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Paper short abstract

The paper examines remote work as a mobility infrastructure shaping ‘homeland’ mobilities of Ghanaian-background youth living in Germany. Spatially and temporally flexible work enables transnational entrepreneurship, an unfolding relationship to a ‘homeland’, and non-linear transitions to adulthood.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the intersections of digitally enabled remote work, migration, and mobilities. Existing research has shown that remote work can generate new vulnerabilities for migrants while also strengthening their agency to shape their lives, careers, and education. However, this literature has largely focused either on digital nomads and their relatively privileged international mobilities or on labor migrants’ local mobilities within digitally mediated platform work. This paper shifts the focus to migrant-background youth and examines how digitally enabled remote work functions as a mobility infrastructure that enables and reshapes ‘homeland’ mobilities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with young people of a Ghanaian background between Germany and Ghana as part of the DIGIMOBYOUTH project, I analyse experiences of both employed remote workers and ‘diaspora entrepreneurs’ who founded their own start-ups. The paper shows how location-flexible work arrangements allow youth to engage in more frequent and extended stays in Ghana, to combine paid work with leisure and family, and to pursue forms of transnational entrepreneurship imbued with 'purpose' and oriented toward both Germany and Ghana. Using three case studies, the paper demonstrates how: (1) work-related ‘homeland’ mobilities are embedded larger mobility trajectories and contribute to an evolving relationship to a ‘home’ country; (2) ‘homeland’ stays function as sites of entrepreneurial experimentation that give rise to new ideas and experiences but are also shaped by frictions; and (3) remote work contributes to decentering traditional pathways to adulthood by reconfiguring the spatial and temporal coordination of work, mobility, and life-course transitions.