Immigrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees: Navigating conceptual challenges through multidimensional migration space-time
Migration is a pervasive social, political, and economic experience. Despite its ubiquity, the complexities of migration present challenges for scholars. Ongoing debates revolve around defining central categories that describe and understand human movement. Concepts such as migrant, asylum-seeker, and refugee are fraught with tensions and overlapping characteristics. Disaggregating these categories is complex due to the messy and varied nature of individuals’ lived experiences. This complexity prompts scholars to critically examine how these categories are constructed and applied. Considering this, I argue that reconceptualizing migration categories as interconnected positions within a temporally and geographically contingent multidimensional migration space-time allows scholars to better examine the complexities of movement. Moreover, the intricate nature of migration necessitates the construction and reconstruction of adaptable concepts to better understand highly contextual experiences. Therefore, researchers must design research projects that can capture the nuances, tensions, and contradictions inherent in migration experiences, even when these nuances do not align with narrow, instrumentalized definitions used in legal regimes and public policy. While more flexible concepts offer valuable opportunities for deeper insights, there are also significant risks to consider.
Anderson, B., & Blinder, S. (2019). Who Counts as a Migrant? Definitions and their Consequences. United Kingdom: University of Oxford.
Bakewell, O. (2008). Research beyond the categories: The importance of policy irrelevant research into forced migration. Journal of Refugee Studies, 21(4):432-453. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen042
Bastia, T. (2014). Intersectionality, migration and development. Progress in Development Studies, 14(3):237-248. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464993414521330
Bohmer, C., & Shuman, A. (2008). Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century. United Kingdom: Routledge.
Brettell, C.B., & Hollifield, J.F. (2014). Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines. United Kingdom: Routledge.
Cameron, B.T. (2014). Reflections on refugee studies and the study of refugees: Implications for policy analysts. Journal of Management and Public Policy, 6(1):4-13.
Crawley, H., & Skleparis, D. (2018). Refugees, migrants, neither, both: Categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘Migration Crisis’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(1):48-64. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1348224
Dahinden, J., Fischer, C., & Menet, J. (2021). Knowledge production, reflexivity, and the use of categories in migration studies: Tackling challenges in the field. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(4):535-554. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2020.1752926
Delli Paoli, A., & Maddaloni, D. (2021). Conceptualizing motives for migration: A typology of Italian migrants in the Athens AREA. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 22(4):1465-1484. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-021-00818-0
Devanney, C., Lloyd, A., Wattis, L., & Bell, V. (2021). ‘We are still quite patchy about what we know’ International migration and the challenges of definition, categorisation and measurement on local service provision. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 47(15):3583-3599. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1772736
Dhaliwal, S., & Forkert, K. (2016). Deserving and undeserving migrants. Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 61: 49-61. https://doi.org/10.3898/136266215816772205
Gorodzeisky, A., & Leykin, I. (2020). When borders migrate: Reconstructing the category of ‘international migrant.’ Sociology, 54(1):142-158. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038519860403
Keyel, J. (2023). Resettled Iraqi Refugees in the United States: War, Refuge, Belonging, Participation, and Protest. New York: Berghahn Books.
Lister, M. (2013). Who are refugees? Law and Philosophy, 32(5):645-671. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-012-9169-7
Malkki, L.H. (1996). Speechless emissaries: Refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology, 11(3):377-404. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00050
Moszynski, P. (2011). Definition of refugee is inadequate for current patterns of migration in armed conflicts, report says. BMJ, 343:d7390. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.d7390
Nail, T. (2015). The Figure of the Migrant. United States: Stanford University Press.
Raghuram, P. (2021). Democratizing, stretching, entangling, transversing: Four moves for reshaping migration categories. Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, 19(1):9-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2020.1837325
Szczepanik, M. (2016). The ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ refugees? Imagined Refugeehood(s) in the media coverage of the migration crisis. Journal of Identity and Migration Studies, 10(2):23-34.
Tsegay, S.M. (2023). International migration: Definition, causes and effects. Genealogy, 7(3):61. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7030061