The significance of things: objects, emotions and cultural production in migrant women's return visits home

This paper draws on qualitative research in Basel, Switzerland with highly skilled migrant women from various European nationalities employed in a number of professional sectors. It seeks to contribute to the literatures on the sociologies of migration and the sociologies of everyday life by intersecting a conceptual link of ‘affective habitus’ to the phenomenology of material culture in unpacking how emotions triggered by objects shape settling practices in host societies. The analysis centres on pathways of cultural production as they unfold through memories, objects and experiential return visits. We find sociological depth in applying ‘affective habitus’ as the conceptual framing to examine how mediations of memory and emotions can extend understandings of how women migrants create agentic ways to settle in new host societies while making cultural accommodations. We theorise the conceptual terrain of ‘affective habitus’ through a phenomenological approach to gendered migrancy and cultural materiality in everyday life