Migration can be an empowering as well as disempowering experience. Leaving your home, your loved ones to start a new life can be a pain-inducing moment, especially when challenged with confrontation and hostility in your new environment. Yet that new environment can open up many new opportunities, including love, career and a new way of life. 

 

In 2019, 612,000 people moved to the UK, compared with 385,000 who left the UK (ONS, 2019). Such a revelation, combined with frequent sensationalist media coverage creates a narrative that the UK is a haven, laced with opportunity and hope. Yet, whilst unreported, we have observed that there exists a group of migrants that are keen to leave the UK to return to their home country, despite having built a home and family here. They do this for many reasons, but the major consensus seems to be that they feel that they can achieve even greater success in their home countries. And the majority of this group tends to be men.

 

Journey Home is a multimedia project that explores this very issue: how migration can affect one’s notion of masculinity and their corresponding perception of a home. Inspired by first-hand personal experiences, supported by expert conversations, Journey Home uses documentary and podcast to convey the ever-changing and complex concept of masculinity, and its interrelations with migration in the UK, told from a West African perspective.