Coming Home to an (Un)familiar Country

This volume focuses on the process of return migration, from a holistic and policy-oriented perspective. Studies in return migration, which remains a vibrant field for academics, researchers, and policy-makers, have provided a large body of knowledge on particular issues, but generally fall along two lines: they are either broad macro analyses and models (especially economic ones) or narrow ethnographic views (anthropological, sociological, or psychological). This volume attempts to chart a course between these two approaches, combining returning migrants’ life trajectories, as seen by themselves, with analysis of the structural processes that have taken place in the last three decades in Europe and in Poland, as a new EU country. In analyzing the social and cultural changes reflected in the biographies of returning migrants, the author uses a framework based on an original synthesis of Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological approach, focusing on the returnees’ “life words,” with the social realism of Margaret Archer, focusing on the concerns and projects of individuals interacting with social and cultural structures.   

• return migration
• homecoming
• EU migration
• social remittance
• acculturation
• social change
• Polish migration
• taxonomy

• Faculty of Social Science, Pedagogical University of Kraków, Kraków, Poland

  Mariusz Dzięglewski

Mariusz Dzięglewski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland, where he also runs an inLAB – Research and Innovation Centre focusing on professional qualitative and quantitative research in culture, education, and B&R.