"Feeling at Home Abroad" Early Childhood Educators with Their Own Migration Experience, a Reflexive Grounded Theory.

This poster presents findings from an ongoing PhD on the emotional dimension of integration, focusing on where early childhood educators with their own migration experience in Germany feel at home. The study focuses on multiple under-researched topics related to migration: women, care-work, and emotions. Early childhood educators work in a shortage occupation, a field where women, care work, and migration are interwoven in particularly disadvantageous ways. I conducted 10 narrative interviews in 3 languages with educators from 9 countries living in different parts of Germany (18 hours of recordings). I used Reflexive Grounded Theory and developed a tool, called "finger-counting-paraphrasing" to overcome the typical difficulties of this method: the flood of codes, the endless paraphrasing, or purely thematic coding. Educators describe the core of this feeling as being able to be who they truly are, being accepted by others, in a secure place with access to resources – "even if" imperfections remain. A key contribution is a model of home-awareness in four phases, an structured extension of findings on emotional transnationality. Home-awareness describes feeling at home as a fleeting contrast-feeling, becoming conscious through experiences of loss, finding comfort, or retrospective remembering. Finding comfort is the conscious moment of finding home, which takes place by returning or by finding recognition. Educators find recognition in spheres of home – the 5 "domospheres" (from domus Lat. for home): society, work, close relationships, self, and nature. The feeling of home is closely tied to remarkable shifts in recognition in the domospheres. The concrete home experiences are nature-related, uncontrollable, relaxed everyday moments of being truly touched. These findings align closely with Axel Honneth's recognition theory and Hartmut Rosa's concept of resonance. The main quotation points to the prominent role of nature in experiences of feeling at home. Further quotations illustrate the theoretical findings: how Shirani Pariman is finally greeted by kindergarten parents (rather than being ignored, as she had been before) and experiences this moment as home: a contrast-feeling through finding comfort and a remarkable positive shift in recognition. In contrast, Rosvita Nowak describes her home as her former kindergarten, where she was close to becoming the director and was highly appreciated, but which she ultimately left due to gendered economic constraints. This marks a contrast-feeling of loss and a remarkable negative shift in recognition.