Intercultural Communications Lecture - Prof Cristina Ros i Sole

This talk will talk about the potential of the personal object for making oneself at home in a new location. A focus on migrants’ everyday life and the objects they transport to their new locations provides a new lens with which to look at the experience of the displaced individual and discusses the revisioning of histories and cultural identities in relation to personal biographies. Drawing on a study of multilingual everyday collections (Ros i Sole 2025) it will invoke the materiality of migrants’ mundane objects and their ‘travelling memories’ to analyse how meanings are disputed, interpreted, and revalorised in the present and are transformed into acts of self-welcome. Such a view challenges the traditional host-guest dichotomy in traditional accounts of hospitality where migrants’ agencies and their everyday material lives are omitted.