PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter1- Introductiontheir actions, but are recruited into patterns of behaviours. This thus implies that theconnections between people‘s practices and the environmental contexts are encounters.Such understanding also has emotional implications as he refers to Giddens (1984) whoconsiders that through people‘s reproduction of previously effective behaviours, acomforting form of familiarity can often be forged. This thus makes clear therelationships between people‘s emotional experiences, everyday behaviours andenvironmental contexts of places where their activities are based so offering insights tostudying migrants‘ practice to constitute belonging.The literature on practices of migrant belonging has increasingly examined the roleobjects play in migrants‘ everyday lived practices and the ways in which belonging isconstituted by connecting objects to a given place (Mee and Wright 2009). However,previous studies have often centred on studying migrants‘ material practices at home inthe domestic sphere (for example, see Dobson 2006; Salih 2002; Tolia-Kelly 2004;Walsh 2006a), omitting experiences in other spatial settings in which migrants‘everyday lives are based (e.g. workplace and leisure spaces). This thesis seeks toaddress this omission and to enrich the understanding of spaces of migrant belonging byincluding an examination of the material culture and material practices in publicdomains in Taiwanese expatriates‘ practices of belonging. Specifically, I consider howthe transnational similarities, constituted by material culture and migrants‘ experiencesof interacting with places and the local environment, may shape their emotional processof belonging. My discussion will address the materiality of Taiwanese expatriates‘everyday living spaces in terms of housing forms and the built environment in shapingtheir emotional experiences of belonging. As economic globalisation has contributed tolarge-scale property development projects across the world, the design of housing hasalso become a manifestation of the landscape of transnational connectivity and16