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Contribution short abstract:

Looking through the lens of labels, this paper presents the tensions within categorisation work in the context of forced return movements. How do people labelled as 'returnees', coming 'back home', challenge unidimensional understandings of mobility through their ways of self-identification?

Contribution long abstract:

Over the last decade, government initiatives aimed at people without legal residence status in Germany have become increasingly visible. These programmes call for a "voluntary return", aim for "sustainable integration of returnees" and draw on ambivalent notions of "homecoming".

Based on collaborative ethnographic research conducted in Ghana in 2023 and 2024, this paper explores how returned Ghanaians reflect on being immobilised and labelled as 'returnees' in a place they once left. How does their analysis of their movement challenge dominant narratives of migration? In which way does their self-positioning call for an understanding of human mobility beyond the logic of a methodological nationalism (Glick Schiller 1999), expressed in terms such as 'country of origin' linked to a nation-based understanding of 'home'?

By following my research collaborators' narratives around the self-identification as 'traveler' in relation to the socially embedded hypermobile figure of the 'borga' (Nyarko-Afriyien 2019) and the classification as a ‘returnee’, this paper focuses on the tensions between self-making and being made. As a form of critical standpoint on migration (De Genova et al. 2022), the empirically grounded conceptual work proposes a way of rewriting linear migration theories and offers a perspective for a more relational understanding of belonging.

The frictions between the categories at work point to the need for a nuanced, multidimensional understanding of human mobility (Vigh/Bjarnesen 2016) and center the question: What does shifting our gaze to the conceptualizations of our research collaborators offer us in terms of rethinking social theory within human mobility research?