“Returning to a Better Place: The (Re)assessment of the ‘Good Life’ in Times of Crisis” is the fourth ERC (European Research Council) project won by Graduate Institute researchers within a year. The five-year project of a total value of EUR 1.5 million will be hosted at the Anthropology and Sociology Department and run by its principal investigator, Visiting Fellow Valerio Simoni, along with a postdoctoral researcher and a doctoral student.
Valerio Simoni’s project will study how ideals of the good life are articulated, (re)assessed, and related to specific places and contexts as a result of the experience of crisis and migration. The project constitutes the first empirically grounded study of the entanglements between notions and experiences of “return migration”, “crisis” and the “good life”. It aims to offer a better understanding of how migrants evaluate and compare two contexts of their life – their countries of destination and origin – and take decisions and act accordingly.
Seeking a better life and a better place to live is allegedly the aim of many people’s migratory projects, and is an issue at the core of public and political debates in present-day Europe. While much attention is paid to the influx of migrants into Europe, the question of “return” has been less prominent in public debates. Following the 2008 financial crisis, however, a significant rise in the number of return migrants, due to declining living conditions and a growing anti-immigration sentiment, has caught the attention of policymakers and anthropologists alike.
Going beyond purely economic rationales to explain return migration, Valerio Simoni’s project calls for a more fine-grained understanding of the different imaginaries, aspirations and values that guide people in their quest for better living conditions. Building on current advances in economic anthropology and the anthropology of ethics and morality, the project takes the “crisis-return” nexus as a fertile context to explore how (dis)satisfaction and the prospect of a better life are explicitly articulated and acted upon.
In line with recent findings, the project posits that dramatic experiences of economic crisis blur boundaries between forced and voluntary migration and that moments of moral reflexivity lead to an explicit engagement with what counts as the “good life”. Countering the tendency to privilege questions of unhappiness and dissatisfaction in the analysis of homecomings and viewing return migration as “a creative effort oriented towards constructing better and more satisfying futures” (Stefansson 2004, 8, 12), Simoni’s project urges us to take people’s claims to “return” and their efforts to (re)create “home” seriously.
The case studies consist in an ethnographic analysis of the imaginaries and experiences of return by Ecuadorian and Cuban men and women who migrated to Spain and envisage/carry out the project of going back to their countries of origin. Ecuadorians have accounted for the largest and fastest-growing Latin American collective in Spain (from 4,000 in 1997 to almost 500,000 in 2005) but – supported by policy programmes and governmental agreements – they have also witnessed the largest number of returns since the start of the crisis. Similarly, between 1990 and 2009 the number of Cubans living in Spain increased from 2,637 to more than 100,000 but, currently, many of them have started to envisage return in the face of growing economic opportunities and the relaxation of migratory laws.
The research will rely on institutional written sources (e.g. state laws, policy documents, non-governmental organisations), media coverage, participant observation, and 120 semi-structured interviews. As a methodological innovation, the three researchers will visit and spend time on their respective field sites.
In terms of impact, the project will foster broader debates on human movement and migration, on the definition and importance of the field of economic practice, and on what counts as good and valuable in people’s lives. Last but not least, it will help ascertain whether and how diffused official and popular media shape return decisions and contribute to improve governmental policies.
Reference:
Stefansson, A.H. 2004. “Homecomings to the Future: From Diasporic Mythographies to Social Projects of Return”. In Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return, edited by F. Markowitz and A.H. Stefansson, 2–20. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.