Introduction: shifting meanings of home

The studies and narratives collected in this special volume acknowledge "home" as a complex, ambiguous notion and reality. The contributors pay tribute to different ways of experiencing home, and to multiple connections to place and time. They illustrate how home is a social edifice, how it embodies different meanings and values, how it demarcates individual and social or national identities, and how a longing for home permeates experiences of homelessness as well as cultural, spatial, linguistic, and economic transitions.