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.

This paper aims to contribute to ongoing theorisation of diasporas by a specific focus on ‘second‐generation return’ – the migration of host‐country‐born second‐generation persons to the birth‐country of their parents. We nominate the term ‘counter‐diasporic migration’ to describe this particular migration chronotope. Although the ideology of ‘return to the homeland’ is inscribed into most definitions of diaspora, relatively few studies have been made of ‘counter‐diaspora’, where the ‘scattering’ is reversed. Adopting a cultural‐geographical perspective, the paper explores some of the core elements that are constitutive of second‐generation relocation to the ancestral homeland: specifically the migrants' complex and ambiguous views of ‘home’, ‘place’, ‘belonging’ and ‘identity’; or, from the emic perspective of the migrants, the ‘who I am’ in the ‘where I am’. The paper draws on some results from ongoing research by the authors into the second‐generation return of Greek‐Americans and Greek‐Germans to Greece, as well as on other studies of counter‐diaspora around the world. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

No abstract

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.