Coming Home to an (Un)familiar Country: The Strategies of Returning Migrants (Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship)

✍ Scribed by Mariusz Dzięglewski

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 391
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume focuses on the process of return migration, from a holistic and policy-oriented perspective. Studies in return migration, which remains a vibrant field for academics, researchers, and policy-makers, have provided a large body of knowledge on particular issues, but generally fall along two lines: they are either broad macro analyses and models (especially economic ones) or narrow ethnographic views (anthropological, sociological, or psychological). This volume attempts to chart a course between these two approaches, combining returning migrants’ life trajectories, as seen by themselves, with analysis of the structural processes that have taken place in the last three decades in Europe and in Poland, as a new EU country. In analyzing the social and cultural changes reflected in the biographies of returning migrants, the author uses a framework based on an original synthesis of Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological approach, focusing on the returnees’ “life words,” with the social realism of Margaret Archer, focusing on the concerns and projects of individuals interacting with social and cultural structures.

✦ Table of Contents

Preface
Note
References
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Introduction: Migratory Streams in Europe and Poland
1.1 Out-Migration and Return Migration in the Post-war History of Europe and Poland
1.2 Departures and Returns After the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Enlargement of the EU in 2004
References
2 What Do We Know and How Can We Learn More About Homecoming?
2.1 The Literature and State of Scholarship on Return Migration
2.2 The Theoretical Framework
2.3 The Main Concepts and Project Methodology
References
3 The Structural Background of Migration and Homecoming in Europe After 2004
3.1 Demographic and Economic Transformations
3.2 Patterns of Social Mobility
3.3 Immigration Policies on Return Migration
3.4 Technology and Communication
3.5 Values and Norms
3.6 Discourse, Attitudes, and Social Opinions on Migration and Homecoming
References
4 Homecomers’ Perceptions of Opportunities and Constraints in the Migration Cycle
4.1 Life in Central and Eastern Europe Before Migration
4.2 Migratory Experiences in Western and Southern Europe
4.3 Return Migration and Reintegration
References
5 Aspects of Return Migrants’ Strategies
5.1 Ways of Acting in Response to Structural Properties
5.2 Communications and Emotional Processing
5.3 Social Mobility
5.4 Acquiring and Transferring Resources: Structural Processing
5.5 Social Networks and the Importance of Place
5.6 The Result of Acculturation and Reacculturation: Identity and Personality
References
6 One of Us or Stranger? A Taxonomy of Homecomers
6.1 The Affirmative Return of the Conservative
6.2 The Affirmative Return of the Innovator
6.3 The Affirmative Return of the Maladjusted
6.4 The Return of the World Citizen
6.5 The Disappointing Return of the Lost
6.6 The Disappointing Return of the Stranger
References
7 Conclusions
References
Index