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Paper short abstract

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.

Paper long abstract

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.