The Amherst playlists

I arrived in the peaceful, scenic town of Amherst, set in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts and home of three schools of the renowned Five College Consortium, in mid-August 2021 for a seven-month stay in the Anthropology Department at the University of Massachusetts as a Fulbright Schuman Professor Awardee. I had made the move from Lisbon, Portugal. And in August, the nights were still warm. I usually stayed on the porch until late, reading, listening to music, and observing daily life unfolding, first at a calm summer pace that got increasingly busier as neighbors and students returned for the new academic year. The Amherst region is fairly walkable, and its small town centre and the surrounding parks and woods are quite inviting for long inspirational walks. So, after the previous two years of extreme collective and personal stress due to immobility, fear, and solitude, caused by the pandemic and intensified by living in the city of Lisbon, I embraced the quietness of Amherst and the possibility of sitting outside and strolling around without the limitations that I had experienced in my apartment back in the city centre.

I came to UMass Amherst to start a new research line on middle-class migratory movements between the US and the EU and their impacts on the two regions’ political, economic, and cultural relations. My main goal for the stay was to gather data and review the existing literature on a relatively discrete research topic – American migrations, in general, and American middle-class migrations, in particular. Despite migration being one of the most vividly researched and publicly debated topics, various flows of human mobility tend to discretely fly under the academic and public radar. Especially if one exclusively uses the migration lens to view this type of movements. And yet, the number of Americans who are presently crossing the Atlantic to live in Europe is considerable — and consistently growing.

Keep reading at the Fulbright Schuman Program website

Words by Marta Vilar Rosales