Workshop: “Homecoming or displacement: Reflecting on return in African communities”

Homecoming or displacement: Reflecting on return in African communities

Return is central to the understanding of migration policies and the politics of belonging on which they are based on. However, despite its relevance there is surprisingly relatively little discussion about the category return and how it is integrated in the categorical scheme of the migration/refugee complex. The label returnee is not a legal category as for instance the category refugee and not a prominent humanitarian label as IDP (Internal Displaced Person). However, like in programs addressing IDPs refugee return program are usually exercise in technocratic ways, thereby ignoring and reducing the complexity of) of peoples’ lives.

Within this setting, the objective of the workshop is twofold.

1.            By bringing together scholars from different fields within migration studies (i.e. migration governance, refugee studies, anthropology of migration, sociology of migration), we aim to get a deeper insight in the way the category is used by different stakeholders and how it creates its own reality. We will look at the career of the category and reflect on how it is performed in every day interactions. 

2.            We will reflect on relevant cases within the African continent that show the interplay between the labeling by the migration regime, the self-categorization of people on the move,  and the way they are categorized by others. We argue that self-categorization is situational and is negotiated in a constant interplay between the experiences and the opportunities of the migrants on the one hand and the categorization of the migration regime on the other. Moreover, we aim to foster a critical reflection on migration categories that goes beyond the discussion on the mismatch between the way people on the move categorize themselves and the way they are categorized by others. By exploring  how labeling people creates its own reality and affects the belongingness of people, their self-categorization and the way they are categorized by others, we attempt to look beyond the binaries of voluntary and forced migration, home and exile, displacement and return and internal and international migration.