Periodic Reporting for period 4 - BETLIV (Returning to a Better Place: The (Re)assessment of the ‘Good Life’ in Times of Crisis)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-08-01 do 2023-07-31
The project addresses people’s (re)assessment of what makes for a ‘good life’ as a result of experiences of ‘crisis’, notably economic crisis. Its contribution rests on a multi-sited, empirical study of imaginaries and experiences of ‘return’ of Ecuadorian and Cuban men and women who migrated to Spain, are dissatisfied with their lives there, and envisage/carry out the project of going back to their origin countries. Three interrelated sub-projects structure the research. The first focuses on Ecuadorian and Cuban migrants living in Spain and how they articulate experiences of crisis with projects of return and imaginaries of a ‘good life’, while the second, in Ecuador, and the third, in Cuba, focus on migrants’ return experiences and their (re)assessment of good living in light of their migratory trajectories. At a theoretical level, the project contributes to three main areas of inquiry in the social sciences, which are 1) the study of morality, ethics, and what counts as ‘good life’, 2) the study of the field of economic practice, including its definition, value regimes, and ‘crises’, and 3) the study of migratory aspirations, projects, and trajectories. Situations of ‘crisis’ are approached as generative moments in which notions of the ‘good life’, its components and whereabouts, are explicitly articulated, debated, and compared.
Seeking a better life is arguably the goal of many migratory projects and 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, often underpinned by assumptions about the ‘better living’ conditions there, the issue of ‘return’ is less prominent, as is a more profound discussion of what ‘better living’ may consist of. The project highlights the need to empirically unearth what a ‘better life’ stands for, accounting for key socio-demographic variables, notably gender, and migrants’ embeddedness in transnational social networks. The findings indicate that a ‘better life’ is a container for disparate desires, values, competing individual/collective aspirations, and socio-cultural norms that cannot be presupposed. To understand migrants’ aspirations and trajectories, as well as their changes over time, closer attention needs to be devoted to the values they come to prioritize, why they do so, and which places they perceive as more conducive to their realization.
The project provides an in-depth analysis of how migrants pondering and/or making sense of return to their countries of origin renegotiate different spheres of value and redefine their relative importance for their lives. It thus uncovers how participants often strive to assert the primacy of what they see as ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ values - among them autonomy, freedom, choice, cosmopolitanism, belonging, and sociality - over perceived ‘economic’ ones - such as wealth and economic success. Such valuations, however, are in tension with the difficult living conditions migrants face in Spain and returnees in Cuba and Ecuador, and with their material obligations towards family members and peers ‘back home’. The research provides unprecedented insights on how influential circulating notions of what constitutes a ‘good life’ challenge migrants’ aspirations and trajectories, illuminating their heterogeneous responses to dominant expectations of ‘successful’ migration as the path for economic prosperity and the leveling of North-South inequalities.
Seeking a better life is arguably the goal of many migratory projects and 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, often underpinned by assumptions about the ‘better living’ conditions there, the issue of ‘return’ is less prominent, as is a more profound discussion of what ‘better living’ may consist of. The project highlights the need to empirically unearth what a ‘better life’ stands for, accounting for key socio-demographic variables, notably gender, and migrants’ embeddedness in transnational social networks. The findings indicate that a ‘better life’ is a container for disparate desires, values, competing individual/collective aspirations, and socio-cultural norms that cannot be presupposed. To understand migrants’ aspirations and trajectories, as well as their changes over time, closer attention needs to be devoted to the values they come to prioritize, why they do so, and which places they perceive as more conducive to their realization.
The project provides an in-depth analysis of how migrants pondering and/or making sense of return to their countries of origin renegotiate different spheres of value and redefine their relative importance for their lives. It thus uncovers how participants often strive to assert the primacy of what they see as ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ values - among them autonomy, freedom, choice, cosmopolitanism, belonging, and sociality - over perceived ‘economic’ ones - such as wealth and economic success. Such valuations, however, are in tension with the difficult living conditions migrants face in Spain and returnees in Cuba and Ecuador, and with their material obligations towards family members and peers ‘back home’. The research provides unprecedented insights on how influential circulating notions of what constitutes a ‘good life’ challenge migrants’ aspirations and trajectories, illuminating their heterogeneous responses to dominant expectations of ‘successful’ migration as the path for economic prosperity and the leveling of North-South inequalities.
Twenty-seven months of ethnographic field research enabled the team to recruit ninety research participants in Spain, Ecuador, and Cuba, providing a unique longitudinal view of migrant’s shifting views on ‘crisis’ and on what makes for a ‘good life’ vis-à-vis changing living conditions, personal aspirations, and socio-economic pressures in their countries of origin and destination. Supported by a robust review of the literature, the projects’ outputs provide a cumulative understanding of the challenges participants faced, and the strategies they devised, as they struggled to improve their lives and (re)fashion their identities, while remaining embedded in a transnational web of obligations that reasserted conventional migration-related values of economic development.
Dissemination of results exploits complementary channels and strategies. Convening of six workshops and over forty public talks in conferences and invited lectures. Publishing of written outputs, including two monographs and a PhD dissertation, an edited book and a journal special issue, and fifteen journal articles and four book chapters contributing to the fields of sociology and anthropology, migration, and Latin American studies. Book reviews, commentaries, writings for media outlets and the broader public, complemented by a recorded lecture and podcast, contribute to the wider propagation of research results. Findings are shared with research participants and host institutions in Ecuador and Cuba, with whom the project consolidates mutually beneficial partnerships and knowledge transfers.
Dissemination of results exploits complementary channels and strategies. Convening of six workshops and over forty public talks in conferences and invited lectures. Publishing of written outputs, including two monographs and a PhD dissertation, an edited book and a journal special issue, and fifteen journal articles and four book chapters contributing to the fields of sociology and anthropology, migration, and Latin American studies. Book reviews, commentaries, writings for media outlets and the broader public, complemented by a recorded lecture and podcast, contribute to the wider propagation of research results. Findings are shared with research participants and host institutions in Ecuador and Cuba, with whom the project consolidates mutually beneficial partnerships and knowledge transfers.
The project advances social science reflections in the fields of ethics and morality, value and economic practice, and migration, notably via the following contributions.
New understanding of the contentious role of ‘economic’ considerations in migratory situations, revealing a fundamental tension between a) an ethics of personal self-accomplishment that prioritizes ‘non-economic’ values, such as freedom, cosmopolitanism, sociability, a ‘simple’ life, and b) collective moral responsibilities calling for economic value-creation and the redistribution of resources associated with a ‘successful’ migration.
New insights gained by approaching the ‘economic’ as an empirical category of practice. ‘Crisis’, economic practice, value, and agency are key subjects of contention in transnational migratory fields, with their assessment shifting between two contrasting poles. a) Collective sharing, wealth redistribution, mutual dependencies, and socio-economic transnational connections valued as a means to temper structural North-South inequalities. b) Individual agency highlighted to justify personal enrichment, blaming dependency on personal incapacity to act as ‘proper’ (liberal) economic actors, encouraging capital accumulation, and leading to transnational socio-economic disconnection.
Renewed approach of comparison as an empirical and intrinsic feature of migration, opening the following questions. What compels migrants to compare; what does comparison entail; how are different spheres of value and domains of life compared, made commensurable and ranked; what are comparison’s effects, advantages, but also predicaments for one’s sense of belonging and existential well-being? The project answers these questions and provides unprecedented insights on the powerful influence exerted by globally circulating moral narratives that tend to prescribe: a) the values migrants ought to prioritize, b) what constitutes a ‘good life’, c) the locations where such good life may be found. By way of exemplification, a decline in living conditions in Cuba and Ecuador paired with societal pressures belittling the value of the unpretentious lifestyle that several migrants had strived to cultivate upon return, ultimately led them to re-embrace dominant comparative world orderings and new migratory projects, driven by the persistent promise of a more prosperous future in the Global North.
New understanding of the contentious role of ‘economic’ considerations in migratory situations, revealing a fundamental tension between a) an ethics of personal self-accomplishment that prioritizes ‘non-economic’ values, such as freedom, cosmopolitanism, sociability, a ‘simple’ life, and b) collective moral responsibilities calling for economic value-creation and the redistribution of resources associated with a ‘successful’ migration.
New insights gained by approaching the ‘economic’ as an empirical category of practice. ‘Crisis’, economic practice, value, and agency are key subjects of contention in transnational migratory fields, with their assessment shifting between two contrasting poles. a) Collective sharing, wealth redistribution, mutual dependencies, and socio-economic transnational connections valued as a means to temper structural North-South inequalities. b) Individual agency highlighted to justify personal enrichment, blaming dependency on personal incapacity to act as ‘proper’ (liberal) economic actors, encouraging capital accumulation, and leading to transnational socio-economic disconnection.
Renewed approach of comparison as an empirical and intrinsic feature of migration, opening the following questions. What compels migrants to compare; what does comparison entail; how are different spheres of value and domains of life compared, made commensurable and ranked; what are comparison’s effects, advantages, but also predicaments for one’s sense of belonging and existential well-being? The project answers these questions and provides unprecedented insights on the powerful influence exerted by globally circulating moral narratives that tend to prescribe: a) the values migrants ought to prioritize, b) what constitutes a ‘good life’, c) the locations where such good life may be found. By way of exemplification, a decline in living conditions in Cuba and Ecuador paired with societal pressures belittling the value of the unpretentious lifestyle that several migrants had strived to cultivate upon return, ultimately led them to re-embrace dominant comparative world orderings and new migratory projects, driven by the persistent promise of a more prosperous future in the Global North.