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internationalmigration-2025-karlramos-narrativeconstructionsofnonreturninoldermigrants2
Journal article

Narrative constructions of (non‐)return in older migrants

PSPE

  • 2025
Published in:
  • International Migration. - Wiley. - 2025, vol. 63, no. 3, p. 1-14
Retirement return migration
Return migration
Older migrants
Biographical narrative interviews
Narrative identity
English Much research has been carried out on (retirement) return migration, emphasizing the importance of family ties, infrastructure, the healthcare system and social relationships as factors that often boost non-return. Less research, however, has looked at the biographies of older migrants from a phenomenological and social-constructivist approach and how return is part of one's biographical narration and narrative identity in old age. In this article, we address this gap by discussing return and non-return as a tópos that is woven throughout migrants' biographical narrations. We reconstruct how one's narrated life story is told, how socio-historical contexts and discourses are part of older migrants' narratives and how (non-)return appears as part of their lived life and narrative identity. We show that staying or returning is not a simple decision but rather a central theme to which
the interviewees refer when giving sense to their life course.
Faculty
Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines
Department
Département des sciences de l'éducation et de la formation
Language
  • English
Classification
Education, teaching
License
CC BY-NC-ND
Open access status
hybrid
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/332252
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