How ‘My Favorite Murder’ Killed It — Without Ever Selling Out
As their podcast turns 10, Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark open up about hard lessons learned, filming their new HBO series on tour and navigating a bloated podcasting ecosystem: “Sometimes I don’t understand what the fucking appeal is here.”
Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark may advise their listeners to not talk to strangers, but in their case, doing so proved transformative. The duo bonded over a shared love of true crime at a mutual friend’s Halloween party and decided to make a podcast on a whim.
The first episode of My Favorite Murder, recorded in Hardstark’s rental apartment for an audience of one (her late cross-eyed Siamese, Elvis), dropped in January 2016. But their weekly exchanges — the format finds each sharing mostly macabre stories, with a comedic slant that’s rare in the genre — would soon surpass 30 million monthly downloads. It’s since spawned a network (Exactly Right Media, with 16 current original titles and counting), sold-out tours, a book and, on deck, an HBO miniseries. They inked a rich deal with Wondery, which they exited before later signing with iHeartMedia. And now that video is all but compulsory, their podcast will stream on Netflix.
Related Stories
iHeartRadio Music Award Nominations: Taylor Swift Leads With Nine
IHeartMedia Adds Video Podcasts to App
A comedy writer and cult stand-up (Kilgariff) and a journeywoman TV personality once best known for creating the viral cocktail “The McNuggetini” (Hardstark), this is not the career either had envisioned. But a decade on, it’s clearly the one that worked. In December, the two sat down in Exactly Right’s Burbank headquarters — a setting that still amuses them both. “I do love making decisions and being in control,” says Hardstark, “but I got into podcasting so I wouldn’t have to come into an office anymore.”
You cultivated an intimacy with listeners well before you realized how many you had. It’s a rather passionate, opinionated fan base. Have you retroactively established boundaries?
Hardstark I still have none. I’ve been sharing every gross, weird, intimate part of my life since I was 20 — blogging and on social media. The podcast was just an extension of that. If you don’t like me because of that, well, we’re not for everyone. I probably should be a lot more private.
Kilgariff I am the opposite to Georgia. I’m a generation older. When MySpace came out, I was like “What are you all doing?” And in doing stand-up, someone — it might have been Patton Oswalt — said to me very early on, “If you’re going to listen to the compliments, you have to listen to the criticism.” Well, in that case, I just won’t deal with any of that. It’s none of my business. I love that people love our thing, but we’re not for everyone.
Hardstark We haven’t been doing this for 10 years because we love podcasting so much. We’ve been doing it for 10 years because people still want to hear what we have to say. We’re both very surprised by that.
Kilgariff I am very analytical, and sometimes I don’t understand what the fucking appeal is here. And I really am a fan of both of us. (Laughs.) But there was a girl that got on our Facebook, maybe month three, and just wrote, “Why them and not me?” There’s a picture of this my mind for the rest of my life. It made me laugh so hard… It’s also why I can’t be on social media.
The podcasting industry’s push into video has been aggressive. Your own show is going to start streaming on Netflix. What’s your take on the transition, and how are you adjusting to it?
Hardstark It took me a while to wrap my brain around having to present myself visually. I’d podcast on a couch, in my pajamas, with a cat on my lap. That was great. Learning how to contour my fucking cheekbones and sit up straight? I was so stiff in the beginning. Of course this happens now, when I’m in my 40s, instead of when I was in my fucking 30s.
Kilgariff I think it’s happening just because podcasts didn’t go away. There’s been a couple of big drops, but it’s probably not going anywhere. So, now they’re investing in them. And they know the younger market watches everything on YouTube. They don’t know podcasts as well, as far as I’ve been told, so it’s getting at that demographic that’s been harder to reach.
Hardstark I had a breakdown when I first saw the initial lighting of our studio. As a boss, I don’t get bossy very often, but I am 45. No one’s going to want to watch a haggard perimenopausal woman who’s badly lit.
Kilgariff Our first video out, we looked like the poor unfortunate souls from The Little Mermaid.
Hardstark I still just listen on a podcast app, personally, but I’m happy for anyone who wants to look at our fucking mugs.
There’s been talk of you two doing an HBO show for years. What’s going on there?
Hardstark We finally shot it. It’s a four-episode miniseries of the live shows with one-on-one interviews, doc-style, with our listeners — with Murderinos.
Kilgariff The question everyone asks us is always, “Why do women love true crime so much?” So we’re letting them tell you. We can’t ever answer that correctly. Other people have answers, but they’re all personal, so let’s get them.
How did you pick your interview subjects?
Kilgariff [When I worked on Ellen], we used to have to pre-produce the audience every day because we’d play a game or something. Like, “That woman over there has resting bitch face, but she’s actually hilarious, go to her,” or “Definitely don’t talk to that guy.” If we could do that with even 200 of the average 2000 people who come to our shows on film, it’d be amazing. So, that’s what we did. We got as many people as who wanted to talk.
What was the most difficult lesson that you’ve learned in navigating the business side of growing the company?
Hardstark People love you until you’re not making them money anymore.
Kilgariff People are here to make money, and they’re going to do it however they can. Everyone is here to stay alive. And maybe this happens to women more, but there’s been a sense of, “You’re a visitor here,” and “We’re letting you be here.” So, you hang and be chill. Then, the second you assert yourself, they’re like “What the fuck?” It made me mad that I had to learn that lesson when I’d already been doing this for 20 fucking years. This sounds so cynical, but if you’re beholden to people praising you and thinking you’re great, you can get fucked over very quickly and very badly. Suddenly, some Scooter Braun owns your shit.
When you started working with Wondery in 2022, the narrative was that you sold your company to Amazon for $100 million. That inspired quite a backlash among some of your listeners for going corporate. Did you ever sell?
Kilgariff We’ve always owned the company. We never sold. The original Bloomberg headline was incorrect. We don’t know why it was never retracted or argued. We don’t know why it was never retracted or argued, but it went everywhere.
Still, it was a PR problem for you. When do you feel like you recovered from the backlash?
Kilgariff That deal coming through and us being canceled in a way, my lesson was that no one gets out alive when it comes to this kind of thing. Whether you want to call it exposure, fame or whatever, you eventually become fodder for the internet.
You’re now with iHeartMedia. Why can’t podcasts operate independently at this point?
Kilgariff You need a distributor like an iHeart for all of the tech — dynamic ad insertion, those kinds of things — and there aren’t many places to go for it. You lose so much money when you don’t have that stuff. We did go independent for a year [in between] to figure out what deal we were going to make next. But we had the cushion. One thing I will say about that [Wondery] deal is that the money enabled us to treat ourselves like we were Ridley Scott. Now our taste is the only one that matters. We develop and make whatever podcast we want. We pay the talent we want. iHeart was a real gamble, but those guys are a class act. They love podcasts.
When you first moved to iHeart, I was very mistakenly targeted with an ad to “meet single Christian women in my area.” But that stopped after a week or two.
Hardstark Ads are the tricky part of podcasting. Anyone will tell you that.
Kilgariff That used to be the real fight in the early years. We used to think that the worst problem we had was like, “You can’t put a Black Rifle Coffee on our podcast.” We fought that for years. Because that’s not our audience. We won’t be represented that way.
When we last spoke in 2019 you mentioned that you saw a couples therapist for your business partnership. Do you still?
Hardstark We did do couples therapy. Then we just got a mediator for business decisions.
Kilgariff We’re very passionate in the same way. So when we’re both worried about something, or concerned the other isn’t going to listen, we bring her in.
Hardstark Let’s say we had a fight in the conference room, we still have to come in here and be best fucking friends. And be funny! It’s just better to have someone walk us through stuff and avoid those incidents. Because when we start recording, I love her and I can’t wait to tell her the story. Even if I’m mad at her, we have the most fun. I fucking love Karen, and I don’t ever want that to stop happening.
You both make a lot of jokes about how long you have been doing this. What does the future look like? You can’t do it forever.
Hardstark Well, we have contracts that say otherwise. (Laughs.)
Kilgariff We’re complainers. It’s part of our personality: Say the first thing you think of, regret it later and then wonder why you keep making the same mistake over and over. The past six months have been especially exhausting, but I love touring. I’m an energy vampire. I get that weird cokey high off of people crying or telling me stories. Then I just sit in a hotel room like I’m fucking Scarface.
Hardstark Someone told us during a meet-and-greet that her doctor gave her permission to miss her first week of chemo to come to that show. It’s so fulfilling and heartwarming. It’s also a lot of pressure. I’m a sensitive bitch. But I’ve got another year in me. We’re not going to do this forever. That’s crazy. Let’s not push …
Kilgariff Let’s not push money away? (Laughter.)
Hardstark Well, that too. But let’s not overstay our welcome.
Are you saving a story for your final episode?
Hardstark I think we should redo our first stories for our last episode.
Kilgariff And you know what? We’re going to redo all of them. Let’s just start over, and then it’ll be 40 more years of these old hags.
The Love-Hungry Farmer
This article is more than 22 years old
Pavilion, Dun Laoghaire
Wed 3 Dec 2003 02.18 GMTShare
John Bosco McLane is a self-proclaimed “crusty bachelor” who, at 56, has never enjoyed the “jiggy-jig caper”, though not for want of trying. It is to the credit of this production that we are never in doubt why: John Bosco remains a virgin because he’s socially inept, self-absorbed and the victim of a society where religion, tradition and propriety obstruct free-flowing interpersonal relations.
The social observation in this adaptation of John B Keane’s epistolary novel is spot-on, then – but would you really want to spend 95 minutes in the company of this difficult character? Adaptor/solo performer Des Keogh works valiantly to entertain us and incite our compassion with amusing anecdotes of John Bosco’s romantic fumblings.
Director Charlotte Moore combats the potential stasis of the material by moving Keogh around the stage a lot, creating different settings – the confession box, the hotel dining room – through lighting changes and snatches of song. But the material overstays its welcome; in particular, the inclusion of an interval drags the evening down.
It’s too much a show of two halves: before the interval, everything’s quite light-hearted, focusing on Keogh’s excellent imitations of the local matchmaker and the priest who finds his parishioners’ idea of sin singularly unimpressive. In the second half, things get rather macabre and much more interesting, and John Bosco becomes more outspoken about the extent of his despair.
The last 10 minutes are quite moving, an effective evocation of existential loneliness that transcends its immediate social situation. If we got there more quickly, this would make a tidy package for the fringe festival circuit.
Reinventing home in the unhomely: children’s and parents’ home-making practices in French asylum accommodation centres☆
Author links open overlay panelAline Desmas abcShow moreAdd to MendeleyShareCite
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104520Get rights and content
Highlights
- •Asylum centres’ constraints are home unmaking strategies.
- •Waiting and temporariness jeopardise both parenting and homemaking.
- •Children’s and parents’ use different tactics to resist unhomely environments.
- •Children’s domestic spaces are larger than their parents’.
- •Comparing children’s and parents’ experiences renews our take on homelessness.
Abstract
The article draws on homemaking and home unmaking to analyse, as two sides of the same coin, the institutional strategies used to prevent residents from feeling at home and the spatial tactics both parents and children deploy in French asylum centres. Drawing on a long-term ethnography with families accommodated in these centres, it highlights micro-resistances to unhomeliness which reflects broader restrictive migration policies. In a context of temporary and precarious housing, looking especially at a sense of domesticity allows to observe spatial practices that extend beyond the private sphere and into the collective spaces of the centres. Studying together the parents and the children’s lived experiences, the article shows home unmaking also jeopardises parenting. Yet, feeling at home can be redefined by individual and collective space appropriation tactics. Paying attention to generational gaps eventually emphasises discrepancies between the children’s and their parents’ socio-spatial experiences inside the centres, which reveals a stronger attachment of the children to these places. Children’s perspectives actually renew our understanding of the centres’ geographies and, with them, of the effects of migration policies.
Introduction
‘The CADA is a 5-star hotel’.
This is how Emmanuel, a 9-year-old boy from Côte d’Ivoire, qualified the asylum accommodation centre where he and his father had temporarily been living for more than four years when we met. A rather unexpected comparison, both to his father and to me, considering the cockroach-infested studio flat they occupied at the time, and the basic kitchen they shared with their corridor neighbours in a collective infrastructure. His description is an invitation to look beyond an adult perspective and to examine the discrepancies between the children’s and their parents’ lived experiences in asylum accommodation centres. Two years of ethnographic research in four different asylum centres can help us understand the child’s comment. The image of a high-end hotel evokes both a pleasant holiday stay, far from the usual representations of asylum places, and his awareness of the temporariness of a housing situation that has actually been lasting for years. In further conversations, Emmanuel invited me to ‘his place’1 on several occasions, either to ‘his terrace’, to play football, or inside, to play boardgames. This may suggest he somehow felt at home.
The encounter with Emmanuel raises the issue of ‘home’ in a context in which not only are asylum centres not intended to become family homes at all but, on top of that, home unmaking (Blunt and Dowling, 2022) is actually part of the centres’ management strategies. These strategies epitomise broader national and European migration policies that intend to prevent asylum seekers from feeling at home until their right to stay is ensured. Yet, in contrast with an institutional discourse which discards the word ‘home’, residents themselves, both parents and children, refer to the centres as ‘home’.2 This emic use of the word should be considered relevant (van der Horst, 2004) as it calls for a vernacular geography in which attention paid to everyday language can reveal how space is experienced and perceived (Collignon, 2010).
In the French asylum context, families with young children are considered a priority as far as accommodation is concerned,3 which explains why children are somehow overrepresented in asylum centres. Whereas minors make about 26 % of the first asylum-requests introduced to OFPRA4 (OFPRA Annual Report, 2021), they represent 40 % of the people5 who are accommodated. However, most refugee families are shuffled from one temporary and precarious form of accommodation to the next before being housed in these centres. Their wait to access them ranges from a couple of days to several months and their homelessness both delays and disrupts a potential feeling of belonging. Eventually, most families are allocated a place in asylum centres (Gardesse et al., 2022) and, as they do not have a say in it, the location they are sent to is a first assertion of the State spatial power (Nettelbladt and Boano, 2019, Darling, 2011). Families are also reminded of this power through the inadequacy between the family structures and the centres’ organisation. Indeed, large families may have to accept being separated between two rooms or, on the contrary, crammed in a tiny one. Most families met in the field came from West Africa, Afghanistan or Bangladesh.
Without putting an end to uncertainty as to the future, asylum centres provide both a shelter and a relief at first (Kobelinsky, 2010), but also, considering the length of people’s stays compared to former short-term housing solutions, a first opportunity to settle down. This may sound paradoxical considering the intended temporariness of the solution. The very denomination of these centres in French, Centres d’accueil pour les demandeurs d’asile6 (CADA), indicates their conditionality, so staying in these centres depends on one’s administrative status, and theoretically, residents are only welcome to stay as long as they have not received a final answer to their asylum claim. Yet, asylum procedures can last for months or even years, so an accommodation that is supposed to be provisional may actually turn into a more lasting experience. In a 2021 survey, people who were living in asylum centres had been there for 16months on average.7 At the end of the application process, they are expected to leave the centres. This means that applicants must then face the continuation of material and administrative precarity, especially so in the case of refused ones for whom the lack of alternative housing options partly explains why they have no other choice but to overstay. This was the case of Emmanuel and his father whose asylum application had been rejected two years before we met. Yet, overlooking the lack of other housing options, the administrations of the centres strongly believe that the more residents feel at home the longer they might overstay. It reflects a broader ambivalence of asylum centres that meet a housing need but are also the embodiment of strict migration policies (Szczepanikova, 2013), which distinguish between a house and a home. The transitory nature of the centres is constantly reiterated by case-workers to justify the limits set by the institution on the residents’ ability to appropriate their dwelling places and make them homes. The detrimental impact of temporary accommodation especially on homeless families (Nowicki et al., 2019) and mothers (Reeve and Turrell, 2025) has been recently highlighted. Asylum centres are no exception to this analysis as they are supposed to be provisional places of waiting, not places of settlement. To what extent is the sense of home and family then questioned by temporariness?
Keeping people waiting has been considered to be a social or a political instrument of domination over marginalised or unprivileged groups in situations other than migration (Khosravi, 2014, Auyero, 2012). For asylum seekers, time dispossession operates on a bureaucratic level (Jansson, 2024, Philipson Isaac, 2022) but temporal insecurity also takes on a material and spatial dimension with institutional forms of reception. In asylum centres, residents are stuck in an in-between time and space where their capacity and will to settle or move forward is curtailed by enforced waiting (Aulanier, 2021, Thorshaug and Brun, 2019, Whyte, 2011, Kobelinsky, 2010) and nothingness (Boccagni, 2025). Waiting and emptiness then become a day-to-day experience of power (Jacobsen, 2020, Fontanari, 2015, Kobelinsky, 2010). Yet, while this imposed immobility and suspended time unquestionably hinder their ability to fully control their lives, asylum seekers’ lived experiences also reveal that, far from being an empty interlude, waiting can be an agential space (Rotter, 2016, Brun, 2015). Scholars have highlighted asylum seekers’ agency in trying to find relevance and taking back control over space and time, even reluctantly (Boccagni, 2025). Indeed, both are intertwined in asylum centres and when time stretches out, space actually shrinks (Schmoll, 2024). This illustrates Massey’s criticism of ‘time–space compression’ as a universal experience (Massey, 1994). To her, the power geometry of ‘time–space compression’ can only be understood by taking into account social differentiation. Life in asylum centres is thereby a good example of a counter-experience of ‘time–space compression’. Conforming to Massey’s analysis, this paper will explore the ways in which age in particular influences residents’ ‘agency-in-waiting’ (Brun, 2015). To do so, it will look at the discrepancies between the children’s and their parents’ spatio-temporal experiences in the centres.
This approach is based on the simple observation that sparked this research: while parents are banned from working during the processing of their application, children, on the contrary, attend school as soon as possible. This strongly questions the idea of waiting and nothingness in their case. Bringing about a rupture between both generations, this underscores the importance of examining the children’s experiences alongside their parents’, following Brickell’s invitation to gather voices from multiple actors (Brickell, 2012). Children’s perspectives are often not taken into account, and when they are, a focus on ‘peer, familial and educational networks’ prevails (McDonnell, 2021). This paper seeks to observe these but also to go beyond the traditional spaces of childhood to emphasise other spaces such as those in which non-kin adults play a key part. Thus, in a context where domestic space is anything but self-evident, studying the residents’ practices with a generational lens seems to be essential to account for its organisation. I therefore apply the concept of spatial agency (Caillol, 2018) to analyse both the children’s and their parents’ home-making tactics and ‘micro-resistances’ (Schmoll, 2024), in line with a longstanding interest in considering children as competent social actors (Holloway et al., 2019). Taking account of the debate surrounding the concept of agency in childhood studies, this paper will draw more on a relational approach (McDonnell, 2021) that is agency built in interdependence with others, rather than being entirely autonomous. Bridging the gap between children’s geographies and geographies of parenting, children’s experiences are understood as being inter-related to their parents’ and informing us about adults as well (Blazek, 2024).
This paper sides with approaches which, far from seeing home as just an empty frame, also conceive it as a set of material, social and spatial practices that reflect people’s agency. It aims to examine these practices and understand how, despite institutional hostility, they are built collectively and relationally in asylum accommodation centres, both by children and their parents. Few studies have been interested in understanding asylum-seekers’ everyday practices, especially to find out whether they consider their dwelling places as potential ‘homes’ (Boccagni, 2025, Grønseth, 2023, Karlsson, 2019). If one considers that homes should provide ‘a sense of security, familiarity and control’ (Boccagni, 2017), using the concept of home to describe places identified as ambiguous places of ‘benevolent captivity’ (Kobelinsky and Bloch, 2014) sounds paradoxical, if not irrelevant. In these inhospitable environments, residents live under the watchful eye of social workers and lack both autonomy and space (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). Even though occupants are not completely deprived of their freedom of movement, less so than in detention centres (Mountz, 2011), a form of ‘disorientation’ (Thorshaug and Brun, 2019) and space confinement occurs. Carceral geographies and their dialogue with migration studies (Moran et al., 2013) and children’s geographies (Moran et al., 2016) may therefore resonate with our analysis of parenting under material, spatial and social constraints. From the children’s perspective, the experience of the Covid-19 lockdown and moments of playfulness that emerged (Russell and Stenning, 2022) hint at how they can find ways to navigate strict spatial restrictions.
By providing a dwelling place, even a temporary one, asylum centres do offer a basis for both homemaking (Douglas, 1991 quoted by Boccagni, 2017) and parenting whether the institution intends it or not. Home studies and in particular critical geographies of home (Blunt and Dowling, 2006) have shown that home exceeds the physical boundaries of a house (Boccagni, 2025, Boccagni, 2017, Brickell, 2012). Irreducible to its material dimension, its emotional, relational and imaginative aspects as well have to be explored (Blunt and Dowling, 2022, Boccagni, 2017). Home should be understood as ‘a special kind of relationship with place’ (Boccagni, 2017) that needs to be negotiated over time rather than something that merely stands on its own. It should also be regarded as a multi-scalar object and a multi-layered process to be fully understood (Blunt and Dowling, 2022, van Liempt and Miellet, 2021; Finlay et al., in this issue). Yet, aiming at understanding the impact of temporariness on family homes, this article will focus on the residential scale, or ‘house-as-home’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2022). If’home is both enabling and constraining’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2022), places such as accommodation centres have to be thought of as both homely and unhomely at the same time to fully grasp the families’ home-making and unmaking practices. Domestic space is usually the most obvious scale when talking about home (Boccagni, 2017), but what about asylum centres where the equation home/domestic space is far from self-evident? Migration scholars and geographers have focused on the domestic scale and shown its relevance in constraining environments (Schmoll, 2024, Boccagni et al., 2023, Blunt, 2005).
Therefore, in keeping with enhancing the children’s perspective, this article suggests moving from a temporal lens to a spatial one, which seems more relevant in a family context. If the ‘dispossession of time’ has been said to be the main issue in refugees’ experience in Europe (Fontanari, 2018), we argue here that it goes along with a ‘dispossession of space’ as far as families, and especially children, are concerned.What are the individual, family or collective ‘tactics’ of space appropriation that act as many micro-resistances to the impossibility of making a home in the centres? I refer here to de Certeau’s distinction between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ that conveys the spatial limitation of such tactics to the interstices of the place in which those in power deploy their strategies (de Certeau, 1984). How does age contribute to different spatial tactics which eventually lead to various ‘waiting territories’ (Vidal and Musset, 2016)?
After explaining the ethnographic fieldwork I conducted, I will show that the unhomeliness of asylum centres more specifically jeopardises the family home. The strong spatial, material and social constraints that weigh on the families could be considered as home unmaking practices and strategies deployed as part of a politics of discomfort. Following Blunt and Dowling’s invitation (Blunt and Dowling, 2022), the next sections will emphasise home-making tactics as many answers to these institutional strategies. Guided by the children’s well-being, families strive to build a sense of home by creating and maintaining a domestic space inside the centres. Eventually, grasping both generations’ points of view will reveal the discrepancies between the children’s and their parents’ experiences of space and time. Children, who suffer more from spatial constraints, also appropriate broader territories.
Access through your organization
Check access to the full text by signing in through your organization.
Section snippets
Methods and materials
This paper draws on a study involving a two-year ethnographic fieldwork which sought to understand families’ everyday experiences on several scales. It was conducted in four different asylum centres all located in the Paris banlieue. However, this paper focuses on two centres which provide collective housing8
Constrained parenting and homemaking: how the politics of discomfort affect families
Home-making endeavours are thwarted from the very beginning by the various institutional constraints that weigh on the families and make it particularly challenging to engage in a home-making process. Not only is homemaking hindered by uncertainty, but it is also hampered by the fact of living under the constant surveillance of an institution whose role in the governmentality of unease reflects its state-centred conception of migration (Bigo, 2002, Scheel and Tazzioli, 2022). As we mentioned
The (re-)making of domestic space in and out of the private sphere
Domestic space can be defined as a ‘fundamental territory’ or ‘the most appropriated and the most charged space’ (Staszak, 2001). This sounds paradoxical when talking about asylum centres where both appropriation and attachment are highly restricted. Brickell (2012) suggests that domestic space might in fact lie in un-homely spaces, and more specifically in the margins of the home or in interstitial spaces like corridors, offices or common rooms. For want of a home of their own, both children
When the children’s domestic spheres go beyond their parents’
Age is a relevant element of analysis in home-making processes as children and their parents do not experience spatial constraints the same way: these weigh more heavily on the younger generation who needs space to play. As a result of varying uses, both generations do not appropriate the same spaces. This spatial gap is visible on different scales and it manifests both inside and outside the centres. The most obvious scale might be the city, as children attend school when their parents are not
Conclusion − Negotiating home, being a parent and a child in asylum centers
A place is people, but it is also a process (Massey, 1994), especially in the case of asylum seekers (Boccagni, 2017) when their home-making tactics are deployed simultaneously with institutional home-unmaking strategies. Negotiating domestic space on a day-to-day basis is key to establishing homeliness in asylum centres, whether materially or immaterially. Thus, paying attention to both children’s and parents’ home-making practices within the centres has allowed us to think of homeliness and
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to all the children and parents I met in the field for trusting me and letting me into their lives. Special thanks to Sophie Bowlby and Andrew Power for their helpful feedback along the writing process and to the French Collaborative Institute on Migration (CI Migration) for funding this PhD research.
