Making the unfamiliar familiar : research journeys towards understanding migration and place

Understanding the ways people respond to place in an inter-cultural context is a rich and rewarding process. The knowledge-discovery journey can involve different modes of transport and multiple and various routes. The qualitative vehicle, although soft in its steering and often circular in direction, provides opportunities to explore landscapes that one rarely sees in single-trajectory intellectual travel. Using hermeneutics and phenomenology, with a particular focus on metaphors and tropes, a number of conceptual journeys related to researching the experience of migration are described. The difficult state of being ‘between place’ and how this becomes manifest in real places is explored. The journeys show that only by travelling circuitously can one arrive at a multi-faceted form of awareness of the experience of migration and place.