Jasper Singh, M.A.

Jasper Singh is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Münster — and an ethnographer who goes below the surface. Her doctoral project, Homeward Bound: Transnational Aging, Remittance Homes, and the Politics of Return among the Indian Diaspora, examines what lies beneath the apparent voluntariness of return migration among highly skilled Indian migrants who retire to India — the nostalgia, the structural compulsions, the aging bodies, the pull of affordable healthcare and familiar domestic rhythms — and what it means to reconstruct belonging after decades of transnational life.

Through multi-sited ethnography, in-depth biographical interviews, Object-Related Conversations, and Photovoice — a methodology relatively novel in the Indian context — Jasper excavates the affective and social textures of reverse migration. Drawing on Boccagni's frameworks of homing and remittance houses, she interrogates how returnees use material belongings, domestic spaces, and everyday practices to negotiate identity, social distinction, and intimacy in later life. The notion of home, her research insists, is never simply recovered — it is painstakingly reconstructed.

Trained in Sociology in India and now researching from Europe, she brings a transnational and interdisciplinary lens to questions that have long remained at the margins of mainstream migration scholarship — among them, aging, affect, and the intimate politics of return. She holds a Gold Medal MA in Sociology from the University of Hyderabad and is co-founder of the Critical Sociological Network, a global think-tank of sociologists committed to knowledge production from the Global South.

Keywords: Return (Retirement) Migration · Transnational Aging · Affect and Belonging · Homing · Remittance Houses · Ethnography

• Research

  My doctoral research delves into in-depth biographical interviews with those Indians who return to their homeland upon retirement. Residents of gated enclaves who fall into the ‘retired’ category according to Gulf Cooperation Council standards would be the interlocutors. The empirical study of (highly) skilled workers who returned to India at the cusp of the age of retirement aspires to probe further into reverse migration of the Indian diaspora induced by factors besides retirement-- their affectivity to homeland, their process of homing and homemaking after their arrival to the parent country.

  The study further explores if they experienced feelings of loneliness while trying to home themselves, and whether it was aggravated by restrictions on movement during the pandemic. The diaspora community remit and construct remittance houses, hence profiling them is its precursor to the study.

• Research Focus

  • Social gerontology
  • Migration studies
  • Gender studies

• Research Area

  • Will follow soon