Post-Deportation Life in Ghana. The Entanglements of Temporality and Gendered Relationships in Deportees Experiences of Forced Return.

The management and control of irregular migration has attracted growing attention globally in the past two decades, in the media, within academia and in policymaking. This resulted in an increased use of forced movement from the global north to the south for immigration-related purposes. However, studies on the long-term impact of deportation are surprisingly scarce.

This project explores what happens in the years following forced return and how deportees readjust to the sudden change in their life trajectories, which interrupts or alters their migration journeys, their social and gendered position, and their relationships with time.

By documenting the lives, experiences and narratives of migrants forcibly returned to Ghana from Europe - a phenomenon that involves predominantly men - I will consider the entanglement of temporality with the reconfiguration of gendered expectations and reciprocities. This research will address three key questions:

- How do social and gendered relationships shape deportees' experiences of reintegration post-deportation? - How do deportees re-establish 'respectable' masculinities in the aftermath of deportation?

- What is the impact of deportation on people's temporalities? (e.g. severed dreams, rupture in social progression, new futures)

These are topics requiring urgent investigation. With this project, I will contribute to a burgeoning scholarship on the interconnection between mobility, gender, and temporality. However, these tend to be analysed as separate fields of knowledge and have received little attention in the context of deportation.

This project will bring novelty to existing work in the field by combining two bodies of literature commonly studied separately: migration and gender, and migration and temporality. Furthermore, the temporal dimension of post-deportation life is a neglected area of study that deserves further academic scrutiny.

Hence, this project addresses an acutely important and timely knowledge gap. While the global north increasingly focuses on forced removal as a central tenet of border controls, there are few studies on the knock-on effects on receiving countries and communities, which are often underprepared to support deportees.

It is crucial to better understand the long-term impact of forced return on people and societies, thereby benefitting deportees, their communities, and returning countries. With an in-depth analysis of post-deportation life, I will offer an ethnographic and collaborative study of return migration, shifting the focus from the global north to the global south.

By studying the aftermath of deportation within local settings and its entanglement with gendered relationships and temporality, I will bridge a gap between scholarships often analysed separately.

This project has both social and cultural significance, providing important insights into issues that are under-researched and overlooked amidst contemporary discussions on irregular migration.