Paper short abstract:

On the basis of long-term ethnographic involvement with issues of migration and social navigation in Guinea Bissau and Burkina Faso, this paper analyses the migrant imaginaries of regional and cross-continental migrants through the concept of ruination.

Paper long abstract:

Migrant imaginaries tend to be shaped by the trajectories and achievements of previous generations of migrants. Past departures and returns inspire and enable the movements of new generations - whether in periodic cycles of regional labour migration or in moves across continents and over decades or even lifetimes. Current attempts by European authorities to dissuade, reshape, or pre-empt African migrant imaginaries in the wake of the so-called European refugee crisis tend to assume that current and future movements are anchored in the present, and centred on the individual, and generally fail to consider the underlying social and structural continuities that shape expectations, outlooks and possibilities.

On the basis of long-term ethnographic involvement with issues of migration and social navigation in Guinea Bissau and Burkina Faso, this paper analyses the migrant imaginaries of regional and cross-continental migrants through the concept of ruination. Ruins of buildings are traces of political and social histories whose practical and symbolic meanings are reappropriated, reinterpreted, and renegotiated in ever-changing socio-political landscapes. Temples become tombs, hotels become barracks, monuments shift from shrines of lost glory to displays of ancient tyranny. In similar ways, past migrations linger on and inspire, challenge or dissuade new generations of migrants who may or may not be aware of the ruins on which they tread. By exploring migrant imaginaries through the processes of ruination they reject or reproduce, this paper offers an attempt to reconceptualise the relationship between past and present movements and the profoundly social nature of migrant aspirations and trajectories.

Paper short abstract:

By explaining the imaginaries behind Ethiopian domestic workers circumventing the kafala in the UAE, this study sheds light on the ruins of structural migration within transnational migration, in which migrants risk being undocumented for better economic opportunities and access to social mobility.

Paper long abstract:

The Gulf Council Countries (GCCs) employ a legal and interinstitutional framework for migrant workers to enter, work, and return. This framework is called Kafala, a sponsorship-based oversea labour recruitment system that ties foreign workers with nationals. Ethiopian domestic workers enter the UAE within this framework yet circumvent the Kafala and escape to join the illegal labour market, which has proved to be a popular destination despite the associated risks. The imaginaries that lead to circumventing the kafala are the product of complex imaginaries. On the other hand, the material and digital remains of those who have already circumvented the kafala are the ruins in which those imaginaries are inspired or challenged. This study examines how the lives of Ethiopian domestic workers in the illegal labour and housing markets disrupt, support, and ultimately redefine the imaginaries that motivate others to take the risk of circumventing the kafala. This study is based on netnography and extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the UAE among Ethiopian runaway domestic workers and in Ethiopia among re-migrating returnees. The findings show how lived experiences (or "ruins") challenge and inspire imaginaries, prompting many to flee or not to flee the Kafala. The ruins of these aspirations to circumvent the kafala support the underlying argument that imaginaries often shift due to actual lived experiences yet remain highly resilient and powerfully active in motivating migrant domestic workers to take the risk of leaving their legal status.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the effects of forced-return migrations on individual and community health in Dakar. The disruption of migration projects can critically alter experiences, perceptions, and relationships, undermining future prospects and deteriorating individual and social well-being.

Paper long abstract:

In Senegal, emigration is socially valued as a meaningful way to achieve success. However, increasingly restrictive European border policies contribute to making migration journeys more perilous and uncertain; therefore, unwilling, forced returns due to deportation or adverse events en route have become more frequent. Ethnographic research in the urban area of Dakar revealed numerous challenges for the subsistence and psychosocial readjustment of forced-return migrants: in a state characterized by liminality, their original project is ruined to a condition of marginalization, sense of failure, feelings of dishonor and shame. Relationships with origin and surrounding communities can be damaged by complex processes of stigmatization. Physical and psychosocial health are jeopardized, also for limited accessibility of available care services. At the same time, new forms of bottom-up communities based on solidarity and shared challanges can emerge. These findings are discussed through the theoretical lenses of bio- and necropower, stigma and idioms of distress, as the result of power unbalances that constrain the opportunities of young Senegalese migrants, expose them to structural violence, and ultimately yield embodied individual health experiences.

Paper short abstract:

Based on research with Somali migrants in Kenya, this paper looks at the unsettling effects return migration can have by focussing on three aspects, conspicuous consumption, alienation from the local population, and the impact on migration aspirations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the unsettling effects return migration can have by focussing on three aspects, conspicuous consumption, alienation from the local population, and the impact on migration aspiration. While conspicuous consumption is one of the symbols of a ‘successful’ migration abroad, these practices of return migrants also have unsettling effects by alienating parts of the local population from the idea of migration and ‘becoming like them’, and at the same time serve as encouragement to migrate for others. This paper is based on anthropological fieldwork with Somali migrants in Kenyan cities and will zoom into the effects of return migration on potential outmigration from the region. By trying to use the concept of ruination, the presentation will discuss in how far return migrants embody a specific kind of ‘migration’ which has shifted its form and meaning over the last decades.

Paper short abstract:

The paper traces ethnographically the emplacement of Portuguese contemporary 'return' migrants to Angola, against a background of past and present (post)colonial entanglements

Paper long abstract:

In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, a migratory flow of Portuguese workers in direction of the ex-colony of Angola took place. Many amongst them were individuals who, having been born to white settler families in colonial times, had left after the independence as ‘Retornados’ (Kalter 2022). Often accompanied by their kin, these migrants held relations to the Angolan land and people that were often ambiguous and conflicted.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the city of Benguela in 2015-16, this paper follows closely these migrant subjects, observing their everyday bodily interactions with the surrounding natural, urban, and socio-cultural landscapes, and the different forms in which they articulated their experience of (not) feeling at home, welcome, useful, etc. It asks: How do they occupy, move around, talk about, and conceive the space/place they came to inhabit? In which idioms do they express their feelings of belonging or estrangement to it? Which types of collective narratives are available for them to summon, re-invent, and embody in order to give meaning to their presence?

I use emplacement as a prism of analysis that incorporates subjective sentiments as well as the sociocultural underpinnings of these sentiments (Bjarnesen 2013), including extant resistance from the host communities, prevailing social-racial hierarchies, and competing ‘past-presencing’ narratives (Macdonald 2012) that lend a (potentially) agonistic imprint to the process. The emphasis is put in the relationship between such processes of emplacement and personal trajectories that resonate with the interconnected histories of the two countries.