This theoretical synthesis explores the notion of home as a dynamic, semiotically mediated construct by connecting a dimensional model of home with a case study on international students’ lived negotiations of belonging. The model conceptualizes home as a hypergeneralized feeling field that becomes experientially meaningful through semiotic emergence across temporal, psychosocial, spatial, cultural, and power dimensions. The power dimension, in particular, highlights how social hierarchies, institutional structures, and political conditions shape who is permitted to feel at home and under what circumstances. The case study illustrates how these interwoven dimensions unfold in practice, showing that home is not a fixed location but a dialogical and developmental process continually reshaped through rupture, transition, and imaginative reconstruction. Drawing on dialogical and developmental perspectives, it demonstrates how internal and external voices, cultural symbols, and imagined futures interweave to restore coherence and continuity after migration-induced disruptions.

By linking the theoretical hierarchy of affective-semiotic levels with the empirical narrative of symbolic reattachment, this synthesis reveals how meaning-making, emotion, and imagination together constitute home as both a psychological resource and an evolving identity field. Home thus emerges as a site of agency and negotiation within asymmetrical power relations, where individuals construct belonging through semiotic traces—food, language, memory, and cultural icons—that bridge past and present. The integration of these perspectives underscores the developmental and dialogical complexity of “home” as a lived process and invites further theoretical discussion on how semiotic mediation, identity, and power co-produce a sense of being at home.