Doctoral Dissertation Research: Agricultural Drivers of Return Migration

Return migration, when migrants return to their original homes, is a common endpoint in the migration life cycle. Whereas much work has focused on the causes of migration away from home, less work has been focused on understanding what drives people to return home following stints away. Return migration thus offers an important window into understanding how the making of home is motivated by different factors, from material to symbolic. This doctoral dissertation research project focuses on agrarian return migration to shed light on factors that motivate home-making in economically disadvantaged regions. In addition to supporting the training of a U.S.-based doctoral student in scientific cultural anthropology, this project disseminates results broadly to academic, policy, and general audiences. This is a multi-sited ethnographic study of former migrants both at home and in the diaspora. The researchers engage in interviews and participant observation in rural community centers, including municipal governments, churches, and farms, to investigate the factors that motivate return and the conditions under which those factors become salient for different populations. These findings are complemented by textual analysis of political debates around rural migration and land use as well as image analysis of multimedia materials produced by migrants themselves as they document their efforts to reintegrate at home. This research furthers anthropological theory about how social and economic remittances shape communities, especially how the movement of people alters the relation between cities and countrysides and transforms the development of rural life and environments. As such, this research provides a framework for reconsidering the migration-development nexus by accounting for features of rural life that are important to the people who reside there, which may include economic factors but are not necessarily limited to them. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.