Emotion, Space and Society 16 (2015) 73e80

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Emotion, Space and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa

Emotions on the move: Mapping the emergent field of emotion and

migration
Paolo Boccagni a, *, Loretta Baldassar b
a
University of Trento, Italy
b
University of Western Australia, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Migrant life experiences and the migration process offer a rich, complex and under-examined field for
Received 6 May 2015 social research on emotion. This article introduces this Special Issue collection of papers, all authored by
Received in revised form migration scholars, by providing an overview of migration and emotions studies, hopefully inspiring
24 June 2015
further scholarly work and orienting newcomers to the field. We examine research to date on topics such
Accepted 25 June 2015
Available online 14 July 2015
as the development of emotional life “on the move” over time and space; the interface between emotion
in proximity and from a distance; the influence of mobility on emotional cultures and on their changing
social and ethnic boundaries; the mixed ways in which emotions are dis-embodied and re-embodied e
Keywords:
Migration
out of place and re-emplaced e in response to migrant life trajectories. In all of these domains, available
Emotion research points to the migrant emotional condition as a complex and multifaceted one. Far from being
Transnationalism the opposite of the instrumental (i.e. economically-driven) dimension of migrant life, the emotional
Mobilities dimension is its inescapable complement, in which ambivalence is more common than straightforward
Emotional cultures “either (home-)/or (host-oriented)” emotional states. The relevance of emotion to the debate on
Ambivalence immigrant integration, identity and belonging, and the political significance of emotion both for top-
Affect down politics and day-to-day ethnic relations, is also analysed. A case is made for further compara-
tive, multi-method and interdisciplinary research on migration and emotion given the important in-
tersections of these fields.
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction downplay emotional factors or overlook them altogether, as we will

Emotions are part and parcel of everyday life, in all its aspects; as
such, emotions have been increasingly debated across the social
sciences. This holds true also for migration studies: mixed and
contrasting emotions and feelings such as hope and nostalgia, guilt
and ambition, affection and disaffection e to name but a few e are
an integral part of the life experiences of migrants. The everyday
relevance of emotions can be easily appreciated in migrant family
and group relationships, as well as in their ethnic relations with
majority societies and in their cross-border interactions with
homelands, communities of origin and left-behind kin. Despite the
plethora of qualitative analyses on the topic, however, the
emotional side of the migrant condition seems still relatively
understudied. This is partly to be explained by the dominance of
economic and political analyses of migration, which tend to
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: paolo.boccagni@unitn.it (P. Boccagni).
argue below.
This ESS Special Issue focuses on migration studies, and its in-
tersections with studies of emotion, in an interdisciplinary
perspective, building on sociological, anthropological, geographical
and psychological accounts.1 The contributions represent a multi-
vocal set of reflections on the continuities and discontinuities
emerging in migrants' emotional experience, as well as on the ways
in which their emotions are socially and culturally (re)constructed.
A major theme involves the emotional bases underpinning mi-
grants' cross-border ties and practices e i.e. their changing dedi-
cations, obligations and wishes, and the social factors accounting
for them. A central question to be addressed, at least in a
1
Several of the pieces included in this Special Issue were originally presented at
the Second ISA Forum of Sociology in Buenos Aires (2012), within the Research
Committee on Sociology of Migration (RC31). The session, convened by the two
Guest Editors, was entitled Out of place emotion? Managing affection from afar in
transnational migration.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.06.009
1755-4586/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
74 P. Boccagni, L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society 16 (2015) 73e80
preliminary way, is what the study of emotion adds to our under-
standing of ‘migrant experience’; and how transnational migration
studies, in turn, contributes to the social science debate on
emotions.
In this introductory and conceptual article, we aim to provide a
concise overview of existing work in the field of emotions and
migration, not only as a suitable context for the papers that follow,
but also to chart the key issues and future directions of this
emerging field. We hope that this initiative will help to consolidate
emotion as an important topic for migration research, while also
highlighting the significance of migration and mobility processes
for the social study of emotion. Importantly, this does not entail
only a focus on the emotions of individual migrants. The emotional
dynamics associated with migration at a social and political level
must also be appreciated, as they affect the life experience both of
migrants and of their “sedentary” counterparts (i.e. non-migrants
in home communities, and native residents in host societies).
Given our background in migration studies, we begin by
examining the key implications of the social theory of emotion for
the study of the processes of migration. These include a focus on the
emotional lives of migrants at the individual, household and
community levels, as well as considerations of the national and
transnational social ‘fields’ (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004) and
‘scapes’ (Appadurai, 1996) of lived experience. With the revolution
in new communication technologies, emotional lives are no longer
conducted solely in proximity, but are increasingly performed,
practiced and displayed in a variety of situated and simultaneous
interactions, including across distance and space and over time. At
all of its ‘stages’, the migration process is characterized by impor-
tant transformations along the migrants' life course involving the
transmission, reproduction and evolution of emotions in relation to
belonging, identity and ‘home’. Indeed, the notion of ‘the migrant
condition’ is a reference to the characteristic ambiguities and ten-
sions around emotional connections to ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Furthermore, some of the most emotive issues of our times
concern not so much the migrant condition as the politics of the
migrant phenomenon: the fraught plight of asylum seekers and
refugees test the limits of trust and compassion; the fear of home-
grown terrorism sits uneasily against the promise of future gener-
ations; the capacity for societies to integrate multiethnic and
multifaith denominations in the face of extremism and acts of
terror have put multicultural social policy on trial. All of these is-
sues are both deeply emotive and deeply political. Indeed, the
politics of fear and a rise in xenophobia has come to dominate most
contemporary political campaigns whether at the level of small
towns, nations or globally. From historically divided continents like
Europe to newer multicultural nations like Australia, clashes be-
tween pro- and anti-nationalistic sentiments are becoming
commonplace.
2. Migration and emotion: taking stock and looking ahead
As has been common throughout the social sciences, there has
been a tendency to overlook emotions in migration studies gener-
ally (Mai and King, 2009: 297), although there is a growing body of
research (including this Special Issue) that responds to this long-
established neglect (e.g. Svasek, 2012; Ho, 2014). There exists
something of a gap in mutual knowledge and recognition between
the fields of migration studies and emotion studies. This Intro-
duction and the contributions to this Special Issue attempt to
bridge this gap, drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches in
migration studies to reflect on key issues in studies of emotion.
Some of the articles that follow are oriented by theories of assim-
ilation and local integration (Raffaeta ; Kivisto and LaVecchia);
others follow the optics of transnationalism and cross-border care
circulation (Baldassar, Vermot, Gallo, Baak); still others belong to
the theoretical fields of interethnic relations (Tazreiter) and of
acculturation e as well as the lack thereof (Kokanovic and Bozic-
Vrbancic).
The case studies in this SI illustrate that the nexus between
emotion and migration makes for an important research field, for
several reasons. First, the migration process offers a poignant
window from which to view emotions, in the light of their ever-
changing cultural bases. The process of migration may result in
transformation of emotional life through hybrid and contrapuntal
cultures of emotion or emotional trajectories brought about by
emotions on the move and out of place. Secondly, an analysis of
emotions provides an important corrective and critique of the
predominant ‘economic rationalist’ approaches to migration of the
past. For example, ties to homeland have always been a central
focus of migration studies. Regardless of the way such ties are
framed e as a negative impediment to settlement and integration
and/or a positive opportunity for diaspora relations and interna-
tional development e the point is that emotions are key to these
links, as well as to the politics and policies of migration. In fact, as
already noted, the issues of belonging and identity, and the asso-
ciated politics of fear, are central to migration and both are quin-
tessentially affective and emotional notions.
Transnational migration, and mobile lives more generally, offer a
privileged lens through which to observe emotions. The migration
process is a powerful catalyser of change in emotional life e one
that may make it physically and symbolically “out of place”. As
people move away from homeeor indeed, between ‘homes’ e
emotions themselves are on the move. They evolve and are nego-
tiated across novel settings, life circumstances and points of refer-
ence. Migration can be appreciated as an important research field
on “the spatiality and the temporality of emotions” (Bondi et al.,
2007: 3). A distinctive focus on migrants' dynamic emotional life
is a source of meaningful insights into their subjectivities, their
interactions with old and new reference groups as well as the
faceted interdependence between emotion, space and place.
Not surprisingly, as the reviews of the literature on migration
and emotion show, the meaning of such a seemingly intangible
concept as emotion is not self-evident (cf. Svasek and Skrbis, 2007;
Skrbis, 2008; Svasek, 2008, 2010). There is continuing debate across
the social sciences about the extent to which emotions are best
understood as social and inter-subjective, or as physiological and
biologically-driven phenomena. Generally speaking, the migration
and emotion literature tends to encompass both these approaches.
In terms of the papers in this collection, Barbalet's (2002: 1) defi-
nition of emotion is apposite: “an experience of involvement” that
“registers in [one's] physical and dispositional being” but, impor-
tantly, “is in the social relationship”. Sociologically speaking, emo-
tions belong both to an intra-personal (psychic and corporeal)
domain and, simultaneously, to an interpersonal (social and inter-
corporeal) one. They are “not simply ‘within’ or ‘without’, but
that they define the contours of the multiple worlds that are
inhabited by different subjects” (Ahmed, 2004: 25). Indeed, they act
like a bridge over “the liminal space between the individual and the
social” (Zembylas, 2012: 167), or as “a crucial link between micro
and macro levels of social reality” (Turner and Stets, 2005: 1); be-
tween agency and structure (Barbalet, 2002); private and public
(Zembylas, 2012); or, “bodies and places” (Bondi et al., 2007). As a
simultaneously “cognitive, motivational and physiological” expe-
rience, emotions are mutually constitutive of social reality e they
“are not only shaped by, but also shape, the relationship in which
they occur” (Boiger and Mesquita, 2012: 221e2).
How this mutual constitution occurs against a background of
extended mobility, which strongly affects social relationships in
proximity and over distance, is the key issue to be addressed from
 P. Boccagni, L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society 16 (2015) 73e80
within migration studies. This also requires an exploration of what
emotionally occurs after migration, whether concerning migrants'
interethnic relations in hostlands, their transnational connections
with homelands, and, more broadly, the influence of emigration (in
terms of “social remittances” e Levitt, 1998) on prevalent emotional
cultures in the communities of origin.
At all of these levels, since the migration process involves
moving from one place to (at least) an-other, it also entails change
and transformation and the consequent (re)negotiation of self and
others in both these places. Emotionally speaking, migration
invariably affects emotions as both (corporeally) embodied and
(societally) embedded. The ways in which the migration process
makes for emotional (dis)embodiment and (dis)embeddedness, but
also e over time e for emotional re-embodying and re-embedding,
is thus a promising research avenue. Indeed, emotions are simul-
taneously embodied and socially circulating: in a nutshell, emo-
tions and place are mutually co-constructive of social relations
(Smith et al., 2009). The dialectic between embedded and circu-
lating emotions, as migrants' life trajectories suggest, affects the
emotional experience of those involved in the migration process,
whatever their central emotional referente people, places, mean-
ingful objects, or biographies and histories.
The persistent (re)embeddedness of at least some emotions
seems especially noteworthy, given the contemporary preoccupa-
tion with the apparent immateriality of all sorts of globalization-
related flows. As shown, for instance, by Raffaeta  in this Special
Issue, some aspects of immigrants' emotional life e in the case of
her informants, hope for a better future e have specifically to do
with the particular conditions and infrastructures of their living
environments. As the author puts it, “hope is materially distributed
in significant spaces”. In this sense, immigrants' emotion may well
retain a distinctive material basis, such as that provided by their
dwelling places, to be experienced as more or less “homely”
(Boccagni, 2014a); or, for that matter, by all sorts of life milieus,
including those conducive to estrangement, alienation or other
negatively felt emotions.
Without question, emotional embeddedness is a highly variable
and context-dependent process, but neither is it the whole story. If
we agree that emotions are socially constructed, as is broadly the
approach taken in all the papers that comprise this volume, then
we need to be cognisant of the potential for significant divergence
in the histories, contemporary manifestations and shared un-
derstandings of emotions and emotional responses in each of these
places. In addition, new travel and communication technologies
provide the capacity, for the first time in history, to be connected to
multiple places simultaneously through so-called polymeric envi-
ronments (Madianou and Miller, 2011), creating new sites of
emotion to explore in the hybrid and transnational spheres of
migrantehomeland relations (see Baldassar, this volume and
Baldassar et al., 2015). New media are transforming and creating
new forms of co-presence and sociality that facilitate the consti-
tution and maintenance of emotional bonds across distance and
over time.
This point foregrounds the importance of relations to the ma-
terial world (Gille, 2012) and links to the work of the so-called ‘new
materialisms’. This revisiting of materialism highlights the idea of
‘things’ as agents and is a response to the ethical and political issues
raised by recent scientific and technological advances, in particular
those dealing with living matter, but also “the saturation of our
intimate and physical lives by digital, wireless and virtual tech-
nologies” (Coole and Frost, 2010: 5). Coole and Frost (2010: 6) argue
that these developments “call upon us to reorient ourselves pro-
foundly in relation to the world, to one another, and to ourselves”.
Here there are important intersections with Science and Technol-
ogy Studies (eg. Mol, 2002; Jasanoff, 2005) as well as more recent
75
‘more-than-human geographies’ (eg. Whatmore, 1999, 2006).
Divya Tolia-Kelly (2010, 2013), in particular, has written widely on
affect and materiality and these are important new directions of
relevance to studies in migration and emotions.
3. Emotions on the move: the challenge of moving beyond
the either/or
While evolutionary-inclined social scientists debate the list of
universal human emotions (cf Wierzbicka, 1986), there is no
dispute, among the contributors to this SI, that they are quintes-
sentially, by all measure, a matter of culture. The appropriate ways
of feeling and manifesting them are learnt and reproduced through
socialization, consistent with the emotional “vocabularies, beliefs,
and norms” that have been culturally defined in a group or society
(Peterson, 2006: 118). Emotions, as Turner and Stets argue (2005:
292), “are the driving force behind commitments to culture …
[they] give cultural symbols the very meanings and power to
regulate, direct and channel human behaviour and to integrate
patterns of social organization”. In a more succinct formulation,
“people embody cultural ideas in the form of emotions” (De
Leersnyder et al., 2011: 451).
Part of the relevance of transnational migration, as an empirical
field for studying emotions, has precisely to do with the changing
cultural backdrops against which emotions are felt, displayed and
managed. Importantly, migrants should not be reified as bearers of
a specific and distinctive emotional disposition e although the
stereotypical ways in which certain types of migrants and emotions
are linked is another topic worthy of analysis (e.g. Pratt, 1997;
Caprariello et al., 2009). The significance of their emotional expe-
rience rather lies in their potential to dis-embed, translocate and
re-embed emotions, on the one hand; in the interaction between
different ways of cultivating and managing emotions, as affected by
different societal backgrounds (i.e. sending and receiving), on the
other. In both respects, the point is to see “what migrant experi-
ences tell us”, emotionally speaking, “about the human condition”
more broadly (Gronseth, 2013: 1).
At the same time, if emotions are variously “constructed across
socio-cultural contexts” (Boiger and Mesquita, 2012: 222), mi-
grants' emotional life is remarkably expressive of these different
constructions and of their predominant combinations over the life
course. It is then an empirical question whether such variations in
emotional life, through migration, amount to novel, place- and
time-specific “emotion cultures”, as distinct “sets of expectations as
to what people are to feel (feeling rules) and how they are to ex-
press those feelings (display rules) in situations” (Stets, 2010: 265).
The literature available, including the case studies in this SI, rec-
ommends caution on the possibility of drawing sharp lines around
migrants' emotional cultures and identities, in a sort of “emotional
multiculturalism”, lest individual emotional experiences are
conflated into monolithic and essentialized collective categories.
The same caution, though, should apply to the ‘emotional’
subtext of dominant theories of immigrant integration and settle-
ment, which tend to posit a ‘straight-line thesis’ of diminishing
identification with homeland and increasing belonging to the host
culture (cf. Alba and Nee, 2003). This straight line is thought to
become even clearer and more visible with each generation. While
emotions are seldom explicitly discussed in this literature, the
implication is that identity and belonging are bound to shift over
time from a home to a host-land orientation. It is precisely because
this process is not examined as an emotional one, however, that
such a conclusion of either/or is so often drawn. As soon as we
consider the issues of belonging and identity in terms of emotions
and emotional processes (Ewing, 2007), it becomes imperative to
complicate, confound and generally confuse the ‘straight-line’
76 P. Boccagni, L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society 16 (2015) 73e80
hypothesis. While consideration of emotions has historically been
thought less legitimate, scientific and important than rationalist
economic motivations and concerns, their analysis actually helps to
deliver a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of immi-
grant integration.
The significant literature on citizenship and the distinction be-
tween its substantive and formal elements is relevant here. For
example, the large body of research by Portes et al. (2005) on the
segmented assimilation hypothesis attempts to measure integra-
tion in quantitative forms of educational attainment and profes-
sional and social class status. While this work is an important
corrective to the overly-simple straight-line thesis, it does not
commonly consider affective experiences like sense of belonging or
identity. This raises important questions about the relationship
between the social and emotional indicators of integration (as well
as the value of a mixed-methods approach). In contrast, most
qualitative studies foreground questions about belonging and
identity. The issue is not so much that the analysis of emotions is
more suited to a qualitative approach, rather the point we wish to
highlight is that the failure to examine emotions may skew analysis
to a more reductive set of findings.
In summary, failure to examine the messy complexity of emo-
tions is likely to result in the over-simplified binary between the
retention of home-grown emotional cultures and the assimilation
into the mainstream host ones. It is much more likely that the
emotional terrain mapped out via the roots and routes of migrant'
experience spans well beyond. A way out of this stalemate is evi-
denced, most notably, in the expanding and diverse literature on
the “multilocality”, “hybridity” or “mixity” of migrant identities, as
developed by students of migrant transnationalism (Vertovec,
2001; Levitt and Waters, 2002) and cosmopolitanism (Nowicka
and Rovisco, 2009). This point could well be parallelled with an
argument on the multilocality of migrants' emotional orientation,
facilitated e to repeat e by the distance-bridging and relationship
enhancing potential of new information technologies. Within this
SI, the article by Kivisto and La Vecchia makes a compelling case for
the relevance of migrants' identity work e or, for their identity and
emotional orientations to stem from an extended process of
adaptation to the expectations of the receiving society, and of se-
lective retention of their earlier identity and emotional worlds.
Importantly, this is an open-ended process with no pre-determined
outcome e be that of a locally- or of a transnationally-oriented
emotional identification, with various degrees of hybridity be-
tween different emotional settings and referents. It seems more
appropriate, therefore, to acknowledge the co-existence of
different, even conflicting emotional orientations as part and parcel
of migrants' emotional experience.
A broad, if far from conclusive connection could be made, here,
with the category of (emotional) ambivalence: a “psychological
postulate” which points to the coexistence of “opposing affective
orientations towards the same person, object or symbol” (Smelser,
1997: 5). The simultaneity of attraction and hope for the better life
conditions achievable abroad, alongside the anxiety and distress
that meeting these expectations entails, is exemplary of this
emotional experience. Equally ambivalent may be migrants', and
their descendants', changing attitudes towards the homeland
(Kivisto and La Vecchia, 2013), from the guilt and relief of aban-
donment of the early stages to the potential for disillusion and
disorientation of subsequent visits home (Baldassar, 2011). While
an analysis of guilt is virtually absent in the emotions literature (it is
not usually included in the list of universal emotions), it is not
surprising that in a special issue on emotions and migration, several
papers examine this particular emotional response. In the opening
quote of Baldassar's contribution is the lament, “guilt, guilt, guilt is
what all migrants face’. This paper extends psychological analyses
of guilt as intra-psychic to show not only its social and relational
features but also to analyse guilt as a cultural process embedded in
the process of migration. At least for post-war Italian migrants,
their very departure from the paese renders the migration process
itself an act of abandonment that must be constantly justified
through markers of both economic success as well as ongoing
emotional commitment to those left behind performed through
visits home (Baldassar, 2001).
The centrality of guilt in transnational family life, as a “gendered
bond” between leavers and stayers, is highlighted also in Vermot's
study of Argentineans in the US and in Spain (this Issue). Gallo's
contribution to this edited collection, in turn, revisits migrants'
emotional ambivalence towards their homeland in a different optic,
albeit still focused on left-behind kin and on the shared “family
histories” between leavers and stayers. Building on her extensive
ethnography of kinship relations in Kerala, India, Gallo highlights
Malayali migrants' use of irony as a tool to manage “conflicting
emotions as displaced subjects” for a variety of purposes: as a way
of negotiating traditional intergenerational obligations, of mani-
festing the dissatisfaction for the normative expectations associ-
ated with them, and of finding a suitably “critical distance from the
emotional load of past family ruptures”, without “entering into
open conflict with dominant values”.
From yet another migration background e that of a group of
African women resettled as refugees in Australia e Baak (this Issue)
also analyzes the complex and weighty repertoire of “emotional
obligations” that her interviewees are expected to meet vis- a-vis
their left-behind kin. Once again, migrants' negotiation of their
persistent belonging with home communities is ridden with deep-
rooted and contradictory emotional stances. Which kinds of emo-
tions prevail in their life experience e whether perceived as “pos-
itive” or “negative”e has much to do, concludes Baak, with the
resources available to these immigrant women to meet the
potentially endless expectations for support of their family mem-
bers. And after all, given that emotions are socially and culturally
constructed and spatially contingent, as well as fluid and emergent,
there is hardly a way to reduce them e in a theoretical and con-
ceptual sense, to being either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, despite the
prevalence of this perspective in popular thinking (cf. Ahmed,
2004).
4. Homo ‘emotional’ economicus: instrumentality and
emotion in migrant life trajectories
Without a doubt, traditional theories of migration have been
dominated by a focus on economic motivations, which are assumed
to not only outweigh but stand in direct opposition to ‘irrational’
emotional motivations (McKay, 2007). Even when concerns other
than economics are considered, as in J. Clyde Mitchell's (1969)
classic necessary and sufficient conditions for migration, the non-
economic motivations are considered the additional extras.
Mitchell argued that the decision to migrate required both eco-
nomic motivations and pressures e the necessary conditions e but
that these alone were never enough to make a person decide to
migrate. They also needed additional what he called sufficient
conditions that tipped the balance in favour of migration. These
sufficient conditions included a diverse range of possibilities from
political and social constraints to climate considerations, health
concerns and even sense of adventure. Of course, any degree of
individual agency or choice must be tempered by the structural and
cultural constraints of frequently oppressive and patriarchal gender
regimes and relations. However, while economic-oriented and
instrumental rational motives are undoubtedly central to migration
projects, their emphasis in the migration literature (and in policy)
deserves careful attention and critique. Mai and King (2009: 297)
 P. Boccagni, L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society 16 (2015) 73e80 77

argue compellingly that economic and emotional dimensions and refugees. Importantly, though, homeland-elicited emotional
cannot be productively separated in migration studies. A similar reactions need not be always or only experienced as positive, as the
point is made by Conradson and McKay (2007: 172): “feelings may case study of Kokanovic and Bozic-Vrbancic (this Issue) points out.
act to enhance and secure particular forms of transnational labour The authors reconstruct the depression and emotional distress of
mobility, whilst also disrupting or undermining capitalist economic “Jane”, though her own narrative, as stemming also from unac-
logic”. complished “homing desires”, at the intersection of alienation from
A more effective approach would be to see economic motives the receiving society and lack of substantive support from, and of
linked intimately to emotional ones. Do domestic migrants from perhaps identification with, the community of origin.
the Philippines decide to leave their children behind for the money Altogether, homeland centrality as a source of significant emo-
that migration promises or for the love they feel for their children tions may persist over time and generations, as highlighted in the
and the desire to offer them a better life? The answer is likely to be significant literature on diasporas (Cohen, 2008). At the very least,
both. The remittances they send home embody their love. Put then, the use of emotions is central to all migration-related political
otherwise, their transnational care practices are as much a matter agendas, whether government-led or grassroots, and is potentially
of “emotional nurturing and economic provision”, as two insepa- conducive to migrant engagement as well as to a variety of
rable dimensions e admittedly, not always easy to reconcile with migration-related stances and attitudes, including xenophobic
each other e of transnational family life (McKay, 2012: 119; ones, as we will see below.
Bonizzoni and Boccagni, 2013; Parrenas, 2005).
The study of emotions therefore offers an important corrective -vis
5. On the political significance of emotions vis-a
to the notion of migrant as homo economicus. This notion is steeped
migration: top-down manipulation and everyday interethnic
in the historic separation of reason and emotion, wherein the latter
relations
is defined as irrational and therefore irrelevant. Even when emo-
tions are considered, furthermore, there is a tendency to see them
Importantly, the political ‘emotionalization’ of migration is by
as largely inconsequential ‘soft stuffing’ to the ‘hard’ issues that
no means the prerogative of diaspora policies. In fact, state-led
really matter. Baldassar (2007) and Merla and Baldassar (2010), for
strategies of emotional manipulation of emigration are only the
instance, has written about the invisibility of care-needs and care-
other face of the political emotional management of immigration. A
obligations as motivations for migration that often trump economic
parallel repertoire of nationally-based symbols, rituals and imagi-
concerns. In the same vein, Baldock (2000) has shown that pro-
naries is generally developed and institutionalized in immigration
fessionals select conferences and work opportunities according to
countries, also as a public way of emphasizing the supposedly
the opportunities they afford to visit family on the same trip. As we
natural boundary between insiders and newcomers. The native-
have already noted, failing to factor in emotions leaves out at least
composed “nation”, on one side, is often emotionally, no less than
half the story and risks over-simplified analysis.
judicially set against an equally reified collective of “aliens” to the
Furthermore, a focus on emotion helps to nuance the emphasis
nation, on the other side. The aggregate dimension of emotion is,
on the primarily economic (or at most, political) stakes that
even in this respect, hardly less relevant than its individual bases,
pervade the study of migrant diasporic relations and homeland
nor is it reducible to a simple summation of the latter.
connections. A large and growing literature is available on mi-
The politicization of emotions, as far as migrants and ethnic
grants' diaspora connections to homeland and on their increasing
relations are concerned, should not be seen as simply a discursive
interest to governments as potential opportunities for develop-
tool for nativist or xenophobic political agendas. Rather, it mirrors
ment, trade, investment, and for the management of remittances
and amplifies the emotional relevance of immigration in the con-
(Lyons and Mandeville, 2012; Boccagni et al., 2015). Interestingly,
texts of settlement e as a typically divisive issue in public debates
homeland ties are often measured in economic terms e including
and, to various degrees, in day-to-day interethnic relations.
owning property, transnational entrepreneurship, business links
Migration and the settlement of ethnic minorities in host societies
etc. e or, less often, in political ones (transnational mobilization,
are likely to amplify the social diffusion of emotions such as
participation in external voting, etc.). Yet, all of these ties to
nationalist pride and belonging, as well as unfavourable reactions
homeland could be argued to be quintessentially affective (Ben
ranging from indifference to hostility and xenophobia. The ensuing
Mosche et al., 2012). Likewise, diaspora-focused discourses and
emotional constellations tend to reflect the variable “thickness” of
rhetorics for emigrant mobilization on the part of sending coun-
the boundaries between majority and minority populations (Alba,
tries, invariably have a strong emotionalized dimension. Expatri-
2005; Wimmer, 2013), as well as the predominant tone and
ates' attachment and nostalgia for the homeland e the latter often
approach in public discourses and policies. Certainly, what we may
being framed in idealized terms e can be purposefully cultivated
call negative emotions need not be the only emotional currency of
for instrumental ends (e.g. Skrbis, 2008; Boccagni, 2014b).
immigration-elicited interactions, although they are probably the
The need to move beyond economic drivers is also a key theme
most visible and best researched. Other relatively widespread
in the burgeoning literature on belonging. For example, Ho's (2009;
emotional reactions range from sympathy (or possibly commiser-
2014) work on emotional citizenship and Wood and Waite (2011)
ation) to solidarity, and orientalist-style fascination with the exotic
on scales of belonging. Even among long-settled immigrants and
alterity, as supposedly embodied in (some) immigrants or in their
their descendants, significant homeland-related emotions are
lifestyle (e.g. in terms of food, clothing, music and arts).2
spontaneously reproduced, and (to varying degrees) manipulated
Having said this, because emotions are instrumental in repro-
by home countries, through rituals, symbols and reminiscences of
ducing the institutional boundary between ‘natives’ and ‘aliens’,
their past life experience, which conflate a cognitive dimension and
and in naturalizing the difference between the former and the
a deeply emotional one (Svasek and Skrbis, 2007). In fact, emi-
latter, they can be effectively appropriated in governmental
grants' emotions “are not only shaped by direct social interactions, -vis undesired and undocumented
agendas e especially vis-a
but also by memories, imagination, expectations and aspirations”
(Svasek, 2008: 218). While the weight of the past is potentially
relevant to any emotional experience, it is likely to be a particularly 2
See for instance Leeuwen (2008) on the “affective ambivalence of living with
strong emotional elicitor in life trajectories marked by significant cultural diversity”; or Rath (2007), among others, on the “commodification of di-
geographic and affective discontinuities, such as those of migrants versity” in large urban areas.
78 P. Boccagni, L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society 16 (2015) 73e80
migrants, as the article by Tazreiter (this Issue) shows. The author
examines the emotional sphere that motivates and mediates the
everyday lives of migrants, residents and the native born with a
focus on the state and its emotional architecture. The ‘politics of
affect’ is explored in relation to irregular migrants and asylum
seekers and the moralities that guide migrant transactions and
epistemologies. The examples developed in the article focus on
irregular maritime arrivals (asylum seekers) in Australia and the
emotionally charged response to them, building an argument that
the state, far from embodying a detached and neutral set of steering
mechanisms, governs through drawing on the dispositions and
feelings in social exchanges as well as the mimetic practices that
become ritualized in collective processes of imagining the nation.
More generally, the long-term settlement of migrant and ethnic
minorities is a powerful elicitor of everyday “emotional dynamics
of proximity and distance” (Zembylas, 2012: 170). This typically
results in the circulation and legitimation of binary oppositions in a
‘we/them’ style, which, from being a basically cognitive device,
becomes a deeply emotionalized way of making sense of far more
complex issues. This can be appreciated at a level of commonsen-
sical social representations, but also in political narratives that set
the “national self” against an all-encompassing “ethnicized other”,
in opposite yet complementary and mutually instrumental terms
(Skrbis, 2008). In other words, immigration is a still more poignant
research avenue than emigration as far as the “emotional consti-
tution of identity and nationalism” is concerned (Davidson and
Milligan, 2004: 527).
Importantly, though, the politicization of emotion is not only a
matter of state-led institutional strategies and interests; research
on the aggregate effects of immigration-associated emotions
should not be reduced to political manipulation and institutional-
ization. Emotions, as Boiger and Mesquita (2012) remind us, are
primarily shaped by everyday interactions and interpersonal ties. It
is also critical, then, to examine how emotions elicited by
immigrant-driven diversity are experienced and negotiated in
multi-ethnic neighbourhoods and proximate spaces e a process
that has been called everyday multiculturalism (Wise and
Velayutham, 2009). Without denying the potential for conflict in
street-level ethnic relationships, or the underlying structured in-
equalities, this literature has cast new light on the multi-sensorial
bases of interethnic coexistence and on its shifting emotional
boundaries and distances.
Critical to researching emotions is then how, and under what
circumstances, the social experience of immigration-elicited
“negative” emotions e fear, anxiety, resentment, etc. e gets trans-
lated into actual social practices and, overall, into a political
resource for the institutionalization of the same emotions, in the
frame of national or local policies for immigrant and ethnic mi-
norities. Empirical research on emotion and migration is, in this and
in many other respects, a large, open-ended and relatively unex-
plored field, as we argue in the final section.
6. Researching emotions and migration: methodological
options and future directions
Consistent with the multi-disciplinary scope of both migration
and emotion studies, this Special Issue of ESS includes articles with
different disciplinary, geographic and substantive backgrounds.
Some authors use the broad category of emotion (e.g. Baldassar,
Gallo, Baak), others revolve around the more specific notion of
affect (Tazreiter, Raffaet
a), still others address the implications of
migration-related depression, as a set of strongly “negative” emo-
tions (Kokanovic & Bozic-Vrbancic), or map less clearly definable
emotional boundaries as “identity work” (Kivisto & LaVecchia). In
terms of immigrant profile, most articles deal with labour migrants
and their family members, be they left behind or reunified abroad.
A few contributors, instead, specifically focus on asylum seekers
(Kivisto & LaVecchia), undocumented forced migrants (Tazreiter)
and refugees (Baak). Geographically speaking, this Special Issue
includes four case studies on immigration to Europe, including
from South America, India and Iraq. There are also four papers on
immigrants to Australia including from Italy, South-Eastern Asia,
the US and South Sudan.
All of the papers that follow, then, are fundamentally qualitative
case studies. Relevant research techniques include in-depth in-
terviews (Kivisto & LaVecchia, Vermot), life histories (Kokanovic &
Bozic-Vrbancic), ethnography (Baldassar, Gallo) and even auto-
ethnography (Baak). Some examples can also be found of less
conventional participatory and visual techniques (such as photo
's piece). In fact, the bulk of empirical research
elicitation in Raffaeta
on migration and emotions draws from the same methodological
background. This is no surprise, given the potential of qualitative
research tools in delving into subjective emotional conditions and
the ways of manifesting them, and the corresponding limitations of
close-ended questions and statistics, in a survey style, to make
sense of emotional life. Having said this, the current state of
research on migration and emotion does have its downsides and
limitations. What can be drawn from single case studies in terms of
general relevance, and how the gaps between receiving and
sending societies (or between different migration systems) can be
bridged accordingly, are important questions. In a way, then, the
articles collected in this SI are not only illustrative of the strengths
of the research field to date, but they also provide important in-
sights into much needed future research directions, in particular at
a transnational (or multi-sited) level, in a comparative perspective
and in a multi-method fashion. In this optic, Brownlie (2011) has
underlined the need to not only employ mixed methods in
researching emotions, but to also recognize the emotional process
of the research itself:
Moving between ‘being there’ as topic, a form of emotional
support, and ‘being there’ as a methodological resource … the
analytical claims we make about our emotional lives are
strengthened through a methodologically mixed e and by ne-
cessity, reflexive e approach which explores, rather than
smooths out, the ragged, sometimes indeterminate, edges be-
tween methods (Brownlie, 2011: 1).
This reflects an important body of research on methodology and
emotions, particularly of mixed methods (e.g. Mason and Davies,
2009), that could helpfully inform the study of migration and
emotions.
Beyond the question of methods, more research seems neces-
sary, to start with, on the key variables that affect migrants'
emotional lives at a local level e including their demographics (age,
gender, length of stay, education, etc.), contextual factors (e.g. res-
idential segregation and interethnic relations) and macro-level
conditions (external structure of opportunities, citizenship and
welfare regimes, etc.). Likewise, more systematic and comparative
empirical study is needed of the variety of “public ways” e events,
rituals, forms of sociability etc. e in which immigrants display and
negotiate their emotions, as affected by their belonging in terms of
religion, ethnicity, nationality, and so forth. Furthermore, research
is still undeveloped, aside from some local case studies, on the
variable scope for migrants to display and negotiate meaningful
emotions vis-a -vis left-behinds, primarily via transnational
communication as increasingly mediated through new media. Here
there is a burgeoning field that examines the plethora of virtual
communities that can provide support as well as sites of activism
and solidarity (cf. Kwan, 2007; Karatzogianni and Kuntsman, 2012).
 P. Boccagni, L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society 16 (2015) 73e80
Finally, and crosscutting with the previous issues, more compara-
tive and large-scale research should be done on the relevance of the
moralities, or implicit moral codes, which underlie migrant emo-
tions. More research is necessary, in other words, on the influence
of the prevailing normative frameworks on the personal and col-
lective ways of conceiving, cultivating and displaying emotions in
immigrant life.
To recap, a focus on emotion, within migrant life trajectories, is
valuable to delve further into their subjective views, identifications
and ways of belonging, against overly structural accounts about
them. Moreover, emotions make for an original vantage point on
the development of interethnic relations and on the “tone” of the
mainstream social representations associated with migration,
whether in host or in home societies. At all of these levels, as we
have argued, an emotion-oriented lens questions any narrow un-
derstanding of the self-interests of the relevant parties, or of their
behaviours as driven only by rational-instrumental factors. At the
same time, investigating migrants' emotional experience sheds
light on the shifting material, relational and spatial bases of emo-
tions more broadly. Transnational migration is a unique window,
first, on the transformation of emotions across different physical
and socio-cultural backgrounds (parallel to migrants' shifting life
circumstances); and second, on the ways and channels for emo-
tions to be cultivated without physical proximity between the
relevant parties e whether that applies to interpersonal relation-
ships or to any (material or immaterial) emotional “elicitor”.
A long, promising and still little-trodden way ahead lies out
there, stemming from the crossroads between migration studies
and studies of emotion. We hope this contribution, and this Special
issue of ESS as a whole, may be a helpful map for those who wish to
advance it further.
References
Ahmed, S., 2004. Collective feelings: or, the impressions left by others. Theory Cult.
Soc. 21 (2), 25e42.
Alba, R., 2005. Bright vs. blurred boundaries. Ethn. Racial Stud. 28 (1), 20e49.
Alba, R., Nee, V., 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream. Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA.
Appadurai, A., 1996. Modernity at Large. University of Minnesota Press.
Baldassar, L., 2001. Visits Home: Migration Experiences Between Italy and Australia.
Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Baldassar, L., 2007. Transnational families and aged care: the mobility of care and
the migrancy of ageing. J. Ethn. Migr. Stud. 33 (2), 275e297.
Baldassar, L., 2011. Italian migrants in Australia and their relationship to Italy: return
visits, transnational caregiving and the second generation. In: King, Russell,
Christou, Anastasia (Eds.), Of Home, Belonging and Return. Spec. Issue J. Med-
iterr. Stud. vol. 20 (2), 255e282.
Baldassar, L., Nedelcu, M., Merla, L., Wilding, R., 2015. Migration and new media:
‘being together’ and ‘co-presence’ in transnational family life. Spec. Issue Glob.
Netw.
Baldock, C.V., 2000. Migrants and their parents: caregiving from a distance. J. Fam.
Issues 21 (2), 205e224.
Barbalet, J. (Ed.), 2002. Emotions and Sociology. Blackwell, Oxford.
Ben Mosche, D., Pyke, J., Baldassar, L., 2012. Diasporas in Australia. Citizsh. Glob. Res.
Pap. Ser. 3 (4). http://www.deakin.edu.au/arts-ed/ccg/cgrp-pdf/rsp-december4.
pdf.
Boccagni, P., 2014a. What's in a (migrant) house. Hous. Theory Soc. 31 (3), 277e293.
Boccagni, P., 2014b. Making the ‘Fifth Region’ a real place? Emigrant policies and the
emigration nation nexus in Ecuador. Natl. Identities 16 (2), 117e136.
Boccagni, P., Lafleur, J.M., Levitt, P., 2015. Transnational politics as cultural circula-
tion. Mobilities (Online-First).
Boiger, M., Mesquita, B., 2012. The construction of emotion in interactions, re-
lationships, and cultures. Emot. Rev. 4 (3), 221e229.
Bondi, L., Davidson, J., Smith, M., 2007. Introduction: geography's ‘emotional turn’.
In: Davidson, J., et al. (Eds.), Emotional Geographies. Ashgate, Aldershot.
Bonizzoni, P., Boccagni, P., 2013. Care (and) circulation revisited. In: Baldassar, L.,
Merla, L. (Eds.), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care.
Routledge, London.
Brownlie, J., 2011. ‘Being there’: multidimensionality, reflexivity and the study of
emotional lives. Br. J. Sociol. 62 (3), 462e481.
Caprariello, P.A., Cuddy, A.J., Fiske, S.T., 2009. Social structure shapes cultural ste-
reotypes and emotions. Group Process. Intergr. Relat. 12 (2), 147e155.
Cohen, R., 2008. Global Diasporas. Routledge, London.
79
Conradson, D., McKay, D., 2007. Translocal subjectivities: mobility, connection,
emotion. Mobilities 2 (2), 167e174.
Coole, D., Frost, S. (Eds.), 2010. New Materialisms. Duke University Press.
Davidson, J., Milligan, C., 2004. Embodying emotion sensing space. Soc. Cult. Geogr.
5 (4), 523e532.
De Leersnyder, J., Mesquita, B., Kim, H., 2011. Where do my emotions belong?
Personal. Soc. Psychol. Bulletin 37 (4), 451e463.
Ewing, K.P., 2007. Immigrant identities and emotion. In: Casey, C.,
Edgerton, R. (Eds.), A Companion to Psychological Anthropology. Black-
well, Oxford.
Gille, Z., 2012. Global ethnography 2.0dfrom methodological nationalism to
methodological materialism. In: Amelina, A., Devrismel, D., Faist, T.,
GlickSchiller, N. (Eds.), Beyond Methodological Nationalism. Routledge, London,
pp. 91e110.
Gronseth, A., 2013. Introduction. In: Gronseth, A. (Ed.), Being Human, Being
Migrant. Berghahn, New York.
Ho, E.L.-E., 2014. The emotional economy of migration driving Mainland Chinese
transnational sojourning across migration regimes. Environ. Plan. A 46,
2212e2227.
Ho, E.L.-E., 2009. Constituting citizenship through the emotions: Singaporean
Transmigrants in London. Ann. Assoc. Am. Geogr. 99 (4), 788e804.
Jasanoff, S., 2005. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the
United States. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Karatzogianni, Kuntsman, A. (Eds.), 2012. Digital Cultures and the Politics of
Emotion: Feelings, Affect and Technological Change. Palgrave, Basingsoke.
Kivisto, P., LaVecchia, V., 2013. Immigrant ambivalence toward the homeland.
J. Immigr. Refug. Stud. 11 (2), 198e216.
Kwan, M., 2007. Affecting geospatial technologies. Prof. Geogr. 59 (1), 22e34.
Leeuwen, B., 2008. On the affective ambivalence of living with cultural diversity.
Ethnicities 8 (2), 147e176.
Levitt, P., 1998. Social remittances: migration-driven forms of cultural diffusion. Int.
Migr. Rev. 32 (4), 926e958.
Levitt, P., Glick-Schiller, N., 2004. Conceptualizing simultaneity. Int. Migr. Rev. 38 (3),
1002e1039.
Levitt, P., Waters, M. (Eds.), 2002. The Changing Face of Home. Russell Sage Foun-
dation, New York.
Lyons, T., Mandaville, P. (Eds.), 2012. Politics from Afar. Hurst, London.
Madianou, M., Miller, D., 2011. Migration and New Media. Routledge, London.
Mai, N., King, R., 2009. Introduction. Love, sexuality and migration. Mobilities 4 (3),
295e307.
Mason, J., Davies, K., 2009. Coming to our senses? a critical approach to sensory
methodology. Qual. Res. 9, 587e603.
McKay, D., 2007. ‘Sending dollars shows feeling’: emotions and economies in Fili-
pino migration. Mobilities 2 (2), 175e194.
McKay, D., 2012. Global Filipinos. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Merla, L., Baldassar, L., 2010. Transnational care dynamics: between emotions and
rationality. Spec. Issue Rech. Sociol. Anthropol. XLI (1). Available online at:
http://rsa.revues.org/130.
Mitchell, J.C. (Ed.), 1969. Social Networks in Urban Situations. Manchester Univer-
sity Press.
Mol, A., 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Duke University
Press, Durham and London.
Nowicka, M., Rovisco, M. (Eds.), 2009. Cosmopolitanism in Practice. Ashgate,
Aldershot.
Parrenas, R.S., 2005. Long distance intimacy. Glob. Netw. 5 (4), 317e336.
Peterson, G., 2006. Cultural theory and emotions. In: Turner, J., Stets, J. (Eds.),
Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions. Springer.
Portes, A., Fernandez-Kelly, P., Haller, W., 2005. Segmented assimilation on the
ground. Ethn. Racial Stud. 28 (6), 1000e1040.
Pratt, G., 1997. Stereotypes and ambivalence: the construction of domestic workers
in Vancouver, British Columbia. Gend. Place Cult. 4 (2), 159e177.
Rath, J., 2007. The Transformation of Ethnic Neighborhoods into Places of Leisure
and Consumption. Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (IMES), University
of Amsterdam working paper 144.
Skrbis, Z., 2008. Transnational families: theorising migration, emotions and
belonging. J. Intercult. Stud. 29 (3), 231e246.
Smelser, N., 1997. The rational and the ambivalent in the social sciences. Am. Sociol.
Rev. 63 (1), 1e16.
Smith, M., Davidson, J., Cameron, L., Bondi, L., 2009. Emotion, Place and Culture.
Ashgate, Farnham.
Svasek, M., 2008. Who cares? Families and feelings in movement. J. Intercult. Stud.
29 (3), 213e230.
Svasek, M., 2010. On the move: emotions and human mobility. J. Ethn. Migr. Stud.
36 (6), 865e880.
Svasek, M. (Ed.), 2012. Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Transnationalism, Cultural
Production and Emotions. Berghahn, Oxford.
Svasek, M., Skrbis, Z., 2007. Passions and powers: emotions and globalization.
Identities 14, 367e383.
Stets, J., 2010. Future directions in the sociology of emotions. Emotion Rev. 2 (3),
265e268.
Tolia-Kelly, D.P., 2010. Landscape, Race and Memory. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Tolia-Kelly, D.P., 2013. The geographies of cultural geography III material geogra-
phies, vibrant matters and risking surface geographies. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 37
(1), 153e160.
Turner, J., Stets, J., 2005. The Sociology of Emotions. CUP, Cambridge.
80 P. Boccagni, L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society 16 (2015) 73e80

Vertovec, S., 2001. Transnationalism and identity. J. Ethn. Migr. Stud. 27 (4),
573e582.
Whatmore, S., 1999. Hybrid geographies. In: Human Geography Today, pp. 22e39.
Whatmore, S., 2006. Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a
more than-human world. Cult. Geogr. 13 (4), 600e609.
Wierzbicka, A., 1986. Human emotions: universal or culture-specific? Am.
Anthropol. 88 (3), 584e594.
Wimmer, A., 2013. Ethnic Boundary-making. OUP, Oxford.
Wise, A., Velayutham, S. (Eds.), 2009. Everyday Multiculturalism. Palgrave,
Basingstoke.
Wood, N., Waite, L., 2011. Editorial: scales of belonging. Emot. Space Soc. 4,
201e202.
Zembylas, M., 2012. Transnationalism, migration and emotions. Glob. Soc. Educ. 10
(2), 163e179.