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Coming Home Hybrid: Returned Sojourner Identity In Everyday Life, Jon Benjamin Mcnair

Theses and Dissertations

Sojourns, or extended periods of time during which people travel and live abroad with the intention of returning to their home countries, are becoming ever more normal parts of the human experience around the globe. In the US, sojourners who travel as foreign aid workers, corporate employees, missionaries, educators, and military personnel and dependents, among others, make up an increasingly broad spectrum of the population. The experience of living abroad is often necessarily accompanied by some sort of identity change that affects how well one integrates into one's host culture (and, conversely, rejecting local customs and norms affects one's potential …