Home across borders: The meaning and making of home experience for Grenadian transnational families

Navigating the multifaceted and temporal transnationalism experience is a daily element of life for many Grenadian families. With its communication and remittance processes, the transnationalism experience is as much a function of individual perception and behaviours as it is a function of recognition, adherence and interpretation of collective social and cultural structural norms. The meaning of home, a similarly multilayered and dynamic phenomenon, is deeply personal. Arguably, irrespective of whether meanings are physical or social in nature perceptions of home influence decision making, sociocultural relationships, and economic wellbeing. Using a qualitative Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) framework, this research finds that for pairs of transnational family members the meaning of home and the transnationalism experience are interconnected. The resulting transnational home system, both a state of being and a process, is a balance of individual and collective influences and decisions, and is in the process an exercise in familial resilience in the face of a range of positive and negative circumstances. This research also finds that although significant in its ability to unify the players experiencing the phenomenon, the experiences of the making of the transnational home are also subjective, depending on variable levels of exposure to a number of social, economic, cultural, political and environmental factors. Only with the acknowledgement of this systematic complexity, beyond any fragmented or highly specified notions of transnationalism and the home, can the wide reaching personal and policy implications of the transnational home be fully realised.