Making a digital home? Homeliness at times of digital co-presences and absences

The chapter focuses on the experience of home and the affective reconstruction of homeliness for refugees, especially as this process is channelled and mediated through digital communications. By drawing on research findings that reveal how refugees experience the loss of home but also how they seek to make a new home, the chapter shows the agentive and digital imagining and reconstruction of a home that is incomplete, but not impossible. Through examples that illustrate refugee engagement with digital technologies, especially smartphones, homeliness is discussed in two ways: as a challenge associated with uprooting, as well as an incomplete experience, with digital opportunities and restrictions mediating relations of safety, emotional and material stability, and care within and across the local, national and transnational spaces of belonging.