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CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF COUNTER-DIASPORIC MIGRATION: THE SECOND GENERATION RETURNS “HOME”
Professor Russell King
Co-Investigator: Professor Ivor Goodson

FINDINGS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

  • Within migration and diaspora studies, the second generation has unusually complex and ambiguous views of home, identity and 'where they belong'. Moreover, their connection to the 'homeland' - where their parents were born and lived before they emigrated - has been little researched. Now, demographic data from various parts of the world with a history of post-war mass emigration (such as Greece and Cyprus) show that second-generation return is a growing phenomenon. This project, built around a comparative study of returning Greek-Americans, Greek-Germans and British-born Greek Cypriots, has shed new light on how diasporas, migration and identities are conceptualised and understood.
  • The overarching research aim has been to explore the second generation's return and their complex and ambivalent identities and views of home. Specific objectives included a comparative analysis of second-generation 'home-comings' of three instructively-chosen groups; understanding how identities and belonging are contested and performed in private and public settings; methodological innovation in the rigorous collection of oral and written personal narratives.
  • The research has been multi-sited and multi-method. Following a life-story approach, more than 90 narrative accounts were collected during fieldwork in Greece and Cyprus. In addition, ethnic community leaders and key informants were interviewed, both in the places of return and in selected 'source' migration sites (London, New York, Berlin).
  • Focus-group discussions amongst second-generation members were conducted in each of these three latter places in order to explore the images and experiences of the ancestral home. Participant observation, field notes, internet discussions, and video, photographic and audio recordings have supplemented the above data collection methods.
  • The research has been pioneering in that it has been one of the first to address the counter-diasporic phenomenon of second-generation return, and unique in its investigation of the 'migrant encounter' between the returning second generation and new immigrants. It has been methodologically innovative in its combination of data collection techniques, and has engaged with the migrants studied by incorporating them as active participants in the research process, and discussing findings with them, as well as with academic audiences.
  • Output targets were a joint-authored book (near-complete draft already written), 5-6 journal articles (four already published or accepted for publication; an edited collection (currently under review as a special edition of the international journal “Mobilities”) and a DPhil thesis (completed and awarded in 2010). All output targets have been already been achieved or are actively in process of being so.
  • Two additional categories of published output have also been achieved. The main addition is several chapters in edited books - four to date. These have resulted either from participation in conferences which have spawned edited books, or from special invitations to contribute to edited volumes.
  • The research team feels that it can justifiably claim that the project has been extremely successful. There is ample evidence to support this claim, which we organise below under the headings of our original aims and objectives.
  • The project achieved methodological variety and innovation in the collection of a large quantity of life-narrative and other ethnographic data. The research has been multi-sited (Berlin, New York, Athens and several other locations in Greece) and, in all locations, we have exceeded the target-quotas of interview narratives we had originally specified. We engaged with each participant with extreme sensitivity; often this involved more than one 'narrative performance' stretching over a total of several hours. The transcribed material has been analysed following an innovative schema based not just on conventional participant categories such as gender, age, social class, timing of migration etc, but, more importantly, following a life-history typology developed by Goodson, according to narrative type, viz. communal or collective narrativists, scripted narratives, autonomous narrativists, and finally hybrid or multiple narratives (Christou 2009). This core methodology of life-narrative collection (163 'voices' in all) has been supported by a wide variety of other ethnographic methods, including 150 photos, 60 video-shoots, and multiple attendances at community events.
  • Significant contributions have been made to the (re-)theorisation of diasporas. Our introduction and discussion of the migration chronotope of 'counter-diaspora' has been a significant addition to the literature and theorisation of diaspora. By highlighting and evidencing the fact that the second generation engages in often intense transnational links to the parental homeland we have also expanded the understanding of transnationalism, including its 'translocal' dimension. These conceptual advances, as well as the elaboration of the concept of ‘diasporic landscapes’ have been expounded in a series of papers and book chapters.
  • We have deployed the counter-diaspora chronotope to achieve new understandings of the ways that key cultural geographic concepts such as 'home', 'belonging' and 'identities' are expressed and articulated in various spatial settings. This is the most difficult of our three aims to evidence with tangible illustrations. It is apparent in some of the papers referred to above, and will be most convincingly demonstrated in our co-authored book. To take just one example, we have collected convincing evidence that the second generation's 'homecoming' to Greece is compromised by multiple experiences of disillusionment. Hence the closure of the diasporic cycle that 'return' implies is far from the final act.
  • The success in achieving these three primary objectives, as well as comprehensively answering all our research questions, is due very much to the extraordinary commitment, energy and intellectual dynamism of Dr Anastasia Christou, who, as the full-time RA, has been the driving-force of the project. One of our key achievements, which was only to a speculative extent anticipated in our original proposal, has been the synergy developed both between our own project and that of the attached research student (who had not been appointed at the time of the application), and between our research and a series of related initiatives across the world. We take each of these two new achievements in turn.
  • The work of the DPhil studentship in Cyprus in addition to the main project on Greece showed that there are two additional dimensions evident in the Cyprus case: the post-colonial context of Cyprus as a whole and British-born Cypriots in particular; and the added comparative dimension of Greek and Turkish Cypriot 'returnees'.
  • The wider synergy that the project has achieved has been through its ability to attract attention - often in very tangible collaborative activities - from a range of other scholars. Other researchers have now undertaken related work. Dr João Sardinha (University of Coimbra) took our basic research framework and successfully applied for a Portuguese post-doctoral fellowship to carry out research on second-generation return to that country. Dr Tracey Reynolds was awarded a South Bank University career development fellowship to become a de facto member of our team at Sussex in order to carry out parallel research on second-generation return to Jamaica. King, Christou and Peggy Levitt (one of the US's foremost transnational studies scholars) held a two-day conference on the subject in 2010, the edited papers from which are currently under review for publication in the journal “Mobilities”.

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