Place is a multifaceted concept that has changing spatial and temporal meanings. For many, the home spurs moments of material and sensory encounter by those who interact there. Assemblages are built by peoples’ interactions in/with home through their connectivity with people, materiality and other places. In the homes of Sri Lankan refugees, I draw on assemblage theory to reflect on constructions and enactments of home. In this paper, I take from interview material with Sri Lankan refugees in their homes gleaned from mobile and visual methods. The paper will focus on data from in-depth interviews and video footage taken with participants in their homes. These interviews sought to capture the sensory encounters, movements and practices that coalesced in the home as an assemblage for Sri Lankan refugees. The non-verbal interactions in the home – witnessed through touching objects, eating and smelling food – generated data on how senses of place developed (or not) for them. Their homes provided unique examples of how refugee journeys from place to place involved (re)creating home. It was through their memory and identity that links to the homeland were sustained. This paper exhibits recent research that aligns with discussions of home and migration in geography.

Recent work in urban geography has focused attention on the interconnections between Indigenous people and planning. Porter and Barry (2015) argue that contact zones with Indigenous people are “emergent social practices, constituted heavily – as all social practices are – through language and located within a much wider field of established discourses” (p. 23). In this paper we take this work in two new directions. First, we take the insights from recent planning literature and apply them to the diverse assemblages of urban regeneration. Second, we build from the discursive framing of Porter and Barry’s work, to examine the practices, performances and encounters which enact Indigenous presence and absence in urban regeneration. Drawing on examples from policy documents; news and social media reports and comments; key-informant interviews; and participant observation, we explore how an understanding of embodied and material encounters can add to our understanding of contact zones in the city. We compare the ways that Indigenous presence is incorporated (or acknowledged yet ignored) in most conventional regeneration activities and how this compares with reactions to the granting of Native Title over the iconic Newcastle Post Office, which has been key to regeneration debates in Newcastle for over a decade.

As Kathleen Stewart’s wonderful book Ordinary Affect perfectly exemplifies, critical theory and cultural studies is usually interested in the ordinary to the extent that the ordinary is that which escapes notice and attention because it is mundane, everyday, humdrum, and so on. Stewart’s work continues a rich field of investigation pioneered by Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and Roland Barthes, among others. But it seems to me one needs to bring this line of investigation full circle, so to speak, and ask not what counts as ordinary, but rather what would it take to begin to see the ordinary dysfunctional infrastructure as extraordinary? We have to stop thinking of the concept of the assemblage as a way of describing a thing or situation and instead see it for what it was always intended to be, a way of analysing a thing or situation. As Deleuze and Guattari say repeatedly, concepts should bring about a new way of seeing something and not simply fix a label to something we think we already know about. For Deleuze and Guattari the critical analytic question is always: given a specific situation what kind of assemblage would be required to produce it?