Motherhood Motivations: African Refugee Women Resettled in Australia and Return Visits to a Country of First Asylum
| Published date | 01 August 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12249 |
| Date | 01 August 2016 |
| Author | Georgina Ramsay |
Motherhood Motivations: African Refugee
Women Resettled in Australia and Return
Visits to a Country of First Asylum
Georgina Ramsay*
ABSTRACT
This article expands on conceptualizations of refugee “return”by examining why African
women resettled as refugees in Australia return to visit the country of first asylum from which
they were previously resettled. I show that their return visits do not relate to attachment to
place, but are motivated by social obligations to practise “motherhood”to family members
who, due to conflict-induced displacement, remain in a country of first asylum. I argue that
the phenomenon of refugee “return”cannot be conflated exclusively with return to country of
origin but is, for African women in particular, centred on the reinvigoration of care relation-
ships across diasporic settings of asylum in which family remain. Building on an emergent
focus on feminization in migration studies, I show how these gendered dynamics of refugee
“return”are an entry point from which to re-consider how scholarship and policy take into
account “family”in contexts of forced migration.
INTRODUCTION
Why do African women who have been resettled as refugees in Australia participate in temporary
return visits to a country in which they previously lived in asylum? Whilst conducting ethnographic
research with women from Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo who had
been resettled in Australia, I observed a number of women planning and preparing to visit a coun-
try in which they had lived in first asylum; and, as part of my research, I used an active method-
ological approach in which I participated in one such journey with an informant on her return visit
to Uganda. I also observed that return visits are often expensive, time-consuming, and disruptive to
everyday life. Despite these difficulties, the women with whom I conducted fieldwork viewed
return visits, primarily to a country of first asylum in which family remain, as an imperative of
their lives in resettlement.
This nexus of migration, transnationalism, and return has emerged as a recent focus in migration
studies research, broadly (Carling and Erdal, 2014; Jeffery and Murison, 2011; King and Christou,
2011), and forced migration research, particularly (Halilovich, 2012; Lindley, 2009, 2010; Horst,
2008; Muller, 2008; Koser, 2007; Van Hear, 2006; Al-Ali, Black, and Koser, 2001; Barnes, 2001;
Shami, 1996). Scholarship in this field emphasizes the important role that resettled refugees play in
supporting the security of kin who remain in either the country of origin or a country of first asy-
lum, particularly through remittances (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves, 2011; Horst, 2008, 2006; Lindley,
2009, 2010). However, as I observed in my research, despite these long distance means of support,
* University of Newcastle
doi: 10.1111/imig.12249
©2016 The Author
International Migration ©2016 IOM
International Migration Vol. 54 (4) 2016
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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