Deborah Boehm

In an era of unprecedented global movement, scholarship has increasingly focused on migrations across borders. Much less theorized are forms of ‘return’ and how return fits within anthropological studies of migration and transnationalism. Returns may be deliberate or forced, celebrated or ambivalent homecomings, movement framed by welcome or marginalization. The proposed Wenner-Gren workshop aims to theorize return in the current moment, bridging research about return migration, the forced returns of deportation, and other forms of ‘reverse’ movement: What constitutes ‘return’? How can studies of migration contribute to understandings of such movement, and in what ways might we need new analytical tools? The workshop will provide a global and comparative analysis of return migration, deportation, repatriation, and other forms of ‘going back’ to familiar or forgotten places. Collectively, the scholars aim to problematize return, identifying how and when returns, departures, or new migrations take place and the political and social entanglements that inevitably accompany such movement.