Projects
This study aims to investigate the complexities of the phenomenon of return migration in Bulgaria as experienced and narrated by return migrants from various educational, social, professional and migratory backgrounds. These will serve to question official policy discourses that approach return in the framework of protecting ethnic and cultural homogeneity in the country. The study will focus on the personal accounts of Bulgarian return migrants about the relationship between return expectations and lived integration as well as about their experiences of home and belonging.
The study will aim to avoid limiting return problematic to questions of investment of money and skills accumulated abroad. Such pro-economic approach tends to dominate present scholarship on return migration that is centered on the migration and development paradigm. Instead the study will focus on the return phenomenon per se to investigate the relationship between migratory experiences of returnees and their civic, cultural and ethnic self-identifications. Explored will be return migrants' lived and imagined experiences of home and belonging that are often assumed unitary and homogeneous by the official political discourse. In this respect the relationship between migrants' host and home country experiences will be interrogated to identify modes of continuity or discontinuity and their relationship to migrants' sense of belonging and experiences of home. In particular the study will focus on the subjective perceptions and objective experiences of home as migrants' lived and imagined reality and their bearing on migrants return and consequent adaptation. The study will aim to shed light on the complexities if return migrants identities that are anchored socially and culturally in multiple places of past and present being.
Methods: The study will involve in-depth interviews with return migrants, semi-structured interviews with officials from relevant migration management institutions and discursive analysis of governmental strategy papers, action plans and official reports in the area of migration and return.