Lauren Barnett Wagner

My research is motivated by my curiosity, since childhood, to understand how everything works.

To do that, I do post-disciplinary social science research using ethnomethodological approaches to practice. In other words, believe the best way to understand how the socio-material world works is to investigate the myriad of micro-level practical actions that cumulatively make it work; I am therefore more interested in what people do than what they say about what they do, and how lots of doings become something noticeable. 

My current project is on the value and labor of care for housing, especially in light of migration and touristic mobilities. You can find more details about how Care Matters here and about Making Things Last here. 

Thematically, I focus my research attention on people living diasporically - locating themselves between homes in 2 or more places. Specifically, I have researched about Moroccan-origin communities in Europe. 

My mission is to reorient research questions about diasporic mobilities away from understandings of diasporicness as a problematic or an ‘other’ way of living, and towards investigations of how diasporic practices create commonplace and ubiquitous social worlds.