Is This Home? Return Migration and the (mis)Appropriation of the Ancestral Place of Origin

In an increasingly mobile world, where we are equipped with the technological ability to build our social relations and activities across a transnational social field (Glick-Schiller et al. 1992), it is easy to overlook the specific nature of communities of time and space. Building on the legacy of social geographers such as David Hummon (1992), we want to re-examine the relationship between an individual and a place, as well as the processes of making a specific place “home” (Boccagni 2022), focussing on the study of return migration.

This session welcomes papers based on empirical research that address the relationship between return migration and place with regards both to migrants and to their descendants (ancestral return migration, roots tourism). Papers may tackle the following issues, without being limited to them:

• the way a sense of an ancestral home is transmitted in families of migrant descents across generations and the way people experience “home” when going back to their or their ancestors’ place of origin
• the relationship between an individual and a place through the use of ancestral citizenship when moving between different countries and in the process of settlement
• how social and professional (re)integration when “returning” to a country of origin influences the relationship between individuals and place, participating in processes of “home-making” and “anchoring” and/or engendering a sense of strangeness
• research on gender differences and gendered roles in this specific process of “returning” are also welcome.

We also encourage contributions that take a critical approach to all these categories.