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In the era of global workflows and massive migrations, it has been suggested that the notion of home is breaking free from its material aspects to become a set of exportable routines and practices. On the other hand, it is argued that the materiality of spaces and objects can support migrants' well-being in the new destination. Drawing on the ethnography of a Moroccan household in Rome, Italy, we illustrate how actions pertinent to the material home can favor identity development and the exercise of agency. First, we discuss squatting as a collective action of appropriation and transformation, which led to the identification with a transnational, intercultural category of migrant. Second, we illustrate the activities of furnishing as the locus of syncretic and reflexive processes, in which elements of the host country and themes from the migratory experience are mixed and reinterpreted in novel ways. Our analysis supports the view that the materiality of the home and the actions it affords play a major role in the socio-psychological adjustment of migrants and-on a wider scale-in processes of cultural dynamism and renovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concerns the dynamics of domestic space ‘appropriation’ in Italian middle-class working families. The article starts from a background in multidisciplinary literature, mostly in the area of ethnographical and psychological studies, where the concepts of both ‘ownership’ and ‘territoriality’ prove to be inadequate. A dynamic view of space appropriations is chosen instead: starting from ‘outside appropriations’, the presence of marked thresholds is then considered. Secondly, domestic space appropriations within the house are analysed in a purely qualitative way. There are selective and ‘predominant’ appropriations by a single family member and by the whole household; questions of sovereignty and painful ‘proscriptions’ (kingdoms and exiles) arise when specific parts of the house pertain to a given individual. But there are also unstable appropriations which reveal that there are negotiations in progress according to the family's power dynamics. Thus defined, the categories of domestic space also provide a key to understanding the families' relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]