Parvati Raghuram: "Four Moves for Reshaping Migration Categories."

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Speaker 1: On the go sprint lectures on African mobilities podcast by Africa Multiple.

Speaker 2: Now an introduction of our speaker for today. Professor Pavati Raguram is a professor of geography and migration research and policy at the Open University in the UK. Her scholarly interests fall under the intersections of globalisation, migration and mobility, gender, class and race politics as well as postcolonial theory. Broadly her research interrogates the implications of mobility for class and race politics and the ways that postcolonial theory can offer routes for really understanding and also contesting some of these politics. Professor Pavati has primarily worked on the tech industry in India and the UK, but as she rightly pointed to us a few minutes ago, she's also currently involved in a few projects on migration within Africa. She has published extensively on retheorising migration of skilled migrants, care workers, but also on international students in the Global North. For our talk today, she will be sharing with us a recently published paper in the Journal of Immigrants and Refugee Studies titled 'Democratising, Stretching, Entangling, Transversing: All Moves for Reshaping Migration Categories'. So we are very, very delighted to have Professor Pavati Raguram with us and Professor, the floor is yours.

Speaker 1: So the paper really comes out of whole issues around categorisation that have sort of befuddled me ever since I came to the UK thirty odd years ago. So in India I did urban geography. So when I came here as a very young mother to the UK, I thought, let me do urban geography. Then I was told, no, no, no, you have to do development studies. And I had never done development studies in my life. I had done economic geography which is not the same thing at all for us because it was about... But here what was economics in India was development here. So clearly where I started from and the fact that how I looked mattered in how I got categorised and how my research subsequently got categorised. So I could never do economic geography. I could only ever do development studies. And from there I developed and then I applied for this job called Third World Studies. It was a two-day interview and I went with one day's worth of clothes. And I thought, oh, I'm never going to get this. I had no clue what Third World Studies was because I kind of knew enough about Third Worldism because of the work, because of the Non-Aligned Movement, but not beyond that. Never had this external outward looking perspective on what a third world looks like and what should be taught within it. And oddly enough, I ended up getting that job and having to teach Third World Studies and I was thinking I am like a few minutes ahead of my students if that. But so there was something fundamental here about how I was categorised, how disciplines were categorised, how objects and people and their mobilities were categorised. And I felt like I was caught in the middle of that. And to me therefore the whole question of categorisation has always been something I've struggled with as a result. But also recognise the power of some of these categories and how we think about this. And so this paper really came out of that and then I, out of that sentiment, an ongoing long-term sentiment. And then I was invited to do a plenary for the IMISCOE conference, which is the organisation of migration research centres in Europe, for their spring conference, which was on migration categories. So it kind of helped me to focus on what it is that I've been struggling with a bit. And this paper comes partly as developed in relation to that. So what am I arguing in this paper?

Speaker 1: I guess what I'm saying is, I start with why does all this matter in the context of migration. Because it's one thing to talk about development studies, it's another thing to talk about migration. Not that both are not problematic, but each is differently problematic and differently situated as problematic. In the European context at any rate, migration is extremely polarized in terms of how it collects together audiences, policies, researchers, slightly less so researchers, but definitely within in terms of audiences and politics. So it is politicized very strongly in bipolar ways, with people generally tending to think of themselves either for migration or against migration in some forms or ways. And there are some little bits of things in between. And I was trying to think through actually what are the inheritances of that for politics and conflict, right? And one of the key inheritances of that is that it is the basis of politics and conflict. It's the basis of so much of elections. So at the Open University where we produce courses which last over ten years, and I did a piece on migration for a level one module, and they said, oh, you know, one of the persons said, actually, migration is kind of topical now, but in ten years' time it might not be so interesting or topical. People might not be worried about it. And the rest of the course team turned around and said, it will, it will still be extremely political. So in a sense, one of the key things for me is how do you think of a category in the context of that categorization mattering, mattering hugely, dividing families, dividing groups, and then how do you step outside of that bipolar politics that is offered to you and which almost seems to be something you inherit and defines you. And so how can you use categorization to think beyond that polarization in some form or way. And I should also say this is part of a group of people who are working in this kind of model, who are thinking beyond the kind of focus on migrants as the primary object of mobility, which has to be contained and through whose bodies other forms of mobilities travel or around which infrastructures cohere. So what we want to do is to think beyond that, to think about all the other infrastructures of thought and ideas, of objects and their mobilities and how they relate to this really problematized migrant category of mobility. So that's where this paper comes from and that's the rationale of the paper, right? So what was I writing in this? The first thing I guess is the architecture of contemporary migration categories. The who, the why, the how, the where and the when, and why these matter. So who clearly matters and it is often seen as one of the really important epistemic divides. So one of the things that people say is, aha, this is an etic perspective because it's made by policymakers, but then this is an emic perspective because this is actually migrants' own categorization, with people aligning themselves differently on whether they think one is superior to the other and making claims about the authenticity of different of these, of who categorizes, yeah. The second is of course why people categorize and is closely related with that, is for instance categorization as claim-making or categorization as a practice which is, no, categorization as something which officials do, right? As opposed to people's own categorizations as a form of claim-making. So in this part of the paper, one of the things that I say is that actually for everybody, categorization is a form of practice. And when somebody is standing there day after day and then going into work and stamping people as such and such compared to such and such, they're categorizing, but that's a set of practices which also seem to need to be seen as living in a world of practices, including that of claim-making.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So, uh, the third question is how do people categorize? So, uh, of course, uh, categori—the um—the the how of categorization is um—is based around uh the powers to categorize and the powers of the categories themselves. So—and there are differences between these. These power differentials arise through the how of categorization. For instance, administrative or legal categories may be seen as derived from law, but common sense categories are derived from these as well as through media and public discourses, contemporary and historical. Moreover, the ways in which categorization is operationalized through everyday talk rather than through juridical processes is another important vector of differentiation. So the power of these categories is not just derived from association or used by policy makers, but also a power over groups and a power through everyday circulations amongst communities and populations. Often reverberating, for instance, through their use in the social media and wider media. That is the power through reach. Um, and then there's the where and the when of the categorization. The power of particular sites in migration category making is really important. So when you walk up to an immigration counter, how many of us who have got—who do not have blue EU passports or red British pass—I mean red EU passports or—you know—blue American passport, so many of us feel anxious, right? We go through and we think—and I remember in the uh—so when my family come from India now, I have a British EU passport, but on the other hand, when they come from India, the first thing they tell you when they reach—yes, you know—it was okay at the immigration counter. So—you know—there is always that anxiety, the where of when and—and the when of categorization. So when a landlord is required to check and ensure that they're not letting a house to an irregular migrant or when the public are encouraged to report those with irregular statuses, they too are required to categorize and are invested in both the roles and the responsibilities of the state and its authority to categorize. So in effect, some of the changes—at least in the UK—through what uh Mezzadra and Neilson call the multiplication of borders has been precisely in redistributing um—who is allowed to categorize, when they're allowed to categorize, and where they're allowed to categorize. Everybody has the power to categorize. Many, many people are given the power to categorize because of the real issues—um—anxieties around migration and the very bipolar politics within which that occurs currently. So the paper then goes on to think through the limitations of categories. So although the who, why, how, where, and when of categories are useful, in practice they usually operate together. Categories can therefore be seen to limit thinking—to box in—rather than provide us with the ability to see the connections and the relationships between different types of categories. And I'm not the first one to say this. There's a whole lot of people who are saying this, yeah. So they critique, for instance, the epistemological tenets of categorization, which is usually about each category needing to be distinctive and mutually exclusive. So people are not allowed to be border crossing. And um—and then the categor—so—so categories have been critiqued because they lack internal consistency or the logic of homogeneity. And they're empirically difficult to pin down and then they have boundary-crossing qualities. Together, these point to the lack of mutual exclusivity, i.e., if you belong in one category, then you can't be in another. However, there's also other qualities of categories that make it—you know—that of migration categories that make it really problematic. For instance, its spatiotemporality, the locations, the statutory nature, and the casual—casual—you know—categories. Importantly, these also cross-cut each other. Okay, so I um—that I want to add to these—this sort of discussion by pointing to a few other things that I think are really important. One of them is that migration categories are often composite.

Speaker 1: Right? Not only in how they're used but also in intention. A typical example of this is the blue card, which uses age, employability or employment sector of employment, earning potential. All of these things can be put together in some more or less coherent ways in order to think of what the category should include. So they are often composite. Second is that a group of categories is often also juxtaposed or collapsed into another. So for instance, you have a group of migration categories and then you have a group of value categories like for instance, these are good categories, these are bad categories, right? These are good people, these are bad people. And that's very common in highly politicized conversations. And then there's differentiations and valuations are dependent on categorization but on different types of categorizations. So for instance, sometimes you may be using race, sometimes you may be using class. And all these are made possible because categories ultimately combine. And then thirdly, classification is very slippery. So it changes over time. And importantly, people change how they use categories. So for instance, you might think you're something now but five years from now you find actually you were never that category because they've changed the rules and they don't bother to tell you. And even if they tell you, obviously, not everybody understands it. And then therefore this can be used to deport and the best example of thus in the UK context is the Windrush. Yeah, and I won't go into that. So I in the rest of the paper, what I do is to argue that all of these things have consequences, right? And the lack of empirical specificity, the fact that these are composite, that they don't have, that they are shifting over time and they're slippery and they're also practices which slip and slide and which are so dependent on the who, how, where, why and when, then all means that, but are useful as analytical devices. But these are, it's really important to think about why are we bothering with all of this, yeah? And that's because categorization has consequences. Some people get evicted, some people use the categories in order to make claims, some others use it to visualize and problematize which is often invisibilized. And so actually paying attention to categorization as a process is part of politics and ethics of building towards the politics and ethics of migration, which is a kind of a body of work which I've been thinking through over time. So my four theses for rearticulating migration categories. The first one is to learn beyond learning from beyond migration studies. So the first one is democratizing categories, right? So obviously in the STS literature, there's a lot of stuff about how you need to open up categories to humans and non-humans alike. But of course, there's also been a critique about who's the human involved in this. In this kind of opening up. And you know, how do we spend more time thinking about those different types of humans? In migration studies too, there has been a desire to democratize, the desire to reduce the authority of experts in categorization and it's been a really important objective. But actually, it only goes so far. For instance, what it doesn't recognize is that the vectors can be so, some vectors can be so important for some groups and not for others. For instance, one migrant may consider mobility journeys as central, another might think that the nature of the work that they're being offered at the end of it is what is important, how it progresses their career is paramount. Somebody else might think it's actually it's the onward trajectory that a mobility produces that is important. So in effect, you are having process-based categories as if as with arrhythmic temporalities involved in this, right? So you have people who are talking about different levels and scopes of anticipation all being categorized together. So paying attention to these categories involves not just democratizing but also thinking of migrants' subalternity, involves recognizing the colonizing gaze through which migration categories are usually...

Speaker 1: produced and thinking about the who of migration most seriously. Secondly, I think it's stretching categories across place and time because categories are ultimately spatio-temporal configurations. They have a where and a when. They're discursive outcomes of cultural tropes and social formations, but also administrative outcomes of very particular here and now. So these migration terminologies and categories often universalized even though they often arise from the particular histories of the management of global south to north migration. So one of the things I always ask myself is what would this migration category look like if you looked at it from the perspective of a global south person. So, you know, as a student applying for a visa standing at the counter at the British High Commission in Delhi, what you'll be thinking is are my papers around scholarship, what's the fee flows that I have to show, what is the, you know, which is the kind of institution which is have they got greater clout or do some institutions get less students applying to less some institution are they less likely to get through. So these are the things that appear as important categorizations when you're standing in that line, right. So thinking through that lens of the actual person standing in that line in the global south, what is what are they thinking of the categories might be a really important political exercise, not just an intellectual exercise. And this this kind of thinking about thinking across borders and to thinking about how these things are colonial inheritances becoming more and more important for me particularly in the light of currently in the Black Lives Movement. So last week I was giving a talk on, you know, what is the challenge for thinking about transnationalism going forward. And that's where I, you know, my heads are thinking about this, are the heterogeneous temporalities that are kind of jostling with each other and thinking about whose categories then matter. And how do we work towards migration justice through our categorization. But the spatialities of migration categories are not only situated like in the global south, but they also exist within a world of categorization. They're translated and transported, especially in the context of harmonizing policies. So it's really important to think that actually even the situatedness of our migration category can be quite variable. Thirdly, and I'll be I'll finish in a couple of minutes, is that categorization exists in a world beyond migration categories. So for instance, if you think about what is it that gender categories are doing, when is it that people are calling up monolithic stable gender, monolithic gender stability for instance, and masking internal diversity and consistency as a claim, right. So when is it that these that that we should be working with, for instance, what is the field of gender studies doing around gender theorization and then thinking how does that relation relate to migrant categorization. And I think this is really important because these questions mean that we are not just stepping out of disciplinary disciplinarity or even transdisciplinarity, but we're becoming anti-disciplinary, right. And and I can spend a bit more time on that later, but but I think it is the political point about this is that in movement politics for instance, people can claim a singular category and actually evicting other people from those political categories is the political point, right. So sometimes you might want this kind of monolithic stability of a category. And finally, the final point is about transversing categories. Changing the point of interrogation is crucial. So starting with the issue of migration arguably leads to the inevitability of migration categories. But if you look beyond this, so for instance, if you look at what is the category that is actually relevant in this context, that category may not be look anything like the category for instance, and I'm here in the context of student migrants for instance. You think yeah, this is all about student migrants and there are millions of papers written about where do students go, why do they decide to go there and so on and so forth. Actually speaking, the point of it is that for me is that when you have the Shanghai University rankings, part of the things they look at is how international are you. So actually it's universities which are invested in this student mobility and academic staff mobility. So if you reposition this within the category of who is invested in these categories, it's not migrant. The migrant is therefore playing along to the branding exercises which are necessary to reproduce the power of institutions with a wider reach, right. So for whom has it mattered these categories. So I want to end by saying, you know, by throwing open some provocations about what this means for the future.

Speaker 1: For me, it's about what do those categories look like in other contexts. What difference does it make to think about categories as lived? How do we take on the categorization and categories which are meaningful to those whom we study, right? And how have existing foci of category led you down paths which actually take away from the power of other categories which actually are far more dependent on these on mobilities, right? And I think these are really important because addressing contemporary politics requires looking at the methods of the contemporary moment. But also to think about the good work that categorize might be doing, categories may be doing and where it is not doing good work. Both are required if we have to transact between the generality of categories and the singularity of justice. And that's what's required for the politics of the present.

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Speaker 2: Thank you so much for that fascinating talk. Um, I would actually introduce myself now 'cause I realise I didn't do it at the beginning. So I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Mobilities Research Section of the cluster and my research broadly looks at the mobilities of electronic waste. So, uh, my first question actually, one of the moves that you suggest for reshaping migration category is democratizing it in the sense of making room for categories that are amenable to non-humans but also multispecies relations. And given the times that we are with the COVID pandemic and also the coronavirus itself and its being a non-human actor so to speak and how it's intersecting with our ability to migrate and really move in interesting ways, I was wondering if you could speak more about what that might look like. What categories, for instance, might be possible for differently positioned people when we look at democratizing categories in general by accounting for non-human but also multispecies relations. What might that look like?

Speaker 1: So I'd like to start by saying that when I've, you know, when thinking about something like the crisis, um, what I find really useful following on from the work of people like, you know, who worked on policing the crisis and thinking about, um, uh, and a conversation actually between Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey on crisis. What's really important about thinking about the crisis is not to think, is to think about it A, as a condensation of existing infrastructures and their failures. And it has the power to unfold things that were probably present in the past, right? What Raymond Williams calls the residual categories, right? So one of the things that any moment offers is the ability to think through that residue, ah, but also to think through the emergent, right? And not just the hegemonic. So that's the first methodological thing is that the crisis is never a moment, it's not a period, it is an insight or an analytical take into what came before and what is to follow and an opportunity to organize oneself politically around this. So, so that's the first thing, you know, which is my broader perspective around thinking through a crisis. The second thing is I don't really work on multispecies, um, uh, so I wouldn't want to go down that path at this point. What I have been thinking about and is is much more about the relationship between that and actually the movement of other objects, in particular financial flows. For me, that's been very important looking at the African case actually, because, um, those kinds of mobilities and the entanglements of the multiple mobilities have become so central in and are rarely talked about. And the fact that actually there's a whole financial element to this migration business, right? So when students move and in my case I think here at the moment about students, but you can apply this to anywhere else, what we used to find is okay, you know, oil prices drop, right? The Nigerian students...

Speaker 1: Um, the value of the naira has dropped dramatically, right? Then, the person who is well-to-do has the ability to show a certain amount of money in the bank and can therefore move money across into another account in another country. But not everybody can because you need to have a minimum amount in order to be availed of international transfers, right? You look at the Namibian case, for instance. Um, the student mobility there to South Africa is is relatively seamless because actually they they for historical reasons have worked in the same currency, um, uh common monetary area, right? Um, whereas you look at Zimbabwe and that's a totally different relationship, you know, with with the question of bonds, with how the currency dropped, the fact that actually even acquiring currency is therefore difficult and then, uh, and I tried talking about this in Singapore which is highly technical, right? And I uh I remember I there were some Chinese uh Chinese um uh people from China in the audience who had already struggled with the backwardness of Singapore that actually you had to pay when you went to the bill because they said, wow, you know, in China it's all automatic facial recognition and so they just, you know, take the money off you. And then what was interesting is, so you have all these kinds of other forms of mobilities which are enabled and disabled. Whereas in the Zimbabwean case literally they're taking bags of money out and walking across the border and distributing it and paying it up as fees in order to acquire a place abroad. So while not of species, what I'm conscious of of is the complete entanglements of the infrastruc of multiple infrastructures, right? The financial infrastructures, the mobility infrastructures, um, and the oil infrastructures in the case of Nigeria, for instance, right? So you're talking about multiple markets. And and all of these interrelate in the context of actually the futures market because, um, the uh because money itself travels in its own circulation. So for instance, in the South African case, it's one of the most highly traded currencies in the world. So it it is highly volatile. So today the Nigerian uh money may be enough and tomorrow it won't, right? So it is in that context and all of these variations came to a head in something like a crisis, right? But what the crisis does because what we found when is that, um, it mobilized some and immobilized others. And this was never straightforward because it was not entirely class dependent. For some people, it was dependent on a multiplicity of factors which came together. So there's um it is uh and it's those kinds of entanglements, the unexpectedness of it, but also the ability to to uh in the COVID case, one of the things we found is that the ability to be able to delay a decision was very variable, right? Some people could delay it and others couldn't. And I think there's something really about the temporalities of how mobility and immobility get played out in these entanglements between things, right? And people that um uh that uh really led to mobilizing some and yeah, it it had very differential effects. Sorry.

Speaker 2: Thank you. We have another question uh from Professor Andrea Behrends and she her question is on the power to categorize. So people constantly categorize or in other words, we are never outside of categories. How do you distinguish between migrant categories and other forms of belonging?

Speaker 1: So for me, one of the things is that any act of um categorization is only a product of um it is no, most of the time, not always, it is a part of the production of one's own subjectivities. So it's done in relation to others depending on the audience. That audience might be a form, right, that you have to fill or it might be a person that you align with, right? And for me, one of the crucial things has been, and again, this is really interesting in the African case, is uh who is who is African, right? Um, and that's been uh a really a political question, um.

Speaker 1: In different ways across my two or three projects, right? So, I've been working with an African dancer who's Jamaican and British-born, or British-brought up, and strongly religious, believes his spirit will go back to Africa after he dies because that's what happens to slave spirits, and he comes from obviously from the history of slavery. Where and yes, the AU says the sixth arm of the AU is its diaspora. But equally, there are so many divisions within Africa as well, as there are in any other place, right? So you will see the kind of... so not any more or less than on any other place which is really important to say. But how Nigerians are held, for instance, one of the things we've really struggled with in one of our projects is the extent to which there's a kind of xenophobia around Nigerians. So when migrants categorize themselves, they're categorizing in context of all these kinds of political movements which are shifting. So it's not to answer that question but to say that what one belongs to and who, when matters probably in thinking about this relationship between migrant categorizations and belonging. So yeah.

Speaker 2: In the paper you talk about how categories can be generated both by migrant activists but also policymakers. In the context of migrant and activists, could you elaborate a bit further how powerful and organized a subaltern appropriation of categories might look like and how they might change migration policies? So in a way the interplay between these different position people, migrant activists but also policymakers?

Speaker 1: I'm not a migrant activist, so I would always want to say that first, that I have been broadly working in the sort of conceptual field. So whenever I speak, I should be humble about thinking that I'm speaking off other people's research on this area and to recognize that there are many in this room who are better positioned to speak on this. So with that humility, I would like to say that I would like to just offer some thoughts since I was asked it. I think claim-making is something we all do, but at the same time there is something also about bringing together multiple claimants, right? And that's where activism really works, because it is through the amalgamation of multiple people and through, you know, that one gets that traction in public, in the media. My worry with all of this at the moment is that I have, in the last few years, all I have seen is growing anti-immigrant sentiment. And that has been... so migrant activism has not fundamentally made a difference to that as yet, in my understanding of it. But I'm sure there are people who would know more about this in the room, and I'd love to hear from them.

Speaker 2: So we have another question from Franca. How categorizations affect North-South migration especially in contexts where multiculturalism is becoming extinct, so to speak?

Speaker 1: Yeah, there are two parts to that actually. One of them is the extent to which South-North migration gets problematized itself, in that it becomes... and it again gets entangled with, you know, other cognate categorizations, like for instance migration and development, right? How would the world look if you thought actually that all this money that students are paying to the Global North actually helps develop the Global North? And that this is negative remittances that the students are paying, that the Global South faces, and that the Global North is actually the beneficiary from student fees, right? You have then...

Speaker 1: upturned your south-north migration story by actually looking precisely through this kind of not species association but by looking at association between fee flows and people flows. So, I think there's that's why it's so political to think about who benefits, right? And to not see south-north migration as where southern beneficiaries. To me, that's also part of the whole thing about thinking about multiculturalism because there was a view of multiculturalism as adding value. There's a really great piece by Adorno, it's a short piece where he talks about the importance, this is in the context of a whole lot of Jews moving from Europe into into the US and they were told that, you know, they were variously accommodated into the academy and then, you know, not always very well because, you know, anti-Semitism is global phenomenon. But and then where they were seen, they were told actually good that you were contributing something to us. And he argues we don't contribute, right? We are constitutive of it. There is no pre-existing knowledge without us. And I think that's one of the fundamental challenges that multiculturalism hasn't taken on board, that actually where is the one culture to begin with? And how is it that, you know, is the Canadian culture already, you know, inherently multicultural, not multicultural the way they look at it, yeah, where there is one culture followed by another culture, but actually you're not contributing to it, you're constitutive of it. It doesn't exist outside of this of this of this kind of amalgam, right? And it has been produced and and I think that's one of the really important contributions that have, you know, needs to be picked up from post-colonial theory. It was one of its strongest contributions to this form of thinking which I think we sometimes have lost. So upturning things and then also thinking what is it the object itself, you know, is there a purity to the object?

Speaker 2: Thank you. And I think this actually provides quite a natural segue into a question from Paddy. What possibilities categories open up for, so in a way can we interrogate the architecture of categorization itself and what possibilities does that offer?

Speaker 1: Oh absolutely. I think the whole paper is about interrogating the architecture of categorization and to say that actually that's one of the key things that we must do, but also that this is a political act because it's always got to align with the politics of the present, right? What is it that we are doing this analytical work for? And I feel that increasingly frustrated at the very mute politics and ethics discussion in some of these broader debates. So now recently somebody told me every paper of yours is a manifesto. I said, yeah, it probably is now. Can't be bothered otherwise.

Speaker 2: So we have another question from Uli and she is interested in the tensions of democratizing categories and how that might relate to policing of categories in itself in terms of authority. So an example that she's thinking of is how landlords are having to check categories and re-categorize and as a result of that. So the question in itself is how might we also have to rethink authority and policing of category in terms of democratizing?

Speaker 1: No, great point actually and really something I'll take away because I think you're absolutely right. In some ways I did not want to use the word decolonization because I think I've, you know, apart from having a very large two million pound project on decolonization, for the rest of my life I don't do decolonization. I think it's something that, you know, indigenous people do and so so yeah, I lead on it but I again I don't do the decolonization. But I think there's something about about democratization as as an outcome and democratization as a process, right? So handing authority to everybody to to categorize is one thing, but are the outcomes democratic, right? Do they enable a better redistribution of power? And that's...

Speaker 1: Not necessarily so in the landlord case, right? Um, it it it accrues and elides the power of the state with that of people. Is that democratization? I'm not sure. Right? So it appears democratization. And that's actually one of the biggest uh magic tricks actually which has been played by current politicians, right? Which is to say that um uh to uh I mean in in in so many countries, right? It is the removal of expertise, the belief that actually everybody has the authority to say things. Um uh and so on. With which is really a act of duplicity because it ultimately hides the fact that most of those are done, most of those words are given in order to elide with existing past power structures, not to unsettle them. Right? And and that's been the basis of populist politics forever. I mean, and I come from India, so I should know about this. Now, it's been terrible, right? It's been really terrible to see what's going on in terms of, you know, how the removal of expertise and the idea that there is democratization has been brought into in order to foster very particular interests.

Speaker 2: Great. Uh, we have room for just one more question, I believe we still have few minutes. So I would ask Paddy's second question. And he's asking uh if your your argument about democratizing categories are ultimately about also liberalizing the process of categorization. In that sense, if that's the case, would this still make any political sense if we liberalize categorization in itself, would there be any political impetus to to categorization then and to the categories that come out of it?

Speaker 1: So, I mean, I guess in some ways it reverberates with the previous question in that uh it is not the same as liberalization. And I think this, you know, this is why ending the paper with actually what is the politics of the present and where is the demand for justice in how does that get framed into questions of migration categories for me is really crucial. Because uh this is not an analytical um you know play. It can be seen and as as something, oh ha, I'm talking quite analytically, quite conceptually. I am not. I am practically saying that actually you need to do this better because otherwise people's lives are at stake. Right? And that's what's so, for me, this kind of analytical work begins with the politics of the present but also must end, return to the politics of the present. Right? It must always return to actually producing a more just world. A more uh and so it so levels of abstraction like categorization, which you know, in some ways is a form of abstraction, you know, as a theoretical um uh as a process of bringing together and abstracting from the concrete as um you know, people like Stuart Hall have argued. But what you get here is the importance of then returning that that theorization back to the politics of the presence. You must address it. Right? You must, that's why it's important to have that manifesto. Not enough to write the theoretical thing.

Speaker 2: Great, great. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for uh sharing with us your ideas and sharing with us uh this paper. I think it's being a fantastic start to this spring's lecture series and we can't thank you enough. So uh we have shared the paper. If you didn't get a chance to read it, I'm sure given the conversation that we have here, it's kind of piqued your interest and you can go back and read it. And also when the podcast uh is eventually edited and produced, we'll be happy to share it with everyone in the audience and also kind of generate more conversations too. So uh with that, I would uh end uh lecture here today and extend all our thanks from the mobilities cluster, mobility section of the cluster to Professor uh...

Speaker 1: Kavati, sorry I'm calling you professor again. I think I can tell myself, pardon me, but we are very grateful that you joined us and also shared with us your research. All right.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. And thanks for the wonderful questions. And thanks Grace for your chairing. Thank you.

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