CEU eTD Collection (2007); Thompson, Brigette Elyse: Making Themselves at Home: Expatriate Women and Spaces of Belonging in Budapest

CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
Author Thompson, Brigette Elyse
Title Making Themselves at Home: Expatriate Women and Spaces of Belonging in Budapest
Summary In this paper, I explore home making among expatriate women involved with International Women’s Club Association and North American Women’s Association in Budapest. Instead of home being a singular dwelling place or an ideal state of belonging, the relational process of making and living through homes is constantly mediated by cosmopolitan discourses of expatriation and of the local space of Budapest. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with two popular expatriate women’s organizations in Budapest from January 2007 to May 2007 in order to investigate how voluntarily transnational women carve out places of belonging among the local space of Budapest. Community space provides a site in which women articulate codes of belonging bridging the global with the lived locality of Budapest, actively claiming that they are, indeed, at home. Through both discourses of distancing themselves from an imagined, ideal expatriate and their navigation of material attachments as vessels for carrying their senses of home with them, expatriate women actively produce intimate geographies of belonging at home.
Supervisor Rajaram, Prem Kumar; Rabinowitz, Daniel
Department Sociology MA
Full texthttps://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/thompson_brigette.pdf

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