Displacement, Homemaking Practices, and Media Use Beyond Large Cities in Sweden

This paper discusses the relationship between displacement, homemaking practices, and media use, aiming to generate knowledge of the meaning and use of different kinds of media in homemaking practices. Studies about displaced populations' use of digital media technologies show that these sources are often vital for homemaking practices in the new place, and for recreating and upholding meaningful contacts and dimensions of former homes. Digital media technologies provide new opportunities to stay in touch with a distant home; at the same time, they can be an important resource against dispossession and a way of making oneself emplaced on one's own terms. This study shows that traditional news media can also serve as an important resource in this regard. The paper analyses both quantitative and qualitative data to discuss discursive frameworks and understandings of feeling at home, and their relation to media use. Results from three quadrennial recurring surveys in a peripheral county in Sweden are discussed with results from interviews with displaced persons in a small town in the same county. The results show that feeling at home is relational more than anything else, and that both traditional news media and digital media technologies are used to uphold old and create new relations to places and people.