Contested Home: Asylum-Seeking in Switzerland and the Politics of Belonging, Place, and Religion

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.