Title:
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Daar al Falastini : home, family and identity among Palestinians in Britain
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What do home, family and identity mean for diasporic populations? What kinds of practices, relationships and spaces are involved in making these things come alive on an everyday basis? What does an understanding of this contribute to discourses of Palestinian identity in particular and scholarship on diasporic identity more broadly? These questions are central to this thesis, which is based on qualitative research interviewing Palestinians in family groups and as individuals in their own houses. My findings are discussed in three parts. The first explores notions of al beit (house) and the practices that bring domestic spaces to life. I argue that physical living spaces are enrolled in family practices of identity but that both Arab/Palestinian family life and British domestic space adapt in the process. The second part explores the geographies of Palestinian families, how people negotiate these through everyday practices and how migration has precipitated a re-imagination of family and a reworking of family relationships. The third part explores the dynamics of social groups and collective identity, including the multiple identities and the range of ideas and conversational practices through which Palestinian social relatedness is enacted. I argue that the loss of family proximity can create opportunities for new kinds of meaningful relationships but that family remains an important coordinate for social relations through which historical family geographies of Palestine are reproduced. Examining the convergence of house, family and collective identity in this way is crucial to understanding the lives of diasporic Palestinians, as it reveals the everyday processes through which hegemonic constructions of Palestinian-ness are imagined, challenged and (re)produced. More broadly, this thesis advances the case for an integrated approach to the study of home, family and identity in diasporic contexts as a means of constructing a richer portrait of what it means to „be diasporic‟.
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