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- Convenors:
-
Martin Sökefeld
(LMU Munich)
Sabine Strasser (University of Bern)
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- Discussant:
-
Shahram Khosravi
(Stockholm University)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This workshop explores the production, circulation and exchange of emotions triggered by deportations and state-assisted return in the context of unequal power relations including administrations, concerned citizens, organized activists and people on the move.
Long Abstract:
In recent years, European states have increasingly taken to deportation and state-assisted "voluntary" return as means of migration control. Deportation is high-ranking on the political agenda and often publicly debated as an issue of protection from threat. Administrations frame the forced return of rejected asylum seekers and "illegal" migrants in judicial terms, as a matter of the rule of law. For those affected, deportation is in most cases an existential experience of brute coercion that shatters dreams and ambitions, producing anxieties and often despair and anger, but perhaps sometimes also hope for a new beginning. These emotional effects of deportation are not limited to the deportees themselves but affect also supporting volunteers in the country of deportation who see their often years long efforts of assistance ruined, as well as the deportees' social context in the country of return, where hopes and expectations are equally destroyed. Such emotions include moral sentiments (Fassin) of injustice and denied deservingness. Deportations thus trigger a political economy of emotions that are produced, circulated and exchanged in uneven networks spread out in time and space in a context of unequal power relations. Given migrants' general condition of deportability (De Genova), this affective economy of forced return exceeds actual cases of deportation.
We invite papers that address the affective economy of deportation, analysing the production and circulation of emotions in the context of deportation and return in the countries of departure and arrival and in the spaces in between.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2020, -Gerhild Perl (University of Trier)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on research in a women’s migration detention center in southern Spain, this paper sheds light on the seemingly arbitrary production of emotions.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on research in a women’s migration detention center in southern Spain, this paper sheds light on the seemingly arbitrary production of emotions. Focusing on one concrete field situation, I analyze how the decision to release some and extend detention for others, thereby increasing the likelihood of deportation, causes great relief on the one hand and panic and terrifying incomprehension on the other. I am particularly interested in the ways how executed law appears arbitrary to migrants, volunteers, legal aid assistants, researchers and the police officers themselves. Therefore, “arbitrariness” – understood as a mode of production within the affective economy of deportation – is a useful concept to convey the experience when something apparently capricious happens to one beyond reason or rule. It is not only the fear of deportation, but also the unfathomable reasons why one person is deported but not the other that cause emotional turmoil and, moreover, shift power relations. I argue that arbitrariness is an affective and effective power-technique that obscures the workings of the state, causes momentary powerlessness but also produces new strategies to fight deportations.
Elise Hjalmarson (Graduate Institute)
Paper short abstract:
This paper probes the imaginaries and emotions of return, highlighting the affective economies in play in the anticipation and awaiting of such journeys. It is informed by the author's ongoing fieldwork among Latin Americans presently in Spain.
Paper long abstract:
Building upon recent literature which foregrounds the moral, emotional, and embodied aspects of migration experiences, this paper locates value in the imaginaries and emotions—including hope, happiness, and hardship—evoked by the prospect of return. By way of such inquiry, it highlights the multifarious affective economies in play in the period leading up to an anticipated return journey, interrogating the emotions, moral valences, and expectations aroused by long-awaited and desired return. It asks: whereas migrant journeys, frequently hallmarked as 'dreams', are often construed as vehicles which lead to some future happiness, how are return journeys affectively rendered? Do migrants who participate in state-assisted programs 'dream' of or dread return? Importantly, and further to critical feminist gains in migration research, this paper also asks how the emotional and moral responses provoked by the potential for return are refracted along lines of gender, race, and class. The reflections it offers is informed by the author's ongoing fieldwork among Latin Americans in Spain, where she is presently working on a doctoral dissertation project on migrant aspirations, moralities, and subjectivities, particularly as they relate to return.
Victoria Tecca (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
Ethnographically illustrated by one woman's voluntary return, this paper analyses the emotions involved in 'giving up' and 'going back'. It follows her to Kurdistan, engaging with the shame, grief, regret, and relief permeating four specific moments as she returns to what no longer feels like home.
Paper long abstract:
Dunkirk, France is home to a tent settlement of mostly Kurdish migrants attempting to reach the United Kingdom. In early 2019 Soma, a 60-year-old Iraqi Kurdish woman, had been trying to cross with her three sons for 8 months. Because her youngest son is disabled and requires a wheelchair, smugglers refused to work with Soma's family, deeming them unfit for the journey. After weeks of deliberating, Soma and her sons decided to separate - her two older sons crossed to the UK and Soma self-deported to Kurdistan with her youngest son.
This paper engages with the emotions involved in four moments in her return process: shame and heartbreak when they decide to separate, grief and joy when her sons reach the UK, relief upon arrival to the state-administered self-deportation centre, and her regrets relayed to me in hushed tones on the roof of her home in Slemani when I visited some months after her return. It also engages with the relationship of these emotions to materiality and space (Navaro-Yashin 2009), their political nature and capacity (Massumi 2015), and what they do as they reverberate through Soma, her family, the Dunkirk settlement, her friends and networks in Kurdistan, and myself as participant-observer (see Behar 1997). They contribute to and reflect interrelated affective economies (Ahmed 2004) in both Dunkirk and Kurdistan, generated by 'giving up' and 'going back' to a place that may not feel like home anymore, while also shaping what it means to leave for Europe in the first place.
Usman Mahar (University of St. Gallen)
Paper short abstract:
In this essay, I try to trace the narratives of taqdeer (destiny) and ummeed (hope) that are strategically employed by Pakistani deportees and "voluntary" returnees to save face and regain agency after their (re)migration.
Paper long abstract:
It is assumed that deportation and "voluntary" return mark the end of an irregular migrant's dangerous "illegal" journey. When it comes to the returning migrant's dreams and desires vis-a-vis return and reintegration, the journey is, however, far from over. In fact, very little is known about the lives of deportees and returnees -- except for the desire on the part of returning countries that economic reintegration will swiftly take place -- upon return. Calling into attention specific stories from my ongoing fieldwork, in this essay, I aim to draw a picture of what Pakistani returning migrants; deportees and returnees have to deal with upon their return from Germany. Shedding light on their lives back home in Pakistan, I try to engage with the vulnerabilities and difficulties but also the hopes of Pakistani irregular migrants and their families. In that vein, I wish to map out the affective economy borne out of irregular migration and subsequent return. Problematising the issue of reintegration and resettlement, I question the role of ethnoreligious ideas of taqdeer 'destiny' and ummeed 'hope' in regaining agency upon return. I also ask how both of these concepts may be respectively informed by the microcosms of contemporary Punjabi-Muslim cultures and the macrocosms of globalised political economies. I claim that the two are employed by my interlocutors to save face and regain agency. In other words, taqdeer and ummeed serve as arguments for accepting or rejecting their return to Pakistan, giving them some agency in the return process.
Sabina Barone (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores conflicting emotional standpoints, diverging time-frames and social positionings at play in irregular Sub-Saharan migrants' decisions to return that surround IOM's voluntary return programme from Morocco. It is based on six months (and ongoing) ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses the findings of ongoing research on Sub-Saharan voluntary return migration from Morocco. Migrants' deportability has increased over the years in this country, so has their option for voluntary return. In 2018 Morocco had the eighth highest number of IOM's assisted voluntary returns (AVR), all towards West-Central Africa (IOM 2019 statistics).
Migrants interviewed frame their decision to return within the perspective of "souffrance" (suffering) which embraces their overall migratory trajectory, marked by hardship due to their irregular condition. Their long-term existential standpoint, emotionally charged, is at odds with the here-and-now managerial logic of AVR, focused on a formal assessment of voluntariness and immediate basic assistance. Long resisted as a failure, once embraced, the return can prove elusive to migrants. To returnees' dismay, registration to AVR falls into more or less lengthy waiting lists depending on budgetary constraints and donors' calendars. The absence of regular follow-ups between migrants and AVR implementers limits returnees' understanding of the programme and may alienate them from the return process. Waiting is experienced with frustration or powerlessness. In turn, returnees' urgent demand to return is interpreted by some AVR implementers as proof of the programme's pertinence.
Tired of waiting or reluctant to comply with AVR procedure, some migrants resort to alternative arrangements to return irregularly, worsening their precarious conditions. Others opt for tactical uses of AVR to advance their migratory project. I argue that embracing the affective economy of return may provide a more holistic and timely engagement with returnees.
Karlien Strijbosch (Maastricht University)
Paper short abstract:
Migrants who returned to Senegal under conditions of deportability are, despite their suffering and distress, not only victims. Ethnographic fieldwork in urban Senegal shows that migrants narrate and perform their return. By doing so they show agency in a context of unequal power relations.
Paper long abstract:
Literature on migration in West Africa shows that migration can have positive effects on the social status of men and their social context. Returning home too early can nevertheless lead to an ambivalent situation, including negative social stigmas, such as failure, 'laziness', or criminality. Studies on deportation and state-assisted voluntary return show that return is in most cases an existential experience that triggers intense emotions and often times suffering and distress. Despite the appeal of returnees and migration scholars to go beyond a limited discourse of victimhood, few studies show the agency of migrants and their social context. As self-narrating and using elements of performativity can be a form of empowerment, this article investigates how and to whom Senegalese men who have been in the occident (Europe & United States) and returned under conditions of deportability, narrate and perform their return in Senegal.
Based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in urban Senegal, the article argues that in order to fulfill hegemonic ideas of masculinity migrants who returned from the occident, situate their distress and suffering by emphasizing, silencing and/or adjusting part of their migration and return experiences. By doing so these men show agency in a context of unequal power relations.
Keywords: return migration, Senegal, ethnography, self-narration/ performativity, hegemonic masculinity