Our session engages with a variety of ways in which home is metaphorically evoked, in the public discourse of American and European countries, as an emotional device to claim the retention of national or local traditions, "autenticity" and autonomy from a variety of external influences; and often, more radically, as a way of advancing nativist, securitarian or even xenophobic political agendas, as already captured in the seminal concept of "Domopolitics" (Walters, 2004). Within the EU, the reaction of populist parties to the so-called refugee crisis, and possibly the claims for "full sovreignty" against Brussels' supra-national authorities, are cases in points of home-centred, deeply ambiguous political narratives. However, how different dimensions of a home discourse interact with each other - i.e. past retention, protection of local/national specificities, exclusion of outsiders - is a highly variable, empirical question. Our session aims to explore it, by gathering contributions from different national and disciplinary backgrounds.

How the apparently neutral notion of home can be instrumental to strategies of governmentality, or to the rhetorics around border control; how home-related cognitions, emotions and metaphors are mobilized, politically speaking, to argue for the protection of past traditions, and/or for the exclusion of minority or immigrants groups; and where the boundary between protection and exclusion lies in practice, are all questions for in-depth and comparative analysis.

The four papers combine the study of home-related discourses and emotions, with an interest in the geo-political implications that home assumes, in the public and political debate, across Europe and North America.