Migration Categorisation

Lucie Laplace

doi:10.22151/politikon.6205

Authors

Lucie Laplace Université Lumière Lyon 2 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1503-3492

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22151/politikon.6205

Keywords:

migration categorisation, political technologies, migrant subjectivities, governance, Latin America, epistemic power, deportability, irregular migration

Abstract

MIGRATION CATEGORISATION: A historically and politically situated process through which states, international organisations, expert communities, civil society actors, and migrants produce, circulate, stabilise and contest labels that render mobility legible and governable. Within a polycentric and unequal field, categorisation works across institutional, experiential and epistemic registers, stratifying access to rights and recognition, distributing visibility and invisibility, and authorising some forms of knowledge while marginalising others. It operates at once as a political technology and as a terrain of struggle, constituting differentiated legal, social and political subjectivities. Dominant classifications are enforced, negotiated, reappropriated and challenged in situated ways, exposing their instability even where such contestation rarely displaces the hierarchies they sustain.

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