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This paper utilises Lefebvre's conceptual triad of space to propose a model of migrants' welcome. This model's application in the context of migration in urban areas requires a simultaneous engagement with social practices, representation and representational aspects of space, countering this way an otherwise essentialised notion of welcome. Utilising this framework in our research with migrants and non-migrant residents in five boroughs in Liverpool, UK, showed that welcome rests on the plane of urban inequalities, which affect the ethics of sharing resources, accepting and enabling the other. A multi-scalar dialectical dynamic of welcome emerges between the discursive notions of welcome as deployed in the everyday encounters and the way welcome is experienced and rephrased in the public domain or lamented in the private one. Dispersal and urban planning policies should regard migrants as stakeholders of welcome at local level for the purpose of migrants' inclusion and managing social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic research on Lodge Lane, the main commercial street within Toxteth (Liverpool), this paper reveals how fundamental ethnic minority enterprises (EMEs) have been to the regeneration of this marginalized area due to public disinvestment. Acting as critical infrastructure, they have transformed the materiality of the locale, and by extension, they have afforded new kinds of encounter and convivialities. Ultimately, EMEs appear to have a critical emplacing and displacing power, which involves urban inhabitants in a differential way over time, depending on their positionality toward the material and discursive aspects of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the3million—a major organisation that was formed after the 2016 Brexit Referendum to represent EU citizens in the UK, this article explores the role of online communication in supporting civic actors' lobbying and mobilisation strategies at local, national and international levels. Apart from multi-scalar dimensions of these civic organisations' work and of the way EU citizens themselves engage, we identify different strategies of impact. These are inter-linked and performed in a nonlinear fashion and include: emotionalising; politicising; channelling; contesting. These findings elaborate on the way multinational diaspora formation and mobilisation in the 21st century should be conceptualised, and their importance for stakeholder empowerment. We argue that contextual factors—both in terms of the socio-political capital of the people engaged in mobilisation and the features and dynamics of opportunity structures in a particular country and historical moment—are important in understanding why civic actors emerge, how they mobilise and the way their status and focus of their work transforms over time. The article significantly contributes to research studying the use of digital communications and especially e-newsletters and e-mails by non-state actors for mobilising and lobbying purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the political engagement and mobilization of the EU citizens post‐Brexit and investigates the extent to which these have led to the creation of an EU diaspora in the UK. Qualitative research took place in Liverpool and Southport–two different localities in the North West of the UK that have attracted EU citizens of different demographics. The project included participants from 18 EU different countries, which afforded the investigation of dynamics and different positionalities within the EU population in the UK. These positionalities, the findings show, are broadly organized around a typology that is underpinned by the (geo)politics of the EU: national and regional stances; EU‐oriented stances; non‐alignment. While Brexit triggered a stronger European identity and mobilization on the basis of it, the orientation toward, and investment in, the EU diasporic mobilization among EU citizens differs due to these positionalities. The findings, therefore, point toward the creation of a post‐national EU diaspora in the UK, but also identify the strength of national and regional identities, which could indicate the development of different gravity diaspora points in future, nested in the EU diaspora. The differences in demographics and social capital within the EU citizens population across the UK have implications for local dimensions of the EU diaspora and its impact and legacy in the medium and long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Toxteth – a distinct and ethnically diverse locality in Liverpool, UK – this article explores the (un)making and re-making of diasporic space in different guises by urban diverse communities and the material aspects or fallouts of this for place and identity. Based on extensive ethnographic research, it shows how a series of localised developments – a history of external marginalisation, an urban trauma of rioting, a protracted experience of eviction, various programmes of regeneration and localised responses to all these – are all inscribed in the physical, as well as cognitive, landscape of the area, both co-creating the boundaries of place, as well as periodically resisting them. The article suggests that this focus on the physical – the material infrastructures of the area – is especially important in understanding how marginalised urban communities are affected by, and galvanise in response to, change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Return migration has been traditionally conceptualised within a framework of 'homecomings', emphasising primordial ethnicity at the expense of micro-level and cognitive aspects of migrants' belongingness. Drawing on the narratives of Albanian-origin children and young people who moved (back) to Albania with their families from crisis-ridden Greece, this paper explores their experiences of otherness in the presumed homeland, and puts emphasis on their agency in the context of return migration. Memory emerges as an important aspect of agency in the process of what we term 'the transnational mirroring of otherness'. Brought up in Greece, the Albanian-origin children are othered upon return because of their perceived 'Greekness' among the locals and limited ability to speak Albanian. Beyond establishing and maintaining transnational ties and identities, participants show initiative in positioning themselves against shifting transnational identification frameworks, as they contemplate a spatially mobile future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the intersection between migration management and child protection is limited and, yet, contradictions between these two domains and ambivalence in the area of child migrants' rights across the developed world have already been highlighted. Based on fieldwork with policymakers and service providers in Albania, a middle-to-high income country with a significant history of emigration, this paper aims to shed light on the interaction of these institutional and policy domains and the impact they have on professional practice. The State's impact on migrant children's rights at the domestic level is affected by the resourcefulness of its system of social and child protection. This key factor appears to affect the work of professionals on the ground and ultimately mean a variety of categories of child migrants have limited access to child protection services. Professional practice in this context highlights the need to include material dimensions—the resources needed to realise child protection on the ground—in its definition, and to consider the impact of multi-scalar influences on service providers' work. The two domains of migration management and child protection appear to converge in the case of unaccompanied minors (UAMs). In turn, stateless, returned migrant children and those from very disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds are overlooked, giving rise to unequal access to state support. Nonetheless, an overall disjuncture appears in the context of transnational child protection, due to the rigid focus on nationality as a precondition for state support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on qualitative research with migrants, their children and key informants in Albania, this paper investigates the experiences of return migrants with social protection and their positionality towards social protection stakeholders. Return migration to Albania has intensified in the past few years due to the economic crisis in different European countries where many Albanians have migrated to since the beginning of the 1990s. Findings of multisited fieldwork testify to the centrality of social protection in the process of migrants' relocation to the country of origin. Due to the trans-national and trans-temporal dimensions of the return process, access to and overall experiences of social protection are mediated by different understandings and regulation of the thresholds of vulnerability, need and welfare held by return migrants, locals, policy makers and service providers. These staggered understandings and thresholds are embedded in an observed trans-national and trans-local developmental gap between the country of immigration and country of origin where migrants relocate to. Resource environment in the context of return is, therefore, characterised by cognitive and material discontinuities at trans-national and trans-temporal level. Experiences of these discontinuities impact on returnees' social protection strategies and have significant implications for their social and economic positioning upon return to the country of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on empirical research conducted in Albania, this article reports that educational experience and performance, and hence, integration of the children of (returned) migrants in their parents' homeland is obstructed by structural factors linked to the educational system. A finding such as this challenges the centrality of an essentialized notion of ethnicity in models of "second generation" integration and evidences the centrality of the nation-state, and the education system as one of its pillars, in the integration of migrants and their children. Comparative integration context theory appears to apply to the integration of children of returned migrants; yet it needs to take into account the mobile lives of migrants and their children, the transnational disjuncture between different educational systems, and the role of locality within the nation-state. Moreover, including children in analyses of integration, in the context of education, calls for the inclusion of life-course and scale in integration theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Return migration has not been associated with negative psychosocial outcomes, while the experience of children involved in this process has been largely overlooked. This article looks at the migration experience of Albanian-origin children and young people upon their families’ return to Albania. Contrasting with a primordial understanding of ‘homeland’, ‘belongingness’ and ‘return migration’, which is focussed on the nation-state, the findings show that a lack of (diasporic) belongingness affects children’s wellbeing upon their families’ return to the country of origin. While children show remarkable mechanisms of coping and resilience, contextual factors moderate the links between migration and psychosocial wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the trips to the homeland and the embedded tourist practices of Kosovan migrants in the Western Balkans. Drawing from the diasporic tourism literature, it emphasises the role of (material) space and place in these movements and tourist practices. Findings show that return trips to Kosovo involved for the participants leisure mobilities in the context of Albania and other Albanian-speaking areas in the Balkans. The paper concludes by questioning the strong connection in the existing literature between diasporic tourism and ethnicity, arguing that the former is also affected by material space – in the Kosovan case, more specifically, the sea – as an aspect of migrants’ experiences. Migration, leisure mobilities and tourism in the case of Kosovan migrants and the (West) Balkans region, at least, appear to have their historical, temporal and spatial specificities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on migration and integration in Britain have noted the paucity of research on ‘new’ migrants, especially ‘illegal’ migrants and asylum seekers. This paper focuses on one understudied group – Albanian immigrants and their children – and looks at their migration and settlement, based on sixty interviews conducted in two phases either side of a 2003 mini-amnesty that gave many indefinite leave to remain. This regularization is the fulcrum around which our analytical narrative is built. Focusing on the interaction of migrants' agency with host-country structure, the paper shows that an unsettled asylum policy and delays in implementation have had deleterious effects on migrants' integration and sense of belonging, even after citizenship acquisition. As they search for a social and ethnic positioning within a multi-ethnic host society, the eventual realization of Albanians' migration project is accompanied by culture shock, intergenerational difference and ambivalence towards integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on transnationalism and integration is increasingly focusing on the intersections between the two concepts. However, the debate is polarised between the country of origin and the host country when migrants' identity and belongingness are concerned. In the case of the children of migrants, the literature also largely lacks references to locality, mobility and cosmopolitanism. This paper explores the integration of Albanian-origin teenagers in Tuscany and the relationship between their transnational orientations and their integration strategies. Findings show that both the social and cultural institutions and the spatial ‘units’ to which these teenagers refer in their integration discourse go beyond their country of origin and their host country. Firstly, there is a translocal dimension to their references—to Florence, Prato and Tuscany and the place of their parental origin in Albania. Secondly, their views and perceptions of integration contain a strong cosmopolitan orientation—both conceptually and spatially. The qualities of space and locality impact on transnational ties, giving rise to cosmopolitan orientation and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, the concepts of city as context, locality and incorporation are applied to the case of Albanian immigrants in Florence. To date, most research on the incorporation of immigrants and its relationship to space is based on the city or the inter-relations between the nation-state and city as contexts where incorporation takes place. The findings of this study show that the relationship between locality and the incorporation of immigrants is multi-dimensional. First, although findings support the role of the urban ethos in immigrants’ incorporation, the city is not a homogeneous entity and should not be equated with locality where immigrants’ incorporation is concerned. The importance of locality within the city is highlighted by the role played by the qualities of space and aesthetics in immigrants’ incorporation and identification. Also, more attention should be paid to intergenerational perceptions of space, as the data show that different generations have different ‘cognitive geographies’ and varying perceptions of space and appreciations of cosmopolitanism, seen here in relation to locality. These aspects should be seen in relation to the historical, structural and cultural particularities of the city as a key context of incorporation, without ignoring the national-level politics of immigration and integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on the links of the second generation to their parental homeland, and return visits in particular, is largely lacking. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 75 Albanian teenagers in London, Thessaloniki and Florence, this paper brings a multi-sited perspective on attitudes towards and experiences of homeland visits. Contrasts are drawn between positive themes emerging from the narratives, which are about belonging, family and nature in Albania, and negative impressions which relate to poverty and traditionalism, and a developing sense of boredom as teenagers get older. We then relate some of these contrasting experiences to differences in social integration in the three different host-society contexts. The conclusion elaborates the uniqueness and significance of this case, both in terms of this being the first exploration of the transnational orientations of one of Europe’s newest second generations, and in relation to the home-country context of a liberalising ex-communist country still in a state of economic backwardness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]