Lunch & Learn Lecture with Dr. Doiczman-Łoboda

HOME-OUT. Boundaries of Home-Making: Biographical Experiences of Young Adults After Leaving Foster Care in Poland, the United States, and Canada

This lecture presents the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological foundations of a research project devoted to the biographical experiences of young adults after leaving foster care in Poland, the United States, and Canada. The project moves beyond narrowly defined institutional indicators of independence and instead focuses on how care leavers build everyday life after care, negotiate relationships, seek stability and safety, appropriate space, and gradually construct a sense of home of their own. At the center of the analysis is the concept of home-making, understood as a relational, material, emotional, and biographically embedded process rather than a simple consequence of legal or economic self-sufficiency.

The lecture will discuss the interpretive and biographical framework of the study, the comparative-contextual research design, and the use of in-depth autobiographical narrative interviews inspired by Fritz Schütze’s methodology. Particular attention will be given to the question of how institutional conditions, support systems, and everyday practices shape the transition to adulthood after foster care in different national contexts.

The event will also include a brief presentation of the book Boundaries of Separation: Biographical Experiences of Young People in Migrant Families, Revisited in the U.S. Context by Natasza Doiczman-Łoboda. Presented alongside the HOME-OUT project, the book creates a broader scholarly context for discussing biographical research, family relationships, rupture, instability, and the ways individuals construct continuity, belonging, and forms of symbolic or relational home under conditions of separation and vulnerability.

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