School of Geography - Theses
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ItemThird Culture Kids: Making Homes in Transient Lives( 2023)This thesis explores how third culture kids feel, experience and (re)create home throughout their transient and mobile lives. Geographic mobility, experiences of transition and relocation is at the core of third culture kids’ lives. Third culture kids are individuals who have spent a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents’ passport country due to their parents’ occupation and are often described as children of expatriate parents from relatively high socioeconomic groups. For many third culture kids, their sense of home is one marked by a certain collective disorientation—home is everywhere yet nowhere at once. Drawing on narratives collected from participant-driven photo-elicitation interviews, this thesis adopts a non-representational style of research to uncover the situated and embodied affective experiences of home for third culture kids. The relationship between mobility and home is explored through three empirical chapters of gaps, bubbles and lines. Gaps reveals how detachment—the process of withdrawing from previous sustained relations and attachment—characterises their affective relations to place. Bubbles shows how third culture kids actively create and maintain enclosed expatriate spaces that generates and nurtures affective atmospheres of safety, comfort and familiarity—one that resembles a sense of home. Lines suggest how habitual routines is central to the homemaking processes for third culture kids.