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Paper short abstract

The paper examines education as a moral practice through which migrant returnees articulate responsibility and social engagement after prolonged migration in Western contexts. Based on ethnographic doctoral research in Lithuania, it analyses education-based intangible remittances between returnees.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses how moral obligations, nostalgia and a sense of responsibility, formed through migration and return, impact the involvement of migrant returnees in educational and cultural agency. This ethnographic doctoral research, conducted in Lithuania, focuses on migrants who have returned after extended periods of migration in Western contexts and who continue or reorient their professional activities toward education and culture. The research examines what migrant returnees seek to convey through education and how they give meaning to these practices.

The study is based on the perspective of transnational social fields, which conceptualises return as a continuous and multifaceted process rather than the final stage of migration (Basch, Glick Schiller & Szanton-Blanc, 1994). Education is analysed as a social and emotional investment through which migrant returnees reflect their transnational experiences, moral commitments and relationships.

This perspective allows intangible remittances to be examined as the circulation of ideas, norms and pedagogical orientations that are selectively interpreted, adapted or resisted in local contexts (Levitt & Lamba-Nieves, 2011; Boccagni & Decimo, 2013; Pinkow-Läpple & Möllers, 2025). The paper further shows how engagement in education and culture is shaped by processes of ethical self-formation and everyday moral reasoning, through which altruistic aspirations are negotiated alongside personal searches for meaning and belonging (Fassin, 2012; Laidlaw, 2014). In doing so, it reframes return as an affective and moral process in which education becomes a central site for negotiating responsibility and social participation (de Haas, 2021; Morokvašić, 2004).