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- Convenor:
-
Cristina Alcalde
(University of Kentucky)
- Stream:
- Migration/Borders
- Location:
- A105
Short Abstract:
This panel explores migrants' everyday practices to create "home" in the context of emigration, reception, adaptation, and assimilation in the host country; in connection to feelings of belonging and ties with the homeland; and as experienced through return migration.
Long Abstract:
How is "home" imagined and subjectively experienced as both familiar and strange by migrants from diverse parts of the globe? This panel explores migrants' experiences of home in the context of emigration, reception, adaptation, and assimilation in the host country; in connection to transnational feelings of belonging and ties with the homeland while living abroad; and as experienced through return migration.
Papers in this panel engage with multiple constructions and practices surrounding transnational identities to interrogate what it means to leave, struggle with, and create spaces of belonging, to imagine home from distinct perspectives of gender, age, location, and nationality, and to confront the (im)possibility of return home. In examining grounded subjectivities among migrants from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, the panel promotes critical dialogues to reassess, refine, and disrupt our understanding of migrants' everyday practices and the methodological paradigms used to approach migrants' experiences of home.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Katarzyna Kość-Ryżko (Institute of Archeology and Ethnology)
Paper short abstract:
Polish repatriates from Kazakhstan arrived to Poland after 1990 are very interesting research group. They proof that the identification with culture and natives is complicated and ambiguous. Settlement reality is often disappointing and lack of compatriots’ acceptance causes acculturation problems.
Paper long abstract:
Repatriation understood as a return to the country of ancestors did not always look like in images prior to departure. The realities often differ from the dreams and after arrival it turns out that everything is different, unknown - foreign. The reality is disappointing but the lack of alternatives begins the difficult process of cultural adaptation - not always successful.
In 2000-2008 I conducted research focused on the fate of Poles returning from Kazakhstan to the homeland of their ancestors, who as a result of forced deportation to the USSR in the years 1936-1946 were for many years abroad. Their situation was extremely complex and it was only after 1990 repatriation became possible. Meanwhile, after arrival to Poland they had to face a numerous of challenges, including the public debate about their identity and questioning Polish self-identification. It turned out that the "Polishness" of repatriates does not fit the romantic vision shared by part of their compatriots for whom they were too Soviet, in analogy as they were too Polish in the previous place of settlement. "Uprootedness" experienced by the descendants of Poles deported from the country for which they missed for many years was much more severe than they felt in Kazakhstan. Observation and analysis of acculturation strategies undertaken by repatriates became the basis of ethnopsychological study in which I discuss issues related to the impact of specific imaginations and expectations preceding decision of migration (in this case repatriation) on their later life satisfaction, cultural adaptation and relationships with compatriots.
Cristina Alcalde (University of Kentucky)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the imaginaries and lived experiences of belonging among Peruvian return migrants, paying special attention to how gender, sexual identity, and class shape migrants’ experiences, and engages with cosmopolitanism as a theoretical lens for understanding these experiences.
Paper long abstract:
Approximately ten percent of Peruvians, close to three million, live abroad. The Peruvian economy has been steadily growing over the last decade, and approximately 250,000 Peruvians returned between 2001 and 2011 (IOM 2012). Far from presenting a straightforward homecoming, the narratives of return migrants underscore that home and homeland tend to be significantly different spaces and experiences (Tsuda 2003). This paper critically examines the return migration experiences of Peruvians through the intersecting lenses of gender, sexual identity, and insecurity. It emphasizes emerging narratives of cosmopolitanism (Glick-Schiller 2004, 2006, 2014) and ambivalent belonging that point to pervasive feelings of insecurity in return migrants’ everyday personal, family, and public lives in Lima. Individuals who identified as LGBT in particular discussed everyday forms of insecurity and decreased feelings of autonomy associated with return migration, as they renegotiated neoliberal forms of personhood in the context of extended families and as a response to the homophobia they encountered within their extended families and in public venues. These tensions and contradictions within narratives provide opportunities to theorize ambivalent forms of belonging and emerging gendered insecurities within the context of return migration.
Suzana Ramos Coutinho (Mackenzie University)
Paper short abstract:
This article aims to discuss the different aspects of the religiosity of Haitian immigrants who arrives in Brazil, bringing light to the transition and negotiation of the native religiosity to a particular model of religiosity.
Paper long abstract:
This article aims to discuss the different aspects of the religiosity of Haitian immigrants who arrives in Brazil. The background of the current situation of these immigrants (and how the government is creating / changing / adapting new public politics in order to attend the basic needs of the newly arrived individuals) help us to discuss the transition and negotiation of the native religiosity to a particular model of religiosity, which accommodate different elements belonging to the Brazilian religious scene and that help to create a specific perception of immigrant imaginary. Based on this reality, we seek to bring light - through the use of photography - to think about new methods and strategies for data collection and analysis to provide a more accurate contribution to the understanding of the group in question.
Martina Bofulin (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU))
Paper short abstract:
Based on the interviews with Chinese high school students living in Japan this paper focuses on the ways these teenagers understand their own personal transformations created by the experience of migration between two countries with a long history of a strained relations.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, Chinese migrants have become the largest immigrant group in Japan. Among them are also teenagers who spent their childhood years in China in the care of grandparents and other caregivers only to be reunited with their parents in Japan at the time of their adolescence. Based on the 16 interviews with high school students in one of the east Osaka’s high schools, this paper addresses how these children negotiate their personhood formed in rural China and the multiple demands, constraints and opportunities of their new urban environment. It focuses on the ways children understand their own personal transformations created by the experience of migration between the two countries with a long history of a strained relations. Through schooling and part-time work they gradually construct an image of Japan that is in stark contrast with the images of Japan shared by their friends and family members in the place of origin. They come to value this particular position, increasingly seeing their own present and future as the cultural brokers mediating between the two conflicted nations.