Transfers 6(2), Summer 2016: 94–111 ISSN 2045-4813 (Print) doi: 10.3167/TRANS.2016.060207 ISSN 2045-4821 (Online) All for a Container! Return Migration, Transport Technologies, and Love Affairs Alessandro Jedlowski, University of Liege Abstract Tis article analyzes the articulation between mobility and technology within life trajectories marked by migration, exile, and the search for economic achievement. It does so by focusing on a Nigerian couple’s (attempted) itiner- ary of return migration from Italy to Nigeria, and on the tensions that surround the role played by a specifc transport technology, the shipping container, within this process. It highlights how, throughout the itinerary that brings the container from Italy to Nigeria, its social meaning and that of the cargo stored in it become the center of a series of tense interactions, in which diverging imaginaries about transnational mobility, migration, and life abroad come to the fore, and provoke radical transformations in the life of the people involved in the itinerary of the container itself. Keywords Nigerian migrants, return migration, shipping container, social construction of technologies, transnational mobility, transport technologies Among the wide range of mobilities that have come to preoccupy the social sciences over the past few years, migration occupies a special place. 1 As Nikos Papastergiadis points out, in fact, “migration, in its endless motion, surrounds and pervades almost all aspects of contemporary society,” 2 thus becoming a metaphorical crossroad for the diferent kinds of mobility (social, economic, material, virtual, symbolic) that crisscross contemporary societies all over the world. 3 Migration and the mobility that it entails are seen as entertaining a particular relationship with the processes of construction of the modern sub- ject. 4 Tey participate in the reformulation of social understandings of iden- tity and belonging, and they orient the processes of construction of the self through specifc, motion-based “drives,” 5 and “aspirations.” 6 In this context, transport and communication technologies have a partic- ularly relevant role. By facilitating and accelerating the motion of people, ob- jects, and ideas, they foster the creation of transnational networks that make long-distance migration possible, and the connection between destination