Migration and return migration in later life to Albania: the pendulum between subjective wellbeing and place

Return migration is currently one of the most widely debated dimensions of international mobility. It has gained a prominent role in the agenda of migration experts and politicians for its impact on both receiving and sending countries (Cassarino 2004). Nevertheless, empirical evidence has mainly focused on the economic element of return and its consequences in terms of development of migrants’ countries of origin (see, for instance, Ammassari and Black 2001; Ghosh 2000; King 1986), whereas the underlying individual and contextual factors behind migrants’ decision to return are still little researched (Hunter 2011). Also under-researched are the return experiences of older people, who are the specific demographic focus of this contribution. Rather than seeing return as a kind of teleological end-point of the migration cycle–a definitive resettlement in the ‘homeland’–my epistemological approach is to link return to the two main recent paradigms in migration theory, namely transnationalism (Glick Schiller et al. 1992) and the ‘mobilities turn’(Sheller and Urry 2006). By embedding both migration and ageing in these two conceptual frameworks, we can more easily talk of ‘transnational ageing’and ‘return mobilities’ as the key discursive containers within which my empirical research results can be analysed.