Counterstreams in Migration: Ethiopians' Choices to Stay, Leave, or Return [Paperback]

Migration journeys are not unidirectional. InCounterstreams in Migration, Hewan Girma reveals a more complex circuit of migration, concentrating on the motivations behind non-migration, return migration, and repeat migration to show how these flows mutually affect and influence the migrant as well as the family members who remain at home.

Weaving together nearly 100 stories of non-migrants, returnees, and repeat migrants from Ethiopia, Girma advances a theory of migra-emotions, emotions specific to migration, to understand decisions and experiences, such as the imaginary of home and the lived reality of alienation, disaffection abroad, and feelings of duty to one’s homeland.

Looking beyond the meanings of migration or processes of integration, Girma explores the emotional subtext of migration aspirations. In doing so,Counterstreams of Migrationcomplicates conventional understandings of migration and provides a more complete picture of migrant stories.

Hewan Girmas book is an exciting, timely, and pioneering work on the experiences of Ethiopian non-migrants, returnees, and repeat migrants. It provides a transnational perspective for a 360-degree view of migration experiences to better understand the emotional labor undertaken by both stayees and migrants.Counterstreams in Migrationis an excellent contribution to migration studies as well as to the emerging scholarship on African diaspora studies.Cawo Abdi, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota and Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria, and author ofElusive Jannah: The Somali Diaspora and a Borderless Muslim Identity

Counterstreams in Migrationis a major intervention into the field of migration studies. Hewan Girma examines non-migrants, return migrants, and repeat migrants to reshape how we understand movements of people and demonstrates that mobility is a dynamic process rather than a one-lÓA