Short Abstract

Who stays so that others can leave? This panel considers staying as constitutive of African worlds of outmigration, asking how departure redistributes status, labour and gendered obligation, and what is held in place so that others can move.

Long Abstract

This panel decentres the study of migration by considering the spectrum of staying, a constitutive dimension of social life: who stays, who is expected to stay, who refuses to stay and what worlds are sustained by those who remain. Migration scholarship continues to privilege movement and reproduce a ‘mobility bias’ (Schewel 2019). Those who remain commonly enter analyses as a residual category, whether as the ‘left behind’ or as members of ‘sending communities’, both casting stayers as dependants of absent migrants. Staying, however, is an active, if differentiated, condition that enables migration as much as it is formed by it, not least because some migrate so that others can stay (Jónsson 2011), and because some stay so that others can leave.

We ask what staying does to migration, and what migration does to the possibilities of staying. How does outmigration redistribute not only people but status, labour, care and gendered obligation? We invite contributions on, among other topics:

• designation through gender, birth order, marital status, illness, age, education, financial means or assumptions about who is already ‘bound’;

• refusals and reversals of designations, including those who leave anyway, those who leave against their will and those who struggle for the right to stay;

• how staying recasts relationships, personhood and the futures people imagine;

• the authority stayers claim over tradition and knowledge, and whether migrants recognise it;

• what is held in place so that others can move, from houses, graves and land to names and ritual ties.

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