Affect, Emotions and Feelings

In research on transnational migration, the role of emotions has generally remained understudied. Understanding emotions has largely been treated as secondary to studying the ‘rational’ economic factors that influence mobility. A valuable body of work has been developed around matters of migrant (non-) belonging, sense of home, and everyday life, primarily through qualitative research approaches. Still, few have studied these questions of identity and belonging in terms of emotion and feeling explicitly (Wood and Waite, 2011). It has been compellingly argued that we cannot properly understand migration phenomena without studying emotional and affective experiences as integral to migrancy, and indeed to social life (Baldassar, 2008; Conradson and ..