Being a part of and apart from. Return migrants’ ambivalent attachment to rural place

Abstract

This study is concerned with the return migration of highly educated young people to rural places. It seeks to understand the drivers and concerns behind their migration patterns and how they deal with own and others’ conflicting perceptions of rurality. Place attachment and place ambivalence in the context of life course changes are the main theoretical perspectives that help us to understand return migration. They are applied in a Danish context and based on analyses of qualitative interviews the concepts are further developed. A main contribution of the study is to look at rural place from the different identity positions of returnees and on that basis nuance the concept of place ambivalence. Another contribution is the identification of specific discursive and action-based coping strategies that returnees utilise to counter external stigmatisation and inner identity battles.