ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between agency and subjectivity of migrants in relation to their everyday practices of housebuilding in the immigrant-receiving countries. It argues that there is a productive relationship between human subjectivity and building practices, and more specifically that the migrant’s participation in their own house adaptation, extension and building assists in extending their subjectivity into the broader cultural and social system. Migrant houses in Australia are cultural products that present intriguing images of sameness and difference, invariably perceived negatively as representations of un-Australian ideas and aesthetics. This contradiction between the positive efforts to be productive and to belong through house-building and the negativity of the reception of the house as product creates a field in which both assimilation and resistance occur.
