In the era of mass migration and increasing temporary employment arrangements, workers are frequently on the move and often housed in temporary living arrangements, such as worksites. However, we know little about how these workers make home under such precarious and transient working conditions, largely due to the predominant focus on stable and elite work contexts in home and work research, as well as insufficient attention to the role of workplace in homemaking within migration studies literature. Addressing this, we conducted a multi-sited ethnography of internal migrant workers living on construction sites in India. Our findings reveal that homemaking for low-earning migrant workers is a continuous process of finding, crafting, securing, and unmaking, where home at the workplace is constantly formed and reformed through ongoing agentic actions, and negotiations. These processes reflect a dialectical tension that we conceptualise as ‘rooted transient homemaking’, wherein migrants simultaneously remain agile and adaptive to shifting conditions while engaging in practices that anchor them temporarily. Furthermore, homemaking emerges as a ‘communal work’ involving active engagement with employers and the local community, moving beyond the individualistic and familial focus often emphasized in stable, permanent, and elite contexts. Overall, our findings contribute to a shift from static conceptualization to a cyclical, ongoing, and dynamic perspective of homemaking, particularly in relation to the micro-political tensions inherent in transient and precarious workplaces.
