This article examines conflicting notions of political home or homeland (waṭan) in the early twentieth-century Western Indian Ocean. In a period of colonial consolidation and shifts in trans-oceanic mobility, determining political belonging took on urgency for both British officials and Omani intellectuals and migrants. This article examines how, in contrast to both anti-colonial nationalists and British colonial officials, homeland in Omani religious scholarship was neither bounded territorially nor articulated through origins or subjecthood. Yet, it was spatial, affective, and hierarchically determined. And, it was manifest, embodied, and performed in the daily requirements of prayer. Spatial but not territorial, necessary but personally, hierarchically, and affectively decided, this pious notion of homeland has for the most part been replaced by the nation-state form. Yet, legacies of attachment to waṭan outside the bounded territorial model occasionally surface, operating as a simultaneous, but not synonymous, expression of political and personal belonging.

Introduction: Discharge communication in the emergency department occurs frequently and has been identified as an important, underestimated problem. Tools, such as patient or caregiver-held passports have been used in other departments to improve communication and facilitate provider and patient decision making. The objective of this review was to identify what modalities, methods and designs have been used and evaluated when implementing a communication tool or passport type document in the emergency department setting. Methods: This review was conducted following Joanna Briggs Institute methodology. Iterative steps included identifying the research question, identifying relevant studies, data extraction and synthesis. Keywords and indexed terms were used to search PubMed, Cinahl, Embase and Web of Science. The reference list of all identified reports and articles from that search were reviewed for additional studies and a hand search of the last 5 years of Annals of Emergency Medicine and the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine was completed. Inclusion criteria were set to select studies investigating either patients, caregivers or health care providers use of passports, communication documents or journals with the goal of improving any aspect of communication in the emergency department setting. Results: Of the 81 potential publications screened, only 4 met inclusion criteria for extraction. 1 reviewed a passport that aimed at pediatric pain management in settings that include the emergency department, 2 of the publications reported on the same project which developed a passport for asthma patients and 1 discussed a passport for patients with learning disabilities. All the included publications were published in and discuss passports that were developed for use in the UK. Descriptions of implementation, evaluation and perception of the passports in these publications was limited. Conclusion: This scoping review has revealed a major gap in the current literature on communication tools in the emergency department, a department where communication, especially about discharge is of utmost importance. The included studies focused on very different patient populations and aim to improve different outcomes and therefore dont allow us to make for passports aimed at helping the general emergency department population.