Thread by @heavencrawley

Thank you @Diegocg214 for articulating so clearly difficulties we face as #migration researchers wanting to avoid problems of 'categorical fetishism' whilst simultaenously being unable to avoid using categories in how we do, and present, our research imiscoephdblog.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/sel…

Here's my @scmrjems piece with Dimitris Skleparis in which we tried to articulate the problem in context of our #MEDMIG research. It's virtually impossible to avoid using categories to name and frame but we need to be much more aware of their consequences tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

Our point is not that we can entirely avoid categories as a way of making sense of our social and political worlds, rather that we should more explicitly ackowledge that these categories do not simply represent or reflect the world but simultaneously create and limit it...

As migration researchers we need to explicitly engage with the politics of bounding i.e. the process by which categories are constructed, the purpose that they serve and their consequences. @reecejhawaii makes same point in his 2009 @ProgHumGeog article www2.hawaii.edu/~reecej/Jones%…

In particular we need to work more critically with categories constructed by politicians, policy makers and the media to exclude and contain. Academics are under increasing pressure to ensure their work 'has impact' but risk becoming complicit in the politics of migration control

I vividly remember reading Bakewell's @refugeestudies article and being taken aback by how much idea of 'policy relevant research' had shaped my own work. More than a decade later its more important than ever to undertake research 'beyond the categories' academic.oup.com/jrs/article/21…

I don't have solution to problem of how to engage with categories, its impossible to avoid them. But we do need to understand and engage with the political and policy objectives that underpin the bounding process in order to ‘bring into bounds’ that which is increasingly excluded