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

Abstract

This article 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 the conceptual frame of ‘affective habitus’ with 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. The authors 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. The conceptual terrain of ‘affective habitus’ is theorised through a phenomenological approach to gendered migrancy and cultural materiality in everyday life.