In a 2007 article in the Journal of Refugee Studies Roger Zetter revised the concept of refugee labelling he had introduced almost 20 years earlier. He argued that originally the concept revealed how the humanitarian discourse and institutional action on refugees contributed to their disempowerment, yet in the meantime the refugee label transformed to differentiate various migrant/refugee categories as a means of their governance. Since then, the concept and debate on labelling and categorizing between and within types of forced and voluntary migration, on the asylum-migration nexus, mixed migrations, mixed motives, and shifting statuses has continued high on the political and public agenda. In this course we will familiarize ourselves with this debate and discuss what it means when policy-makers, humanitarian aid personnel, refugee support groups or local social workers and migrants themselves enact and co-create or evade and resists such labels.
Thus, this course aims to discuss pertinent questions around the issue of labelling, based on readings from migration and refugee studies that reflect the ongoing discussion of the last ten years, including its relevance in the current global crises of migration (governance). Thus, how does it matter which terms we use to describe the world and the people? What are categories and labels, and why are they important? How do (policy, legal, discursive, social, and symbolic) categories work, how are they defined, and by whom? How are labels put into practice? How, when and why do migrants (not) fit categories? What are the consequences of labelling? How does this matter within and outside European borders?, and not least how do migrants experience labels used on them, and how do they use, subvert or resist their being labelled?
- Kursleiter/in: Margit Fauser
- Kursleiter/in: Leif Merlin Tietz