Doctoral Dissertation Research: Success and Livelihood Outcomes within Migrant Social Networks

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For many agricultural households, labor migration has emerged as a popular strategy to mitigate and overcome the stresses and threats to their livelihood. While migration as a livelihood diversification strategy can be an effective response to economic precarity, labor migration and remittance is usually a temporary measure. Upon returning home, they not only have to find alternative sources of livelihood but assimilate to new local realities and cultural patterns. This project builds a framework to understand the types of livelihood capital available to migrants once they return home, and how this capital interacts with community standards of success circulating in their respective social networks. It responds to community needs and was initiated at the local level, by community stakeholders. However, as return migration is a global issue, this project incorporates a research approach to make its findings generalizable and can be expanded to examine return migration and reintegration in other contexts for cross-cultural comparisons. Findings have the potential to inform policy, along with the design and implementation of reintegration support programs for returnees. The project aims to obtain an understanding of success as defined by the local community and assess how non-migrants and migrant returnees align with these local definitions, through successive free-listing, semi-structured interviews, and cultural consonance. It will then identify livelihood outcomes among non-migrants and migrant returnees and collect information on sustainable livelihood capitals that individuals have acquired through their respective networks using a life history calendar and semi-structured interviews to guide network data collection. Combining qualitative methods and data with quantitative network measures will contribute to methodological discussions of network analysis, specifically ego networks, within anthropology. The project brings new insights into the discipline by adding a layered and interdisciplinary approach to anthropological theories at the intersection of culture, migration, and network studies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.