Título: The Transnational Strategies of Portuguese-Canadian Migrant Descendant Returnees.

Investigadores: João Sardinha (investigador responsável). 

Áreas científicas: geografia.

Palavras-chave: Canada, return migration, integration, transnational networks, transnational negotiations, mobilities.

Centro/Rede de investigação: CEMRI - Universidade Aberta.

Duração: 2012-2013. 

Entidade/instrumento de financiamento: International Council for Canadian Studies.

Observações:

Resumo: Within migrant and transnational studies, second-generation migrants often have complex and ambiguous views of ‘who they are' and ‘where they belong'. Such complexity and ambiguity is further stressed upon returning to the ancestral homeland. Returning migrant descendents may be confronted with a dramatically changing landscape and society, where their previously conceived ethno-cultural ideals, perhaps garnished through short visits or inherited from their parents, may be non-existent or distorted from their own perceptions. Consequently, questions of ethno-cultural definition arise, driven by the multiple relations and negotiations that emerge in the context of migrancy, return and maintained transnational linkages. Taking these points into consideration, the core nature of this proposed research focuses on the migration of ‘return' of Portuguese-Canadian emigrant descendants to Portugal. The study rallies around two central themes of inquiry. First, as descendant returnees who have been raised in Canada often maintaining transnational practices, even as a daily norm, the amount of agency the migrants are able to exert in the return is a key factor in determining the extent to which they can create a post-return transnational sense of home. This study sets out to examine this agency aiming to observe strategies of settlement (integration and identity) as negotiated through a transnational sense of (dual) belonging. Second, in a transnational era, where movement is better described as continuous rather than completed, the aim is to analyse mobility - not only physical but also cultural, symbolic, knowledge, economic, among others - with the key question being: what sort of socio-cultural capital and network maintenance goes into placing and maintaining these returnees in a transnational social field where their ‘Portuguese and Canadian worlds' are in constant negotiations.