Im/Mobility Dreams. Rethinking Young Eritreans’ Migratory Trajectories

Based on ethnography conducted in Tigray (northern Ethiopia), this article investigates narratives, experiences, and imaginaries of Eritrean refugees about their past journeys and their desired and hindered future ones. It aims at scrutinizing some of the analytical dichotomies through which contemporary migration is described (i.e., forced and voluntary mobility, mobility and immobility, spatial im/mobility and existential im/mobility, migration and mobility). By adopting a phenomenological approach, it recognizes the socially, historically, and politically constructed character of the categories of migration, as well as their inability to account for the complexity of individual experiences and collective frames.