We are happy to announce the next session by Sarah Kunz, University of Essex.
- The talk will take place on June 14, 10 AM Lisbon-London time / 11 AM Paris time.
Sarah will present her new book and her presentation will be followed by a short debate moderated by Erika Polson, University of Denver. Please check the session’s details below:
Expatriate: Following a migration category
Abstract: Who are expatriates? How do they differ from other migrants? And why do such distinctions matter? Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this book interrogates the contested category of ‘expatriate’, tracing it across different sites from the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonisation to today’s heated debates about migration. Doing so, the book sheds light on the expatriate’s changing meaning, controversial uses and diverse lived experience. Then as now, debates about who is an expatriate reveal broader struggles about social inequality and power. Expatriate argues that migration is a key terrain on which imperial and colonial power relations have been reproduced and translated. Today, migration categories like the expatriate remain at the heart of the insidious ways that intersecting material and symbolic inequalities are enacted.
Bio: Sarah Kunz is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. Her research explores privileged migration, the politics of migration categories and knowledge production on migration, and the role of for-profit actors in the commodification of citizenship via citizenship-by-investment programmes. Her first monograph titled ‘Expatriate: Following a Migration Category’ was published with Manchester University Press in January 2023. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, the book explores the postcolonial history and politics of the category ‘expatriate’, tracing it from the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonisation to today’s heated debates about migration. Sarah co-founded the Elite Studies Working Group and is also a co-convenor of the BSA Study Group on the Sociology of Elites. See profile here.
To access the webinar room, please click here.