My PhD was an interdisciplinary practice-based research emerged through an exploration of my own transnational context. I argued that on migrating, some people create new identities while some try to retain their old identities, however, there were also those of us who neither sits on this side nor on that side; instead, they sit in-between. I used autoethnography as research methods to address how I created an in-between identity by simultaneously adapting to the new environment, and maintaining old identity, demonstrated through my practice.

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A research that sat within interior design, offering a new approach to understand interior space; instead of understanding it through formal descriptions, it aimed to facilitate it via examination of cultural and domestic practices that happened within those spaces that ended up qualifying the space. It asked two questions: if it was the interiors that controlled how a particular practice was performed in the space or if it was the practice that dictated how the interiors might be made, occupied, and left? And if a migrant could make themselves at home by transforming a cultural and domestic practice of Rangoli into Knitting, and how that shift in culture and cultural practices affected the meaning and the making of home.

It was informed by Peggy Levitt & Deepak Lamba-Nieves’ formulation of reverse social remittances analysing the making of home for a migrant like me. The research began and ended in Portsmouth (receiving country), however, a vital understanding on the changing notion of home arrived when I returned to India (homeland) for over a year, resulting in an honest autoethnographic account of reverse social remittances. I argued that social remittances were a continuous exchange of knowledge, proposing that the concept of home was continuously changing; its meaning often expired as soon as one migrated, hence, it needed reconstituting every time one moved or displaced.