This paper introduces the special issue on return mobilities. Return movements have been relatively ignored in migration and mobilities research, despite their scale, frequency and variety across time and space. This special issue is part of an overdue but now growing interest in return visits, return migration and transnational circulation which lays special emphasis on 'ancestral returns' of the second generation and beyond. The main purpose of this paper is to develop an explanatory framework for locating return mobilities within three conceptual domains: the mobilities paradigm, the transnational approach and diaspora studies. A typology of return mobilities is then developed, onto which the following papers in this issue are mapped.
IMISCOE is a European Commission-funded Network of Excellence of more than 350 scientists from various research institutes that specialise in migration and integration issues in Europe. These researchers, who come from all branches of the economic and social sciences, the humanities and law, implement an integrated, multidisciplinary and internationally comparative research program that focuses on Europe's migration and integration challenges.Within the program, existing research is integrated and new research lines are developed that involve issues crucial to European-level policy-making and provide a theory-based design to implement new research.The publication program of IMISCOE is based on five distinct publication profiles, designed to make its research and results available to scientists, policymakers and the public at large. High-quality manuscripts written by IMISCOE members, or in cooperation with IMISCOE members, are published in these five series. An Editorial Committee coordinates the review process of the manuscripts.
Drawing on a wider study of 90 second‐generation Greeks and Greek Cypriots who have relocated to their ancestral homeland, in this article we focus on the significance of childhood visits to the homeland. Freedom – how children were allowed to roam free and stay up late – is the key trope of such memories, in contrast with the strict spatio‐temporal parenting they received in the host country. Different, sometimes less pleasant memories, however, emerge when the visits took place during later, teenage years. We explore the connections between childhood visits and adult relocation. Adult returnees find that settlement in the homeland produces a new set of challenges and reactions that differ markedly from childhood experiences and memories. They engage a second narrative trope, nostalgia, reflecting on the loss of the ‘authentic’ nature of the homeland and its customs and values. Instead, they highlight the materialism and xenophobia of Greek and Cypriot society nowadays. However, they see the ‘homeland’ as a safer place in which to raise their own children.
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