COVID-19 and Bulgarian Female Returnees: Three Stories, One Core Motive – Caregiving
COVID-19 and Bulgarian Female Returnees: Three Stories, One Core Motive – Caregiving

Summary/Abstract: In the focus of the article are the stories of three Bulgarian women who moved back to Bulgaria in the period 2020-2021, influenced by the pandemic of COVID-19. The ethnographic study was done in October-November 2021, exploring return migration and self-identification processes among Bulgarian returnees within which, in these three particular cases, COVID-19 is given as the key trigger for the return or the permanence of the return. The stories are interesting because they elaborate on the correlation between the emigration motives, migration stories, return motives, and the self-actualisation of the women upon return, synthesising one core motive for their return – caregiving. The complexity of return decisions is typologised around the three objects to which the caregiving is addressed – the personal, extended, and larger family, seen as a community/country. The article concludes that return could be explained as a mix of the women’s responsibility to closer or larger circles and structures and triggered and initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic through their strong female will and agency.

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