Conference Agenda

My presentation is inspired by the focus of this year’s ECQI Congress: Global Flows, Connections, Dialogues and Collaborative Practices in Challenging Times. Such a focus captures my own research on Greek diasporas and allows me to reflect on it as a life-long project. More specifically, I address the topic of “returning home” for a Greek diaspora community in Australia, both in groups and as individuals, over a period stretching from the early decades of the 20th century to the present, in my attempt to explore these diverse “journeys” and the different relationships with home which various members of this diaspora have manifested over the years. What constitutes “home” for diaspora individuals? In what ways do they “return home”, if they do? How have these returns been transformed in today’s globalizing conditions and challenging times? And how can we, as researchers, address these transformations, study and attempt to interpret them?

Among the various qualitative methods I have employed in conducting research on this topic, multi-sited and longitudinal fieldwork and collaborative ethnography have proved to be of paramount value. In my talk I will consider the stories of Greek migrants and their descendants who return home physically, or mentally and emotionally, according to their circumstances and worldviews. Some of these returns are linked to active involvement with the ancestral land and its society, inspired by a sense of intergenerational debt to their forebears. Other returns are purely imaginary, revolving round symbols and myths associated with the ancestral homeland. Yet other return journeys involve representations of the homeland in writing, on websites, or in other artistic creations. In all of these stories, I have employed collaborative methods during my research, to reach, I feel, a deeper understanding of “home” as the family- and community-orientated past that diaspora individuals carry and deal with over the course of their lives. In an auto-ethnographic sense, these stories also form my own attempt to ‘return home’.