Multi-scalar home: collective care practices as connecting to and making home/lands

This article examines how women from refugee and migrant backgrounds negotiate home across multiple scales through creative collective care practices. Drawing on relational creative care workshops as a form of qualitative methodology with Afghan and Iranian women at Zara’s House in Muloobinba/Newcastle, Australia, we explore how home is reconstituted across spatial, temporal, relational and affective terrains. Findings from these workshops centred around three interrelated themes: (1) crafting collective homelands, (2) maintaining connections to homelands elsewhere, and (3) making home in the present. These themes illustrate that both ‘home’ and ‘making home’ are multi-scalar experiences that simultaneously interplay across interconnected and relational scales. Additionally, this multi-scalar focus highlights how spaces such as Zara’s House support practices of making home as connected across homelands, the diaspora and new home(s). Methodologically, this paper demonstrates the significance of arts-based research methods and a methodology of researching-with that enables forms of knowledge production that reflect these spatial, temporal, relational and embodied experiences of multi-scalar home making. In doing so, the paper contributes to migration and feminist geographic scholarship by emphasising the embodied and relational dimensions of making home across scales while foregrounding collective care as central to these processes.