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This paper builds on twelve months of fieldwork among Arab migrants in Berlin in 2024-2025 and shows how they emotionally interacted with feelings of existential displacement in response to the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism relating to Israel's war on Gaza

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This paper builds on twelve months of fieldwork among Arab migrants in Berlin in 2024-2025. During this year, Israel’s war on Gaza and the subsequent unrest it brought about in the region, as well as political developments in Germany that translated in the repression of pro-Palestinian activism have significantly impacted Arab migrants. This paper focuses on how these events created a sense of collective disillusionment and questions about belonging among my interlocutors who described this in the language of “regression." I argue that this is grounded in freedom being an existential project for many who have migrated in the aftermath of the failure of the Arab revolutions. As such, my ethnographic account demonstrates how "critical events" such as the genocide and political repression in Europe can valorise affects and temporalities relating to past lives guiding migration trajectories (Das, 1995). I show how my interlocutors emotionally interacted with feelings of existential displacement in the city and the mediums through which they expressed these emotions. This included collective mobilization to provide spaces for grieving those killed in Gaza and expressing feelings of disempowerment through open mic, poetry and communal events. I also focus on how my interlocutors personally navigated feelings of alienation in their daily lives as they interacted with people in their surroundings who negated the reality of the unrest in the region in support of Israel. I build on literature within existential anthropology to highlight how people experience emotions of "de-anchoring" in response to political crises (Obeid, 2025; Hage, 2021).

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Migration is increasingly understood as an ordinary condition of post-migration societies. Drawing on multimodal ethnography with long-term migrants to the UK, this paper examines how personal belongings mediate affect, belonging, and everyday practices of settlement beyond crisis-oriented framings.

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Research on migration increasingly adopts a ‘post-migration’ framework that conceptualises migration as an ordinary and constitutive feature of contemporary societies in the global North, shaped by long histories of colonialism and labour mobility (Moslund 2015). From this perspective, migrant identities in migrant-built societies no longer align with public categorisations that separate ‘migrants’ from ‘citizens’ (Favell 2022), which inadequately capture lived experiences of transnationalism in these societies. My proposed paper contributes to this approach by presenting preliminary findings from a multimodal ethnography conducted with long-term migrants to the UK, focusing on the material culture of international mobility. Specifically, I examine what people pack when they move across borders and the emotional and affective role these items play as part of migratory journeys? I argue that this object-centred approach offers new distinctive entry points into exploring belonging, settlement, and integration in 'post-migration' contexts. I will show how participants continually reworked notions of home, integration, and settlement through materially entangled affective labour and embodied practices, as part of their everyday social reproduction at the intersection of private and public life. The findings will demonstrate the constitutive role material culture plays in both sustaining and reproducing migrants’ identities and sense of belonging across multiple places. By empirically grounding conceptual debates on ‘integration’ and ‘settlement’, the paper aims to diffuse the crisis-oriented and value-laden framings of migration (Squire et al. 2021). Instead, I foreground migration as an ordinary affective and emotional condition, offering a materially-grounded rethinking of belonging in post-migration societies.

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The paper explores how women experience a Turkish-German mosque as an affective, social, and communal space, reproducing belonging through care, participation, and shared emotional life, highlighting how the mosque functions beyond a religious site and as a protective ‘home’.

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Belonging is an emotionally charged social location rooted in shared practices and attachments, producing feelings of familiarity, intimacy, and emotional safety through embeddedness in a social fabric. Rather than a stable condition, belonging is continuously reproduced through everyday interactions, affective investments, and shared sociality, making emotions central to how belonging is lived.

Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in a large urban Turkish-German DITIB mosque in Germany, the paper explores how women experience the mosque as an affective, social, and communal space in which belonging is reproduced. The mosque functions beyond a religious site, as an affective and protective space where prayer and teaching are intertwined with sociality. Networks of care, trust, and reciprocity emerge through everyday interaction, religious and community gatherings, offering emotional and practical support during moments of hardship and reinforcing a shared moral and religious community, enabling women to navigate changing socio-economic conditions in Germany. Through sustained investments of time, labor, and resources, as well as practices of placemaking, women experience the mosque as a ‘home’, anchoring belonging in both interpersonal relationships and the physical and symbolic space of the mosque.

Reflecting on my positionality, the paper incorporates my own affective experience of belonging as ethnographic material, highlighting how belonging is learned through embodied participation and shared emotional life.

Ultimately, the paper argues that the mosque functions not simply as a place of worship but as an affective social space in which belonging is continuously reproduced through women’s emotional investments, everyday interaction and acts of care.

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This paper examines the affective domains of host-migrant relations in Singapore. I locate the roots of boundary-making practices and anti-migrant discourse in what Polanyi describes as the “deleterious effects” of economic liberalisation, using the emotive towards de-escalating polarisation.

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This paper examines the affective domains of everyday host-migrant relations in Singapore. I focus on sensory contact zones between locals who live in public housing estates and low-wage foreign domestic workers (FDWs) who gather in public spaces adjacent to these estates. Drawing on participant sensation, interviews, and sensewalks with 12 public housing residents over 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I show how perceived sensory infractions reveal fears about the erosion of Singaporean folkways and the devaluation of public housing assets while stoking anti-immigrant sentiments. Revisiting Polanyi’s concept of the countermovement and placing it in conversation with the notions of neoliberal morality and affective economy of removal, I develop the concept of provisional tolerance. This theoretical approach complicates the relationship between affect and removal in the lives of those in unfree labour regimes. Provisional tolerance thus captures how FDWs are rendered “out of place” when their bodies and sensescapes spill from sanctioned enclaves into residential spaces, yet begrudgingly acknowledged as necessary labour in the neoliberal-developmental state of Singapore. In light of diffuse political structures and economic systems that foster a laissez-faire approach to immigration, anger is thus displaced onto proximate migrant bodies, and protectionist approaches become more pronounced. In adopting a host-focused lens, I do not relativise migrant marginalisation in Singapore. Instead, I locate the roots of boundary-making practices and anti-migrant discourse in what Polanyi describes as the “deleterious effects” of economic liberalisation, and use the emotive to trace a pathway towards radically de-escalating polarisation.

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Pakistani‑Hindu migrants view India as a cultural homeland, yet social boundaries and reproduced differences limit their belonging. Drawing on year-long ethnography, this paper shows how their hyphenated identity and intersectional positions shape negotiated practices of inclusion.

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Belonging is a complex and layered phenomenon, as even a simple assertion such as “I belong here” carries multiple meanings and claims. While place belongingness—often understood as feeling “at home”—is central to belonging, being part of a community also requires the ability to express one’s identity through social habits, ways of thinking, and language. For Pakistani Hindu migrants, a sense of belonging to India emerges from perceived similarities in religious and cultural practices, alongside the idea of India as their fatherland or “true destination.” This paper examines the social boundaries they encounter and how these boundaries shape and transform their perceptions of belonging within the broader Hindu community.

Although scholarship frequently explains migrants’ belonging through identity, ethnicity, citizenship, or affective attachment, my fieldwork indicates that participants rarely felt fully accepted in India. Persistent reproduction of difference by the recipient population marked them as outsiders, complicating their incorporation. In response, migrants developed varied strategies to adapt and adopt local behaviours, yet their capacity to do so was deeply influenced by their intersectional social positions—caste, class, gender, age, life stage, and their hyphenated identity as Pakistani Hindu.

Drawing on semi structured interviews, life story narratives, and 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, this paper addresses how these intersecting identities shaped migrants’ navigation of difference and exclusion. It unpacks how the interplay of hyphenated identity and intersectional location informs their efforts to claim a negotiated, though often partial, sense of belonging.

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Using the notion of “feeling at home,” this paper examines contemporary Spanish migration in Europe through emotional, affective, and embodied perspectives, showing how these interact with economic, political, ecological, and sociocultural factors, generating multiple forms of belonging.

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In 2023, 36.27% of Spaniards who emigrated abroad were skilled migrants, a group that is often in demand and less stigmatized institutionally than labour and irregular ones, yet whose experience is not exempt from challenges and negative emotions. Drawn from the first round of interviews conducted in Denmark in autumn 2025, the aim of the paper is to account for migrants' experiences, focusing on how they engage emotionally and affectively with their new sociocultural and ecological context, while maintaining relationships somewhere else and generating different forms of belonging. Emotion and affects are the core analytical concept since they structure the experience and, while closely connected, they highlight different aspects of the lived experience, namely affects drawn attention to sensory and bodily dimensions. The aim is not to study experiences instead of structural issues, but to approach the latter focusing on the “lifeworld”, concept that refers to the everyday life and the pre-reflective dimension accessed primarily through the bodily perception. This embodied approach to the sentiments (affects and emotions) comes from phenomenology which partially constitute the theoretical framework of my qualitative and multi-sited research planned in three countries: Denmark, Germany and United Kingdom. The study addresses the aforementioned dimensions using the analytical notion of “feeling at home”, an universal need that is indicative of the form of belonging to the new place and the new community, which is also constituted collectively and institutionally, and is mostly felt in the body.

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Drawing from multi-sited (auto)ethnographic research with collective writing workshops in Belgium, Germany and Spain, this paper shows how writing can be a powerful tool for processing and expressing complex emotions connected to migration as well as creating new social and affective ties.

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Migrating and creating a home in a new place are emotionally laden processes, yet the affective and embodied feelings that they elicit can be difficult to comprehend in oneself and communicate to others. Like experiences of migration, the emotions stirred by movement are not singular nor uniform but plural and complex: hope co-existing with fear, joy with grief, nostalgia with anticipation. Moreover, migrants navigate complex relationships to places and (imagined) communities, juggling multiple belongings as well as feelings of unbelonging. In this context, writing can be a powerful tool for processing and expressing emotions connected to migration as well as creating new social and affective ties. This paper draws from multi-sited (auto)ethnographic research with collective writing workshops involving migrants in Belgium, Germany, and Spain, from 2024 to 2026. Writing about their experiences of movement across diverse scales, geographies, and temporalities, workshop participants use creative writing to explore emotions both individually and together. While sometimes texts produced in workshops are kept private by the authors or preserved within the intimacy of the group setting, other projects and writers see the process of sharing them externally to be a valuable means of communicating emotional and embodied experiences of migration and exile to a broader public. At the same time, the act of writing as an affective, embodied, and relational practice can become a form of (co-)creative placemaking and community-building through which participating writers actively construct new spaces and imaginaries of belonging.

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Rùn emerged during COVID lockdowns as a coded idiom of (e)migration among young Chinese urbanites. Using a patchwork ethnography, this study reads rùn as a symbolic and affective language of movement, futurity, and aspiration, negotiated across different sociocultural infrastructures of migration.

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Rùn emerged during the heightened COVID-19 lockdowns in Shanghai as a coded idiom of (e)migration among Chinese young urbanites. Existing scholarship has predominantly interpreted rùn as an expression of pandemic-driven disillusionment with an authoritarian regime of under-mobility, caged freedom, and frustrated future-making. While it captures the political context, reading rùn solely through the state governance minimises deeper sociocultural complexities that foreground movement as both being and becoming. Rather than treating rùn as a Chinese peculiarity, this study situates it within broader post-Cold War social imaginaries across the Global East, where tensions between staying and leaving intersect with an uncertain futurity. Drawing on a patchwork ethnography of netnographic participation and in-person interviews in Shanghai, the study re-examines why rùn emerged and persisted as a coded term among young Chinese urbanites and examines how they negotiate and inhabit its meanings in everyday life. It operationalises rùn as a complex symbolic and moral structure rather than as a one-time act of departure. Seeing rùn as a lived language across chronotopes unsettles ‘migration’ as a singular analytical unit of movement that semantically obscures many culturally embedded elements of movement in everyday experience. Its symbolic richness indicates how a cluster of ideas about freedom, kinship, future, and aspirational imaginaries interacts with one another. In doing so, the study speaks to different sociocultural infrastructures of migration that constitute various enabling and constraining forces shaping people’s migration intentions and their actual ‘doings’ of migration, offering new insights into debates on (im)mobility, moral aspiration, and futurity.

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Based on autobiographical interviews with descendants of Polish migrants in Germany, this study explores how transnational mobilities produce liminal, devalued, idealised and imagined forms of (non)belonging. It shows how these processes shape wellbeing at various life stages.

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While Eastern European migrants receive increasing scholarly attention, their adult children are often seen as a “success story” of integration and, consequently, remain "invisible". Based on 35 autobiographical interviews with people raised by Polish parents in Germany, this paper examines how different forms of mobility shape experiences of (non)belonging and related wellbeing.

The study shows how mobility operates ambivalently: it both reinforces feelings of exclusion and offers strategies for coping with them. For many interlocutors childhood relocations within Germany and regular holiday trips to Poland rather than fostering belonging often intensified a sense of instability and difference. In adulthood, mobility to Poland and other countries acquired new meanings: opened spaces for self-exploration and the creation of alternative forms of belonging beyond national categories.

The paper identifies three interconnected processes through which (non)belonging was shaped: positioning in a liminal space of (non)belonging and devaluation, rejection, or romanticisation of their connection to their parents' homeland. Participants described prolonged states of liminality, in which belonging was conditional and required continuous emotional and social labor, resulting in uncertainty about one’s place in society. Second, family narratives and practices variously devalued, rejected, or idealized ties to Poland, producing fragile or inaccessible forms of belonging and, for some, a diminished sense of self-worth or cultural loss. Third, "imagined belonging" was often temporary, giving way to disappointment.

By foregrounding mobility as an everyday and biographical process, this paper shows how “invisibility” conceals ongoing struggles over belonging and wellbeing.

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Study of Taiwanese women married to Polish men in Poland. Newer arrivals often manage daily life in English, reducing linguistic stress but reshaping belonging. Polish learning (or not) emerges as a strategic decision of time-investment shaped by work, family, and transnational ties.

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This study examines how language choices shape belonging among Taiwanese women married to Polish men and residing in Poland. It argues that for more recent arrivals, the pressure to acquire fluent Polish has softened, enabling everyday life to be managed through English and “good-enough” Polish. Rather than treating this only as a pragmatic adaptation, the paper presents the affective stakes: language proficiency becomes a medium for managing comfort and friction in public encounters, workplaces, and family relations, including moments of confidence, fatigue, embarrassment, and relief. In many professional settings, Polish is not required because employment pathways are increasingly oriented toward English-use roles, which can reduce exposure to stressful linguistic situations while also sustaining a sense of partial social distance. Social media and online platforms function as emotional infrastructure, maintaining local and transnational ties that buffer loneliness and provide recognition, yet may also limit deeper immersion in Polish-language social worlds. The findings show that women recalibrate the costs and benefits of language learning in ways that protect well-being and prioritize portable professional skills and English-based networks. Conceptually, the study links intimate migration and mixed marriage to shifting regimes of integration in a globalizing Poland, highlighting how “comfortable distance” becomes a lived form of belonging.

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The paper explores the experiences of Ukrainian (forced) migrants in Poland. It offers a theoretical framework of the dialectic between uncertainty and certainty, providing a lens through which to investigate the dynamics of affects among crisis-affected individuals.

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The paper explores the experiences of Ukrainian migrants and forced migrants in Poland and how the war in Ukraine has influenced their sense of time, uncertainty, and decision-making. My research was guided by, among others, the question of whether the state of waiting exclusively elicits the affect of uncertainty, or whether individuals also experience other affects and a divergent perception of their circumstances. I claim that when uncertainty is overwhelming, one waits for “small certainties” that allow for ontological security and may bring relief. Navigating the war and the foreign country as a (forced) migrant is navigating between certainty and uncertainty. Therefore, I will present the application of the uncertainty-certainty dialectic as a framework for examining how war and other rapid transitions affect populations. I will argue that uncertainty and certainty should be approached by moving beyond dichotomy and considered dialectic, i.e., as forces working together and complementing each other. Prior research largely treats uncertainty as the sole, defining affect – an absence of knowledge or passive limbo. My paper will challenge this view by arguing that prolonged uncertainty may transform into certainty and proactive engagement. By introducing this dialectic, I will demonstrate waiting transformation from a passive, empty state into a dynamic, active form of waiting, which entails regaining agency. A central argument of my paper is that for individuals affected by the crisis, it is crucial to acknowledge the dynamic interplay of various interdependent affects and to broaden the analytical perspective to integrate the uncertainty-certainty dialectic.

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This paper explores how experiences of migration and political rupture among Egyptian revolutionaries are lived and navigated through affective practices of homemaking. Focusing on everyday practices and emotions, the paper examines how belonging is negotiated across distance, memory, and movement.

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This paper examines migration in the context of counterrevolutionary survival, foregrounding affect, embodiment, and the everyday practices of belonging. Based on long-term ethnographic research with Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo and the diaspora, particularly in Berlin, the paper conceptualizes "home" as an affective infrastructure—a relational and processual formation through which mobility, political rupture, and belonging are experienced, and made meaningful.

Instead of approaching migration as a linear movement from origin to destination, the paper traces the oscillations between attachment and estrangement, presence and absence, and return and postponement. This shows how home and belonging are continuously negotiated across time and place. Focusing on domestic spaces, such as living rooms and empty apartments left behind, as well as material and sensory practices, including music, revolutionary memorabilia, and shared rituals of care, the paper argues that emotions are constitutive of migration, not secondary to it. Homesickness, nostalgia, exhaustion, hope, and political attachment influence decisions to leave, stay, or remain suspended. These affects are collectively produced and sustained through everyday interactions, transforming homes into sites where political life is processed, remembered, and sometimes reactivated.

By attending to how revolutionaries inhabit homes during and after moments of upheaval, the paper highlights the entanglement of mobility with emotional labor, memory work, and embodied practices of belonging. It shows how domestic spaces function simultaneously as refuges, sites of political debate, and laboratories of affective endurance, mediating both revolutionary possibility and counterrevolutionary defeat. Ultimately, it proposes understanding home as fragmented, contested, and generative.

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This paper examines how migration, emotions, and belonging shaped human experiences in deep prehistory. Archaeology shows mobility as an adaptive social process, where emotions influenced movement, strengthened group ties, and shaped deep-time belonging.

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This paper contributes to the conference theme “Emotions on the Move” by examining how migration, emotions, and belonging shaped human experiences in deep prehistory. Archaeological evidence shows that mobility was a continual adaptive strategy, expressed through lithic technologies, settlement choices, and environmental responses. These material signatures reveal that movement was deeply social, shaping identities and structuring interactions across landscapes.

Anthropologically, prehistoric mobility is understood as an affective process. Although emotions themselves do not fossilize, they become visible through cultural practices carried by migrating groups—ritual behaviours, symbolic traditions, and technological styles that reproduced belonging in unfamiliar environments. Long-distance exchange networks indicate trust, cooperation, and emotional interdependence, while defensive structures and territorial boundaries suggest fear, tension, and social closure.

By integrating archaeological data with anthropological insights, this paper argues that emotions were fundamental to prehistoric mobility, guiding dispersal decisions, sustaining group cohesion, and anchoring deep-time forms of belonging.

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Hmong in Alaska craft belonging after migration through subsistence practices such as gardening, gathering, and animal procurement that support meals, ritual, and healing. These practices shape felt life by linking body, land, and kinship, making displacement livable and morally meaningful.

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This paper examines how migration is lived through everyday subsistence practices among Hmong families in Anchorage, Alaska. Focusing on gardening, gathering, animal procurement, herbal healing, and ritual, it shows how belonging is made through embodied labor rather than symbolic identification alone.

Hmong migration to the United States followed war, flight, and resettlement. In Anchorage, many families cultivate gardens, gather wild plants, raise animals for ritual, and circulate food and medicine through kin networks. These activities are rarely oriented toward economic survival. Instead, they are described as ways of “feeling right,” staying healthy, and maintaining balance between people, spirits, and land.

Sensory distinctions between store-bought and garden-grown food, between sedentary and physically engaged life, and between lifeless and living environments shape how migrants evaluate place and well-being. Through smell, taste, touch, and labor, migrants remake unfamiliar environments into morally resonant places.

I argue that subsistence functions as an affective infrastructure of belonging. Felt life is not simply an internal response to migration but is produced through material practices that connect bodies to landscapes, memories, and relationships. Gardening, healing, and ritual allow migrants to experience continuity with ancestral worlds while adapting to new ecological and economic conditions.

Attention to these embodied practices shows how migration is not only movement across space but an ongoing project of making life livable, meaningful, and relational within conditions shaped by displacement, inequality, and shifting family roles.

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This article explores emotional entrapment in asylum-seeking migrants in México. exploring how emotions shape strategies and attempts at integration during prolonged waiting. Based on ethnographic research, waiting is understood as an active way of inhabiting marked by uncertainty

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This article positions the emotions that emerge in contexts of seeking asylum in the United States as central to understanding contemporary migration experiences. It examines how these emotions shape the strategies and attempts at integration through which migrants navigate an uncertain and precarious period of waiting across different cities in Mexico. Based on ethnographic research with asylum-seeking migrants in Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Mexico City, as well as on a situated experience of humanitarian accompaniment, the article proposes understanding waiting not as a dead or immobilizing time, but as a form of inhabiting marked by uncertainty, risk, and emotional labor. The research combines participant observation, in-depth interviews, art therapy workshops, and socio-emotional activities as methodological tools to explore the affective dimension of migratory experience.

Drawing on the analytical category of emotional entrapment, the article shows how the tightening and constant reconfiguration of U.S. migration policies, together with the containment mechanisms of the Mexican state, produce prolonged regimes of waiting that reorder migrants’ life projects, social ties, and everyday practices. In this context, waiting becomes a space of emotional management in which strategies to sustain life emerge, including engagement in informal labor, the circulation of knowledge among migrants, the reorganization of daily routines, and forms of silent integration aimed at reducing exposure to violence and discrimination.

Rather than immobilizing migrants, waiting reconfigures precarious forms of belonging. By foregrounding emotions as constitutive of migratory experience, this article contributes to anthropological debates on mobility, affect, and belonging.

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This paper examines the repatriation of deceased Moroccan migrants in Catalonia as a social, ritual, and emotional process, highlighting identity, belonging, transnational ties, and the tensions between family, tradition, and state regulations. 

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This paper investigates the repatriation of deceased Moroccan migrants in Catalonia, framing it as a complex social, ritual, and emotional process. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including life stories and participant observation, the study examines the motivations, negotiations, and tensions surrounding the decision to return the body to the country of origin. Rather than viewing repatriation solely as a bureaucratic or logistical procedure, it is understood as a ritual laden with social, religious, and affective meanings, through which identity, belonging, memory, and transnational family ties are maintained even after death.

The analysis pays particular attention to the emotional and gendered dimensions of these practices, showing how grief, nostalgia, fear of oblivion, and the desire to “return to earth” shape decision-making. It also highlights conflicts between state regulations, religious traditions, and lived experiences, as well as between individual choices and family or community expectations. These dynamics reveal broader tensions in migratory life between permanence, return, and attachment to the homeland.

Repatriation is conceptualized as a form of post-mortem mobility, challenging conventional distinctions between origin and destination, mobility and immobility. By centering death, care, and affect, the study emphasizes that migration is an embodied and relational experience extending beyond life itself. This approach contributes to anthropological debates on migration, ritual, and belonging, demonstrating that funerary practices offer a privileged lens for understanding the social, emotional, and transnational dimensions of contemporary mobility.

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The ethnographic research on Indian older migrants in Germany explores ageing and migration experiences through an affective lens, where everyday experiences of health and illness with ageing become a crucial site through which belongingness, vulnerability, and attachment are experienced.

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Drawing on ethnographic research with Indian migrants aged 55 and above living in Germany, this paper examines how ageing and health are lived as affective and embodied dimensions of long-term migration. For older individuals, who often describe Germany as “home,” health becomes a crucial site through which belonging, vulnerability, and attachment are negotiated in everyday life. I explore how encounters with Germany’s healthcare system, social institutions, and bureaucratic regimes generate ambivalent emotions, ranging from trust and security to frustration, uncertainty, and alienation. These affective experiences shape how ageing migrants make sense of their bodies, their life trajectories, and their place within their host society, while also maintaining transnational ties and moral obligations with India. By foregrounding health management as an affective practice, the paper highlights how ageing migrants navigate not only institutional structures but also emotional landscapes of care, dependency, and autonomy. Methodologically, the paper reflects on the role of long-term ethnographic engagement and case studies in capturing the emotional textures of ageing and migration. Overall, the contribution situates ageing migrant health as a relational and affective process that reveals the complex entanglements of mobility, belonging, and well-being.

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This paper examines how collective tragedy shapes migrant belonging beyond private emotion. Based on interviews with highly skilled Turkish migrants in the Netherlands and Germany after the 2023 earthquakes, it shows how transnational grief and host-country responses reconfigure belonging.

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Scholarship on migrant belonging has long been informed by transnational perspectives, with recent work increasingly emphasizing the role of emotions in shaping migratory experiences. However, research on emotional transnationalism has largely focused on private, individualized feelings, overlooking emotions generated through collective events in migrants’ countries of origin. This paper addresses this gap by examining how collective emotional experiences shape skilled migrants’ sense of belonging in the transnational space.

Empirically, the study draws on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 11 highly skilled Turkish migrants living in the Netherlands and Germany in the aftermath of the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquakes. The analysis shows that collective tragedy activates complex emotional processes that extend beyond personal grief, producing intensified emotional proximity to the country of origin while simultaneously reconfiguring relationships to the host country. Migrants’ sense of belonging is shaped through transnational affective ties such as grief, guilt, and moral responsibility as well as through their perceptions of institutional and societal responses in the host context, including recognition, solidarity, and silence.

The findings demonstrate that belonging emerges as a dynamic and relational process that is negotiated across borders and mediated by both emotional transnationalism and host-country structures. By foregrounding collective emotions and institutional responses, this paper contributes to debates on migrant belonging, emotional transnationalism, and skilled migration. It argues that collective tragedies constitute critical moments that reveal the emotional and political conditions under which belonging is affirmed, contested, or destabilized in the migratory experience.