EMOTIONAL DISPLACEMENT AND THE FRAGILITY OF BELONGING. THE MEANING OF HOMING IN ITS TRANSITION

Abstract

This study investigates how Belarusian migrants and political exiles reconfigure the meaning of home and belonging following forced
displacement after the 2020 political crisis. The object of inquiry is the emotional and symbolic reconstruction of home in exile, shaped by practices of homing, relational care, and identity negotiation. The main task is to examine how migrants experience and enact belonging in uncertain sociopolitical landscapes, and how emotional geographies and symbolic rituals serve as coping mechanisms amid loss, mobility, and precarity. This study asks: how is home performed beyond physical space? What makes belonging possible in contexts of rupture? The study employs a qualitative methodology, grounded in reflexive thematic analysis of 13 in-depth interviews
with Belarusian migrants living in Lithuania, Poland, and Georgia. Data were coded to trace patterns in affective spatial practices, identity transformations, and diasporic community formation. The analysis draws on theoretical frameworks from diaspora studies, emotional geography, and feminist theory, particularly the works of Brah, Ahmed, and Blunt & Dowling. Findings reveal that home is not a static location but a mobile, affective infrastructure — reassembled through sensory cues, symbolic objects, and everyday rituals. Belonging emerges through emotional labor, repetition, and relational investments, often despite legal and spatial instability. Participants describe homing as a dynamic process: making spaces livable through routine, care, and memory. Communities in exile are revealed as fluid emotional cartographies rather than fixed social networks. The study concludes that emotional displacement creates both fragility and opportunity: while rootedness is undermined, new forms of resilience, identity, and political imagination emerge. These insights contribute to migration scholarship by foregrounding the intimate, embodied, and relational dimensions of belonging, offering a nuanced understanding of exile not only as loss but also as a site of becoming.