Eda Gemi, Research Associate of ELIAMEP, participated as a keynote speaker at the 60st International Academic Week organized by the Munich-based Southeast Europe Association (SOG) in cooperation with the Academy for Civic Education in Tutzing, Germany, where more than 30 academics gathered to discuss one of the most challenging topic that of return migration in Southeastern Europe.

Eda Gemi gave a presentation on the topic: “Rethinking Return and Mobility in Southeast Europe: Multiple trajectories of Second-Generation Albanians from Greece and Italy” which is based on the findings of the book “Rethinking Migration and Return in Southeastern Europe” (co-authored with Anna Triandafyllidou) published by Routledge in 2021.

Eda proposed a new typology of return, reintegration, and onward mobility of the second-generation Albanians that places return in the middle of the migration experience rather than at its endpoint. According to her “the experience of migration and return appears to create a significant transnational capital – a propensity towards mobility and an intimacy with transnational living that facilitates onward movement. Indeed, Albanian return migration from Greece and Italy in the 2010s is typically a migration of the twenty-first-century: dynamic and open-ended.”