Home, interrupted: Return visits and transnational dwelling among young migrants in the United Kingdom

This article examines how young, highly skilled migrants negotiate the meaning of home through return visits, everyday practices, and the disruptions brought about by COVID-19. While return visits are commonly understood to reaffirm connections to the homeland, this study shows that they often produce ambivalence, alienation and emotional dissonance. Drawing on qualitative interviews and a counter-mapping exercise with 27 migrants living in the UK , I demonstrate how childhood homes increasingly become experienced as “parents' homes,” evoking feelings of boredom, frustration and loss of autonomy after only short stays. These visits illuminate identity transformations that have taken place abroad and frequently remind migrants why they left in the first place. At the same time, home in the UK is experienced through unstable “micro-locations,” shaped by frequent moves, temporary housing arrangements and limited control over domestic space. COVID-19 amplified these dynamics by imposing involuntary immobility and transforming the home into a multi-functional environment for work, sociality and emotional refuge. For many participants, the pandemic triggered new material, symbolic and affective investments in their UK dwellings, intensifying the process of homing despite ongoing transnational attachments. Taken together, the findings argue for understanding home not as a fixed geographical site but as a temporal, emotional and processual practice continually renegotiated across life-course transitions and shifting mobility regimes. In doing so, the article contributes to debates on transnationalism, belonging and middling migration by foregrounding the unstable, multi-sited and often ambivalent character of home in young migrants’ lives.