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Home and citizenship carry contradictory and ambiguous meanings for immigrants as they negotiate lives ‘here’ and ‘there’. We use the concept of topography to analyze the ways in which activists in the Arab-American community draw connections between homes in the United States and in the Middle East. In intensive interviews, we ask activists about how their understanding of home influences their activism and positioning as citizens within the United States. Activists often bring to their work conceptualizations of home and citizenship that are open, and that connect home to broader forces operating at various scales and in more than one place. Rather than pursuing a deterritorialized, transnational citizenship, our respondents forged a politics of home and citizenship whose topography transcended localities and nations, even as they were often rooted in the spaces of both.
Staeheli et al. (Mon,) studied this question.