HOMInG’s Luis Eduardo Pérez-Murcia and Paolo Boccagni have recently published a research article in Global Networks. The paper revisits the burgeoning debate on return migration in a home studies perspective, drawing on HOMInG’s fieldwork with Ecuadorian migrants. As the authors argue, approaching return as an ongoing interplay between different views, forms and scales of home illuminates its lived experience and consequences. Doing justice to the temporal and spatial scales of home is critical to acknowledge the complexity of return, well beyond the idea of “homecoming”. For sure, return is hardly ever a simple way back home, as so many have already shown in social sciences and humanities, from Alfred Schutz to Milan Kundera. Nonetheless, what home means, and how it can be relocated again (and where, and when), still makes a difference to people on the move.

Of home-comings and home-scales: Reframing return migration through a multiscalar understanding of home

Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia, Paolo Boccagni
Global Networks, online first, doi: 

https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12371

Is return migration a form of ‘homecoming’, as common sense would have it? While increasing research has addressed both its determinants and the underlying lived experience, still lacking is a systematic revisit of return through the prism of home studies. Based on a multiscalar approach to home and on our fieldwork into Ecuadorian migration, we explore return as a life transition between separate geographic spaces and biographical times; in essence, as an ongoing interplay between different views, forms and scales of home. What potential returnees construct as home, how different this is from the past, and on what spatial and temporal scales they (re)locate their sense of home, are all critical influences on their return orientations and practices. Overall, little generalization can be made about the shifting temporalities and spatialities of return migration. Nonetheless, reconstructing the attendant (re)locations of home affords a more nuanced and sensitive understanding of it.