Year: 2026
Type: article
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.
Author: Lucie Laplace
Institution: Université Lumière Lyon 2
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7214940694