This article asks why broadly similar mobile subjects develop sharply different ways of making home across destinations. Drawing on comparative, multi-sited ethnography with Northeastern Chinese sojourners in Hainan (China) and Bangkok (Thailand), it argues that divergent homemaking patterns are generated by institutional terrains. Rather than serving as a neutral backdrop, institutional terrains organize access, infrastructures of support, and everyday uncertainty, thereby producing distinct practical possibilities for residence, care, and belonging. The analysis identifies two ideal-typical modalities of mobile homemaking. In Hainan, where mobility unfolds within domestic continuity and citizenship-based entitlements, sojourners cultivate embedded homemaking through repeated co-presence, shared routines, and expanding interpersonal ties within residential communities and everyday public spaces. In Bangkok, where longer stays are organized through conditional residence under immigration regulation and linguistic difference, sojourners more often develop project-based homemaking. Here, livable routines are assembled through deliberate coordination across selected spaces, commercial services, and digital networks that translate rules and paperwork into manageable steps. The article conceptualizes these adaptive practices as tactical mobility, understood as skilled everyday navigation through uneven institutional terrains. It further shows how affective navigation—managing uncertainty, curiosity, and distance—becomes central to sustaining comfort and predictability in transnational settings. By linking ethnographic detail to institutional analysis, the study advances debates on homemaking under mobility and offers a structural critique of choice-centered accounts of lifestyle-oriented migration.

Xuewei Zhang. Institutional Terrains and Tactical Mobility: Two Modalities of Mobile Homemaking between Hainan and Bangkok. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2026), Vol. 9, Issue 8: 61-76. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2026.090809.

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