Belonging in Unhomely Homelands

The Ph.D. project investigates how internally displaced women and men position themselves in discourses on national belonging. My focus is on the intersection between the homeland as the place of people’s rooting and biographical articulations of the flight route. This is an empirical project, and I draw my thesis’s findings on the intersectional analysis of the biographical-narrative interviews I conducted among Kosovo Serbs with the status of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and reside in Serbia since 1999. The status of ‘internal displacement’ is temporary and limits in the level and scope of the assistance. Displaced from Kosovo aren’t official refugees but also not ‘full’ citizens, which, as I show in my thesis, causes multifacet exclusion of people who reside in the refugee camps and wait for long term housing. In biographical accounts of Kosovo Serbs, I find examples of what I am referring to as unhomely belonging to ‘nation’ between its real and imagined place of origin which collide and causes estrangement.