Homemaking amid uncertainty: Russian newcomers and host communities in post-2022 Tbilisi

This article examines homemaking practices among both Russian newcomers and host communities in Tbilisi, Georgia, exploring how change, uncertainty, and migrant-host relations shape the making and unmaking of home. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2023–24 with socially aware, economically non-privileged Russian migrants who oppose the war in Ukraine, and ongoing participant observation in Tbilisi, the article traces two interconnected processes: how host community responses to Russian migration constitute their own forms of homemaking and claiming of belonging, and how some Russian migrants enact quiet, often non-material homemaking practices – walking familiar routes, building online communities, participating in Tbilisi protests – amid constrained and contested circumstances. Situating homemaking at the intersection of migration studies and critical geographies of home, the article argues that home is not a possession but a relational and contested practice, unfolding across mobilities, memory, politics, and everyday life. Central to this argument is the role of non-human actors – streets, urban green spaces, animals, and digital platforms – as active participants in homemaking. The analysis demonstrates that contingent homes, shaped by uncertainty and precariousness, characterize not only migrant experiences but also the unsettled belonging of host communities confronting rapid social transformation in the context of reversed migration. These two forms of homemaking are not symmetrical, they are shaped by historical legacies of occupation and unequal relations of power, yet both constitute active, relational responses to displacement and change.