Contested Home

»Home« is both personal and political, static and dynamic, familiar and unfamiliar. Through ethnographic research with asylum-seekers at a church-based refugee program in Basel, Switzerland, Katherine Kunz explores the role of government, church, volunteers, and refugees in defining belonging. By examining asylum systems, the role of place and agency, and religious motivations, she reveals home as shaped by systems that often obscure its essential vulnerability and multiplicity. This study is of interest to anyone who has considered belonging through the lenses of migration, borders, or religion and to those who have questioned their own relationship to home.

Katherine Kunz is a visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. In 2018, she completed her doctorate in practical theology at Universität Basel and then worked as Director of the Fellowship in Public Scholarship and the Listening Lab at the Center for Religion and Cities at Morgan State University. Her research focuses on migration, religion, public scholarship, ethnography, and home. ---