“I Want to Share This Story in What Feels as My Home”: Disrupting the Single Story on Refugee Home-Making in the Netherlands Through a Community Storytelling Project

This chapter explores how acts of storytelling can disrupt single stories about refugees and their home-making practices in the Netherlands. Drawing on an engaged storytelling project within a Dutch community initiative, it discusses how personal stories about feeling at home in a new environment are crafted and shared by participants, and how these stories speak to and about existing dominant discourses of Dutchness. The stories illuminate home-making is a relational and dynamic (rather than static and territorial) process that intertwines past, present, and future and shifts between safety and openness. Herewith, the chapter demonstrates how storytelling can foster processes of home-making by nurturing safe spaces of belonging. In addition, it argues storytelling practices can spark a process of world-making, meaning that they can make space for difference through creative and fluid acts of agency that challenge and re-imagine the boundaries of our common world(s). Through this, the chapter ultimately shows how stories act as vehicles of epistemic resistance that challenge static, exclusionary notions of Dutchness; opening up horizons for imagining more inclusive, democratic worlds built on care, reciprocity, and a (more) balanced sharing of stories.