Democratizing, Stretching, Entangling, Transversing: Four Moves for Reshaping Migration Categories

Migration categories are powerful in shaping who migrates, how and with what rights. This paper outlines the who, why, how, where and when of current categorization and its limits. It then suggests four practices that can reshape migration categories: democratizing and decolonizing them by taking these categories beyond the countries of the global North; stretching their spatio-temporal referents; entangling them with other categorisations based on race and gender and how they are practiced so that their theoretical foundations, disciplinary insights and methodologies can be multiplied; and transversing them to see other processes and methods that cut across migrant categories