among migrant students.
4. Methods
Empirical data was gathered during March-April of 2018 by conducting qualitativeinterviews with 12 full-time graduate students at a university in Japan. The initial
respondents were selected through mutual connections, and the others were invited toparticipate through snowball sampling. Eight respondents were women, and four weremen. All respondents arrived in Japan between 2011 and 2015, having spent at least
three years in the country at the time of the interviews. At the time of conducting theinterviews, the majority was planning to remain in Japan for an uncertain period, andeventually, leave to a third country. Each interview was conducted in English or Russian,with occasional Japanese words and phrases used by the participants, and tookapproximately one hour to complete.
5. Being together at a distanceHome is regularly linked to family and personal relationships both in academic literatureand in popular discourse. For the majority of the migrant students participating in thisresearch, the notion of family was strongly attached to their concept of Home. The
presence of family was named as “the main determinant” of calling a place Home byseveral respondents. Relationships with family and Home are maintained through several
communication tools, such as video conferences, instant messaging applications, andWhatsApp calls. The choice of a speciﬁc tool depends on a variety of factors, such as thelevel of digital literacy of the family members (Share et al. 2017, Pham & Lim 2016),
availability of applications depending on geo-political localities (Ahlin 2020), andrelationship closeness (Alinejad 2019; Bucholtz 2019; Pham & Lim 2016). Being able tocontact family and friends at any time is a crucial element of maintaining close
relationships and building a sense of everydayness.
Ilektra, a 28-year-old Ph.D. student from Greece, shared her experience:
No matter what you use, the fact that you have the means of being in the immediatecontact with your family and friends is very important. Like, I think, that the times
when people were going away, and all people had were pay-phones that weresuper expensive, I don’t know how they did that. In, like, I may not talk as much as I
would like to, which is bad, but the fact that you have the possibility to do that isvery important. It makes you feel safe. Like, if I want to talk to them, I can.
The instantaneous connection, made available by contemporary ICTs as opposed to more
“traditional” modes of communication such as pay-phones, provided Ilektra with a sense ofsafety. The sense of gratitude towards modern technology was unanimously shared by all
respondents, including Anna-Linda:
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I can't imagine the times when we only had snail mail to be honest. No one can. No
one can. And that’s usually like, in any conversation, that thing pops up. At least
once. Like, can you imagine, when we only had letters, like... I think I wouldn't have
let you leave, or I wouldn't know you anymore or in anyway... <…> I guess it's
because like the distance relationships existed also before all the Skype andFacebook whatever, and they still worked, it seems, I don't know how, I live in adifferent time, but yeah, it is helpful. (Anna-Linda, 26, Estonia)
As young adults who grew up at the time of rapid technological advancement, theparticipants struggle to imagine maintaining close relationships with Home without theadvantages of the Internet: “I wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise, writing letters is so muchworse” (Ra’no, 27, Uzbekistan). The ability to effortlessly connect provides a sense of
casualness, mutual co-presence, and safety. Moreover, it allows the students to maintainexisting traditions despite national borders. Lesia, a 33-year-old Ph.D., recollected hostinga virtual Christmas celebration:
Obviously, it is better [to have online communication tools]. If Skype didn’t exist, it
would be much sadder, like, last time we had a Christmas party in our house, andwe actually turned on the Skype, and we like showed family, and showed how weare celebrating, and they showed us the way they were having their Christmas
party, so, if no Skype, no... there is no, yeah, chance to do it like that.
Similarly to Lesia, Anna-Linda annually joins her family on Skype during the Christmas
dinner, and Waldir joins his family for Easter lunch:With my family, especially during Christmas, I am with them on screen, eating
Japanese food, while they are feasting on all the [Christmas] goodies.
No, I don’t celebrate [Easter], but my family in Brazil – they do. So I just makemyself coffee and I drink coffee with them. Every year they do the traditional lunch,
Easter lunch. (Waldir, 27, Brazil)
For Anna-Linda and Waldir, physical distance does not prevent them from participating inannual traditions celebrated by their families. Doing things together at a distance allows
the participants to keep a sense of “normality” and continuity. Migrants tend to ﬁnd Homein routine practices, stories, memories, familiar interactions, familiar food, and customary
ways of doing things (Nowicka 2007; Wiles 2007). Virtual participation in family traditions
allows migrants to feel a sense of Home despite the physical distance, eventually
expanding the subjective notion of Home.
Online co-presence is not merely a means of maintaining relationships. It allows migrants
to foster, nurture, and strengthen connections through sharing new experiences via ICTs.
Trisha, 29, a graduate student from India, describes her experience of going on virtual
dates with her boyfriend:
But we did some shared activities, like we had a Skype date, we went for a dinner
together on Skype one day. Quite a few times we watched movies together, or
watched a series together, like me and him watching at the same time, and it felt
like we’re doing the activity together.

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Eventually, Trisha and her boyfriend got married. She attributes the success of their longdistance relationship to messaging and video conference applications, such as Skype andWhatsApp:We got married while being on distance pretty much all the time. Our relationshipnever really suffered because of it, touch wood. But it actually became, it actually
grew and evolved through Skype, I would say. And whatever, WhatsApp. Ours
could be like an online relationship. I don’t know if we met 10 years, 20 years backwhen those things were not that advanced, I don’t know if this thing survived andended in marriage, I don’t think it would be possible. I think it’s a big... Today, ours
is, I would say, touch wood, a successful relationship, because of modern
technology and nothing else. And to ﬁrst world countries that have good Internet.
Like, also I really don’t know what would happen if I was in India and he was,because, you know, it’s not that good yet, services and all of that, if we would be
able to do that many shared activities.
For a long time in migration studies, physical presence was considered to be the “goldstandard,” implying a lesser involvement and emotional intimacy among transnationalfamily members. However, digital co-presence is not any less signiﬁcant than spendingtime together physically simply because of its virtual essence (Alinejad 2019). While there
are things that could only be experienced when being physically together, such as touchand engaging in particular activities together, the absence does not necessarily meanemotional alienation.
To sum it up, the majority of respondents have initially deﬁned Home as a place wherever
their families are, while geographical location was secondary. One of the most efﬁcient
ways of preserving a sense of Home is through regular communication with family
members left behind. In a transnational family context, sharing intimacy and strengthening
relationships rely on the ways families create an ambient co-presence together at a
distance (Alinejad 2019). Technological advancement and the availability of ICTs make itmuch easier for migrants to create a sense of mutual co-presence, feel connected with
Home, feel safe, maintain family traditions, and even foster new relationships throughvirtual spaces.
6. Re-deﬁning Home
Migration changes the concept of Home (Nowicka 2007). While settler populations
experience Home as a complex, multi-layered structure as well, migrants tend to be moreaware of changes in perceptions of Home, and therefore serve as a ﬁgure through which
researchers can examine the meanings of Home and identiﬁcations related to it.
Particularly, the everyday maintenance of relationships across national borders tends toundermine the importance of a solitary, unrivaled Home and allows migrants to reconﬁgure their identiﬁcation with Home in more than one place (Ralph & Staeheli 2011).
Trisha, for example, initially identiﬁed her Home as India:
Home for me is India. Any day. Any time. Like, I don’t feel as complete, like I feel
when I’m in India. And now that I’m just back from India, I feel like my whole is still
together.
Yet, Trisha acknowledges how her perception of Home has changed since her experienceof living abroad. Before, Home was in India, “any day, any time.” Now, her Home is“everywhere”:

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I liked it when I did not know any better. When I was there, I didn’t see the world.
That was my Home, that was my world. Now my Home is everywhere. Now I will
never be fully happy anywhere. You know? Because, because my world is
scattered now. But I still do feel that major parts of my world are [my husband], myfamily, some of my close friends. And if this part is still together, I will still feel
together. (Trisha, 28, India)
Trisha reveals the inner con ict she has been experiencing since moving abroad. As
globalization and transnational practices take away speciﬁc, unitary homelands andHomes that people used to have, it might bring up many negative feelings, such as loss,
confusion, and angst (Bier & Amoo-Adare 2016). For Ra’no, a 27-year-old Ph.D. student
from Uzbekistan, Home became “half-place and half-consciousness,” which she deﬁnes
as "more of a psychological relationship with a place.” Particularly for migrants, Home
becomes a symbolic space which embodies subjective feelings of safety, love, andbelonging (Lucas & Purkayastha 2007). For transnational migrants, Home can be“everywhere” and “nowhere,” as they live their social lives across nation-states, being “halfhere” and “half there.” Anna-Linda shares a sentiment similar to Trisha and Ra’no’s:
I would say that my Home is where my heart is, but my heart is everywhere, so… I
don’t know. I need… Probably, wherever you feel cozy and happy, that’s where yourHome is. And you can have many Homes at the same time <…> But I feel, that I
lost… I lost my national identity and place, to which I belong 100%. <…> I feel like I
belong, and like I don’t.
In contrast to their settler friends and family, migrants develop a much broader
understanding of what Home means to them (Bier & Amoo-Adare 2016). Alternatively, they
can identify as having several distinct Homes instead of one, similarly to what Anna-Linda
was talking about in the quote. Ilektra sees her Home divided between three places: herhometown in Greece, Athens, and Japan. Feelings of safety, happiness, freedom, andcommunity are what makes place a Home for her:
Home is a place where you feel safe and happy, and surrounded by people, whomake you feel safe and happy. Doesn’t matter, where it is. I think, I could call Japan
one of my Homes. <…> In Greece it’s my town and Athens, but two countries,
Greece and Japan. It’s people, whom you love, it’s a safe place and the ability to dowhat you want. (Ilektra, 28, Greece)
Not for everybody having more than one Home brings up a sense of loss and confusion,as described by Bier & Amoo-Adare (2016). Waldir, originally from Brazil, feels good about
having two Homes simultaneously. For him, this means two places to feel belonging andsafety: “I feel good, I leave one Home and I come back to the other Home.”
Home can be divided into a home Home and a professional Home:
There are several different Homes. For example, Japan would be mine, how do I
say it, speciﬁc Home, where I can do whatever I want, my “professional Home” ishere. But as a person, my Home is Estonia. It is a very complicated feeling. I can’t
say that one Home is more “Home” than the other. It’s just two completely different
Homes. (Anna-Linda, 26, Estonia)
Anna-Linda’s experience is consistent with a study conducted by Lucas & Purkayastha(2007) regarding the Home identities of Canadians working in the United States. Many of
the interviewees described both Canada and the U.S. as their Home, associating each71

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country with different aspects of their lives. Just like for Anna-Linda, their “work" Home wasin the United States, and their “family” Home was in Canada. None of these “homes” wasmore important than the other; they merely co-exist simultaneously, in the spirit oftransnationalism, “transcending one truth.” Alternatively, Home might be constructed fromseveral places where the members of the extended family live (Mallett 2004):
For me, Home might be in more than one place. So like, family, people... It has tobe people that are my family. But it doesn’t have to be in my home country. (Lesia,
33, Ukraine)
For Lesia, among others, the presence of her family is the main determinant of why she
would call a place one of her Homes. As she explains, it does not necessarily have to betied with her home country. At the same time, another Home exists: the Home that she
remembers from her childhood. After Lesia’s family moved, the Home to which she still
feels an emotional attachment does not exist anymore, and only remains in memories.
Ra’no shares a similar sentiment:
Yes, I remember my childhood Home – that is also my Home, but it doesn’t exist
anymore. In that sense, I can’t say that where my parents live now is Home,
because I can’t come back to my childhood Home.
Since she does not have any family-related memories in the place where her parents
currently live, she does not perceive that place as Home. For her, it has no emotional or
sentimental value.
To sum it up, the deﬁnition of Home is remarkably exible and subjective, and at the sametime quite universal. It might mean a childhood family Home, hometown, place of birth,
place of residence, nation-state, or planet Earth (Bier & Amoo-Adare 2016). Home
constitutes many things and is individual to each person: it might be a particular house,
one’s country of birth, a signiﬁcant relationship, or a set of feelings associated with Home.
Moreover, Home is in a dynamic relationship with migrants’ life experiences and ways of“doing family.” The accessibility of ICTs allows maintaining intimacy with family members,
while information on the Internet, like current news and real-time pictures, normalize
deterritorialization and pluralization of Home. As a result, the majority of the student
migrants participating in this study have developed attachments and loyalties to more than
one place through their life experiences and transnational practices.
7. Developing transnational identities
Mallett (2004) writes that Home is not only a place of origin, it is also a point of destination.
The construction of Home can become a quest for The Promised Land, based on lived or
imagined, nostalgic, romanticized, and/or idealized images of memories, places,
relationships, and activities we associate with Home (Taylor 2014; Mallett 2004). Both
Jason and Lesia have an image of a Home they would like to build for themselves in the
future. Jason describes Home as a mystical destination he has not reached yet, butintends to build one day:
Home is like this mystical place that I haven’t reached. It’s a small house with a big
kitchen, there’s a lot of board games, a lot of vegetables in the garden, kids are
running outside, and friends are living nearby. Yes, for me Home is a physical place,something, towards which I am working. For me Home is something that one day I
will create myself.

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In Jason’s mental picture, Home is an embodiment of the things that are important to him:a small house, space for his hobbies, cooking, board games, children, and friends living
nearby. Lesia also feels that she has not yet reached a place she would be able to callHome:
I think, one day I will have a place, which I will be able to call my Home, you know,a place where I plan to live for a long time, perhaps, my own place, and I willdeﬁnitely invest my time and energy into that place, which I will call my Home. But
now [where I live] it’s not that place. And I don’t have a feeling that my Home issomewhere else right now, no… But you start to develop a relationship with a place.
You ﬁnd the best hairdresser in the world, because it will be the hairdresser which
you’ll be visiting for the rest of your life, you know? That’s the thing. That would beHome.
For her, it is less about the physical properties and attributes of the house, and more aboutbuilding long-term relationships with the place, people, and surroundings. Neither Jason’s
nor Lesia’s description of their ideal Home had any references to a particular geographicallocation, which highlights the idea that an ideal Home could be created anywhere in theworld. Their experiences are consistent with Ralph & Staeheli’s (2011) argument that
initially, and particularly for migrants, Home arises from relationships with both humans
and non-humans, and only later can it be localized in a ﬁxed location. The relative
insigniﬁcance of place and migrants’ conﬁdence in the ability to create Home anywhere in
the world demonstrates the migrants’ shift towards a transnational mindset:
Well, I think that you can belong to any country you want, basically. I’m not saying
culturally, but you can move to any country you want and feel at home there. And
relate to it. Any country you want. And it got stronger… The feeling that you can,that you can have a life in any country, not just where you were born. <…> I
understood that the world isn’t as big as I thought it was. And you don’t have to live
only in Ukraine, where you were born, but you can live anywhere. In any country,
and still relate to Ukraine, and come back Home to Ukraine. I mean that sense ofmobility, I think. It became much stronger. (Yuliya, 25, Ukraine)
That's also something that, uhm, I... kind of felt more strongly about in the
beginning, when I moved here and everything. But now I’m like kind of getting tiredof all nationalities to begin with, like... It shouldn't be something you deﬁne yourself
by, like, you should deﬁne yourself by you. Your experiences, not like, I'm from thisgroup, or like, I like these things, it's basically something like because I like pink, I’mpink or something. It doesn't really matter, yeah.... Not anymore. Used to. Not
anymore. (Anna-Linda, 26, Estonia)
Anna-Linda shares how over time, national identity became less important to her. Insteadof describing herself in terms of nationality, she views herself as a global person:
I do have to say, like, aiming for more transnational, like, global kind of message,yeah, that has become quite a big part. Like I said, I kind of grew apart from thenationalism of Estonia or any other European country, and, like, I don’t get it
anymore really. Yeah, just more of this universal, universal topics, universal
humanity, kinda like that, yeah. Trans-border, without any borders kind of mentality
has become stronger because I’m away, that’s true. (Anna-Linda, 26, Estonia)

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Echoing Anna-Linda’s experiences, Waldir prefers to think of himself as a citizen of theworld:
Yeah, I would go, like, for a more general term, like, a citizen of the world. I mean,
there’s, like, I’ve been to US, then I’ve been in Japan, then I lived in Brazil. <…> I
think I’m stuck in a limbo. There’s no, like, my place, I’m a citizen of the world, I
could be anywhere. (Waldir, 26, Brazil)
Yuliya, Anna-Linda, and Waldir share a common sentiment of being able to ﬁnd Home
anywhere in the world. They reveal that after living abroad their self-image expanded toinclude multiple national borders (Ramie 2006). In other words, through their journey as
migrants, they managed to reconﬁgure their sense of identity to merge old and newmeanings, which eventually led to the transformation of their concept of Home (Ralph &Staeheli 2011). The increasing interconnectedness across borders, virtual co-presencewith family and other signiﬁcant relationships, as well as belonging to social groups ofother transnational migrants contributes to a smoother transition to identifying as a “citizenof the world.” Lena emphasizes the impact of her social network, mostly comprising ofother international students, on diversiﬁcation and globalization of her identity:
I mean, I live in one country, I take courses in another country, I work for a third
country, I mean, judging just by that I am super transnational. I keep in touch withpeople from other countries, I mean, either my home country, or I also have several
friends with whom I constantly keep in touch with, from other countries. And also,
here, <…> I hang out with foreigners, and that also, like, affects the way I, like, seemyself, it affected my habits. Like, affects how I see myself. <…> It all rubs on you.
And I feel like I’m a cultural chameleon, I adopt certain things, gestures, words,
concepts, and yeah, that’s why, like, what works for me I keep, and what doesn’t, I
throw away. (Lena, 25, Lithuania)
To sum it up, Home is a complex structure, a virtual place, inhabited by memories,
experiences, spaces, and relationships (Mallett 2004). For migrants, in contrast with theirsettler family and friends, the notion of Home becomes a signiﬁcant life anchor and aspace for contemplation. After experiencing living far away from a family Home, migrantstudents develop transnational identities, which result in belongings, loyalties, andattachments to multiple places. Not everyone maintains the same levels of transnational
integration, as it varies depending on individual characteristics and circumstances.
However, the general trend reveals that migrants tend to fuse their old and new values andre-shape their identities towards a more transnational vector (Ralph & Staeheli 2011). The
shift to a transnational mindset alters the students’ orientations towards their futureHome(s): Home becomes a deterritorialized idea, tied neither to a family Home in the
country of origin nor to their current place of residence. In other words, after having a
positive experience in establishing their own Home, and maintaining intimate relationships
with their signiﬁcant relationships across the international borders, migrants do not feellimited geographically in their “quest for Home.” Rather, the main point of reference
becomes rooted in their subjective judgment about how they feel in a particular locale.
8. Conclusion
This paper pursued two goals. First, it described how migrants maintain their close
relationships with people back at Home, and how this affects their concept of Home. And
second, it investigated whether virtual co-presence and a shifting sense of Home
contribute to the development of transnational identities. I conclude that the shift to thetransnational type of consciousness is facilitated by the maintenance of intimate co-74

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presence with migrants’ signiﬁcant relationships and the consequent deterritorialization of
the meaning of Home among migrant students.
Despite missing small things, such as physical affection, the smell of cooking, and taking
trips together, through ICTs migrants are able to share everyday moments freely throughinstantaneous connection and creating a sense of mutual co-presence. The students
reported feeling involved in the everyday lives of their families. Not only did theysuccessfully maintain already established relationships, but they were also able to deepen
them, and even foster new ones. This was achieved through regular online communicationand virtual participation in existing family traditions, such as joining family gatherings forcelebrations or establishing new shared practices online. The relationships, then, become
deterritorialized, as virtual co-presence and involvement in the loved ones’ lives throughICTs provide a sense of comfort, security, and belonging, something migrants associatedwith Home.
I argue that the migrant students’ transnational experiences and the practices of “doing
family” have transformed the way they feel and think about Home. The migrants describedHome as “half-place, half-consciousness,” a set of relationships, or the feelings ofhappiness, security, and love, associated with a place. Due to contemporary hyperconnectivity, the understanding of Home becomes more exible and context-dependent.
Feeling actively involved in the lives of signiﬁcant people despite physical distancefacilitates the transition to a deterritorialized, transnational perception of Home. It
translates into being able to feel at Home in more than one place in the present. In termsof the future, it detaches migrant students from deciding between their future Homes
based on geography and family proximity alone, thus creating space for the developmentof transnational lifestyles, mindsets, and identities.
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