Of home-comings and home-scales: Reframing return migration through a multiscalar understanding of home

Is return migration a form of 'homecoming', as common sense would have it? While increasing research has addressed both its determinants and the underlying lived experience, still lacking is a systematic revisit of return through the prism of home studies. Based on a multiscalar approach to home and on our fieldwork into Ecuadorian migration, we explore return as a life transition between separate geographic spaces and biographical times; in essence, as an ongoing interplay between different views, forms and scales of home. What potential returnees construct as home, how different this is from the past, and on what spatial and temporal scales they (re)locate their sense of home, are all critical influences on their return orientations and practices. Overall, little generalization can be made about the shifting temporalities and spatialities of return migration. Nonetheless, reconstructing the attendant (re)locations of home affords a more nuanced and sensitive understanding of it.