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Sarah Kunz, "Expatriate: Following a Migration Category" (Manchester UP, 2023)
01:04:06
An interview with Sarah Kunz
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very excited today to be speaking with Dr. Sarah Kunz about her book titled Following a Migration Category. It's just come out in 2023 from Manchester University Press. And this is a really interesting book. Asks a bunch of questions, who are expatriates? How are they different from other migrants? Why do we care about these distinctions? And additional ones like, how do we study this? How do we think about studying this? The book looks quite small and packs quite a punch, goes through these questions and more with lots of really interesting methods and thinking about methods. So, as you can probably tell, I got a lot from this book. And so, Sarah, I'm very excited to welcome you to the podcast to tell us more about it.
- [01:59]
C
Well, thank you so much for having me today. I'm really excited to be talking to you today.
- [02:03]
B
Before we get into the details of the book itself, could you maybe start us off introducing yourself a bit and explaining why you decided to write this book?
- [02:11]
C
Sure, of course. So I'm currently a lecturer at the University of Essex. And before I started in Essex just about five months ago, I was based at the University of Bristol for four years. And before I was at the University of Bristol. I was at UCL in London doing my PhD on the category expatriate. And that's really where this book originates. So I have been studying migration topics such as racism, gender, you know, inequality, social inequality, my whole career, so to speak, and also throughout my education. And I've always been interested in forms of privileged migration, as I call them, and I think that interest really does have a biographical background as well. Because I was a migrant myself. I lived abroad at various times in my life and I realized that I was never called a migrant, right. And then I started studying migration at university and I also realized that a lot of the migrants or case studies or sort of research I was exposed to in my studies didn't really attend to privileged forms of migration as much. And I couldn't really find myself in there. So I became interested in how certain forms of migration really aren't studied as much and aren't talked about as much in the framework of migration. And I think that's the sort of background to this, to this book. And then I came to the uk, so I moved to the uk and I think I can't quite remember when it was, but that's when I first came across the term expat expatriate. Because being German, we don't really use that category much, right? It's not a German term and we don't really have an easy equivalent to that category. So I came to the UK and I remember doing my master's thesis at the LSE at the time. So I was thinking about what to study and I was like, well, that's interesting. Wherever I've been abroad have been these expert communities and, you know, they have these really, you know, interesting dynamics. But I haven't really been studied so much, so I. So I did research on that and that really then turned into an interest in the category itself and the history of the terminology and the politics, because obviously it's a really contentious term, but it's also just such a diverse term and really surprising one. And so I, I became interested in it. That's really what started me often. So I did my PhD on the Catarix Patriot and I'll talk a bit more in a bit. But I then continued doing research here and there after I'd finished a PhD and then decided to publish my research into a book and, you know, rewrote the whole thing, did some more work and yeah, here it is.
- [04:42]
B
Wonderful. So you've mentioned already this idea of the category expatriate. It's in the title and you've mentioned it, and I think this is something I found really interesting sort of conceptually or methodologically. So can you tell us more about kind of of what can we learn from studying migration categories as categories rather than maybe the more common thing of studying migrants themselves, whether or not we call them expats?
- [05:10]
C
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a really great question. And I should probably start off just by saying that I'm obviously linking to really long tradition of sociological and other social science research into social categories. So, you know, social categories have been studied in all the different disciplines in the social sciences. And we know that social categories are embedded in power relations. So whether you think about the gender categories that we all live in and by, or whether you think about categories such as racial categories or nationality as a social category, or whether you think of employment categories, all of these categories that we use every day and often use really unthinkingly and that are absolutely natural to us in, in some ways or in many ways are, you know, socially constructed, if you like, and they are a product of society in many ways and are not necessarily rooted in any sort of essence or in any sort of biology. And obviously that's a well accepted and, you know, well researched fact. And I think that's really where my interest originated. And then coming to migration. Migration is a hugely politicized topic and it's become ever more politicized, I think, over the last decades. And you can just see that nowadays, you know, migration makes or, you know, breaks relationships, it decides elections, you know, is such a hugely important topic. And I just started to realize that a lot of, I think a lot of social struggle struggles were kind of carried out on the terrain of migration that really had actually very little to do with what we might think about as migration, statistically or legally speaking. Right. So when you think about the category migraine, I think we'll get back to that. But it's not even a legally defined category in many countries. It's also not a coherent statistical category. So statistically or legally speaking, there often is no migrant as such. Right. But yet we talk about migrants as if they were this kind of, you know, obviously obvious thing, you know, obvious group of people. And I think as the more I started thinking about it, the more I started realizing that a lot of debates that are supposedly about migration are really also or mainly even about other things. So they're about, you know, who belongs to us, you know, who are, who are we, you know, who do we want to be as A social imagined community, if you like, but also sort of. There are a lot of times they're quite racialized and we'll get back to that. But the, you know, racist distinctions or racist arguments nowadays are often made on the terrain of migration. And so, you know, thinking about and learning about these sort of issues more broadly, I then obviously came with my, you know, interest in privileged forms of migration and my realization, growing realization that privileged migrants were often excused from that category and came kind of couched in other terms. And so I thought about how interesting it is to study those who might, you know, be defined as migrants statistically, depending on which definition we use, but really aren't referred to as migrants in public debate, but also often don't self identify as migrants. Right. And so basically to look at these kind of implicit others of the category migrants. And that's when I came to the category expert, I suppose, and which had been, you know, was. Was debated more and more as I kind of came to this topic as well. But basically, I think that migration is broader than migrants. Right. And I think it's really dangerous, actually to think about migrants as, you know, an obvious category or an obvious group of people that, you know, we can include or exclude or let in or, you know, keep out. And I also think that it's really interesting and it often disappears from view to think about how migration categories are constructed not just by the state, you know, in. In its immigration law, if you like, or in kind of surveys, but they're constructed by corporations and by cultural productions and by, you know, all of us in everyday life. And we all kind of produce migration categories and use them to make sense of our world. And I think that's just a much broader field of research. And it's really interesting to explore the way that that works discursively, but then also how that links, of course, to material inequalities that define our societies and our societies across borders and to just think about the politics of that. I think I'll leave it at that. Was that kind of a useful introduction?
- [09:51]
B
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and gives a very good taste to some of the discussions that obviously are in much more depth in the book for listeners who want to continue diving into those chapters of your work. But the book is not just about thinking and theory. There's also some really interesting case studies that you bring in. In to kind of think about this social construction of categories and the politics of them in sort of some really practical examples. So could you maybe introduce us to the Sort of three research sites. And explain why you chose those particular three.
- [10:32]
C
Yes, yes, of course. And oh my gosh, it was such a difficult choice. I remember sitting in my supervisor's office and having a list of at least seven sites that I really wanted to research. And I had to narrow it down and it was a very difficult decision. And I mean, that just means that I think there's a lot more scope for research on this topic. But yes, I chose three sides. And the reason I did so should. Maybe I should tell you a little bit more about my methodology first. So I use that term following. And obviously that's also in the title of the book. And I think it might not make so much sense until you have actually read the book. But following is a sort of ethnographic tool, if you like, or methodology of, you know, I guess ethnography or ethnographic research traditionally would be these kind of locales that very match that kind of closed communities, right? But then in the context of a globalized world, in the context of an increasingly mobile world, ethnography has become, you know, uprooted and mobilized, if you like. And so following has been seen as a video, has been used as a really useful strategy to do sort of transnational, multi cited ethnographies. And people have followed money, for example, people have followed commodities to study, you know, the global capitalism, global capitalist system, if you like, and production chains. People have followed all sorts of things. And I then came across research that used, you know, following to follow categories and to look how categories operate in different sites and across context. And that's then what I wanted to do. And so I thought it would be really useful to follow the category expatriate to sites where it was a central organizing category, right. So where expatriate was a really key term. But I wanted to go to different sorts of sites. So the first site I choose was Nairobi, an expat city, quote, unquote, if you like. So Nairobi is, you know, one of these big metropolis, really a cosmopolitan city conceived, you know, through migration really, and like built through migration. Of course. Nairobi was the capital of Kenya, I should add. And people always told me, you know, Nairobi is a perfect place to study expats. And it's such an expert hub. And, you know, you've got the United nations headquarters, you've got a lot of, you know, international organizations that are charities that have the headquarters, their regional headquarters. You've got big corporations. More recently, Nairobi has been kind of touted as a tech hub. And it already gives you a sense of who's considered an expatriate. Right. The example I've just given. But then I thought it would be really interesting to go to a city such as, like Nairobi and just follow the category in that city and look at what it creates. So not just say, okay, you are an expert, I'm going to study you, but go there and see who considers themselves an expatriate who's referred to by others as expatriates. Which kind of places and spaces are narrated as expat spaces. What are sort of mobilities across the city and within the city does the expatriate narrate? What does it render invisible in that city? What sort of relationships does it render invisible? Which experiences Does. Does. Does it highlight in a city such as Nairobi? So how does a category become specialized and sort of used to create identity and community in diaspora space? And that's what I wanted to do. Nairobi. So my second site was an archive in the Netherlands, and they ha called the Expatriate Archive Center. And I first came across them on the Internet, really. And it's a really beautiful little archive. It's not that small anymore, it's growing, but it's an archive of, you know, as the title says, of expatriate, patriot, social history, life histories. And so I was interested to understand who does archive considers an expatriate. So whose stories does it archive and why and how does it, you know, construct us or use this category, expatriate, to create social history. And that, of course, links to, you know, a whole bunch of history that thinks about archiving as not just a neutral activity, but a political activity. Right. By deciding what becomes archive, we archive, we create history as much as that, we document it. And archives are really active participants in the production of memory and in a political production of memory as well. So I went to the Expatriate Archive center with a dual strategy, really. So I did research in the archive and I used their collections, and they were really, really interesting. But I also traced the emergence of that expatriate social archive, its itself as an institution. And I looked, I did a sort of. I took almost an ethnographic approach to doing research in the archive. So how is that category constructed, you know, and how is it used? And that was my second site. And then my third site was a sort of. I don't know if you could call it a site in the. In a traditional sense, but it was international human resource management literature, which is quite a mouthful. And in a book I usually use the abbreviation, you know, I hrm but expatriates have been studied for the most part, not in migration studies, as you might think, but in, you know, international human resource management literature. And it's interesting. So I, I wanted to know what expatriate means in that literature. You know, how does that literature define expatriates and what does it study? How does it study it and how does it sort of construct the category expatriate through the way it becomes. So it's a very, you know, it's an approach to looking at literature as knowledge production, you know, that roots in post colonial studies and subaltern studies and critical archiving literature as well. And I also conceived of that literature almost like an archive or I conceived of it as an archive that tells you about social change. It tells you about the sort of social context in which that category expatriate became used. And it's a really, really interesting story. I actually think it leads you to, you know, post war US driven corporate globalization and the way that the category expatriate was really kind of repurposed, if you like, in this particular context and kind of became incorporated in the business context, in the US context. So that's a really long answer to your short question of my three sides. So it's Nairobi as an expat city. It's the expatriate Archive Center. It's an archive of expatriate social history, the and its international human resource management literature as an academic knowledge that has used the analytical category expatriate. I went through all of these three sites with slightly different methodologies and slightly different approaches and tried to understand the history and politics of the terminology in those contexts.
- [17:27]
B
So I think that's a great way of helping our listeners understand why I said this book packs a punch. Despite being not very many pages long. It really gets rather a lot lot done through these really interesting research sites and examinations within them, which unfortunately we're not going to have the time to do justice to every argument in the book and in the vein of thinking about sort of the criticality of the questions that we ask and the lenses that we bring to things. One of the arguments I'd like to pick up, given how the word migrant and the word expatriate often are used in sort of Anglophone news media in particular, the angle I'd like to pick up is of course, how can we think about the work that the category of expatriate as a term is doing when it comes specifically to Race and racial categories.
- [18:22]
C
Yeah, that's a really good question, and it's a really big question. And I will try to do justice. And I think before I go there, I just want to clarify two things. And the first thing is that I understand, of course, race as a social construct, right? So racial categories are social categories. And the way that racism. Because really what creates race is racial thinking, is racial ideology and racism. The way that racism operates is that it draws on other social categories and discourses and reifies them, essentializes them to produce inequality, justify inequality, really, to give you really sort of, you know, simple definition, I suppose. But racial ideology flexibly employs, you know, visible and invisible criteria like skin color, but also, you know, plot ideas of blood. It uses biologizing, pseudoscience. It uses cultural, you know, cultural markers. It use common sense. So racism really is a really, really flexible ideology. And I really like some of the. Of the ways that people have termed it. So Barbara Fields, I think it was called, called race a promiscuous critter. And Goldberg, you know, one of the main theorists of, of racism and race, that conceptually, race is like a chameleon. It is parasitic in character. It insinuates itself into and appropriates as its own mode, more legitimate forms of social and scientific expression. So race really is not a thing, right? Race is not a neutral. It's not. It's not an obvious reality. Reality out there. So RA ideology has to draw on other social categories to realize its inequalities that it, you know, it's. And what an inequalities. It's. It's discrimination, it's violence that it often justifies and always justifies and perpetuates. So I think that gives you an idea of how. Of how I think about race and racism. And so thinking about migration, and I said earlier that migration nowadays is so politicized, that is so heated. The interesting fact is, and that's where my research really started off, and I think about expatriate in the context or in relationship to the category migrant. And I don't do that throughout the book, but I think more recently, in more recent years, expatriate really has begun to work together with that category migrant, even if often through their very separation. Right. And so both expatriate and migrant don't have, you know, commonly accepted sort of clear definitions. And I think that comes as a surprise, really, because if you look at expatriate in the dictionary sense, it is just anyone that, you know, if you look at the Cambridge dictionary, I Think it was Cambridge that defined the expatriate as anyone that lives abroad, you know, in a country that isn't theirs. If you look at human, international human resource management, they have a much more narrow definition of expatriate as an intra company transfer in a corporation, but then also not every inter company company transfer, only those moving from particular context. But you know, that's, that's a different argument. So, and when you think about expatriate as it is used, it often doesn't conform to these definitions or to many of the other definitions that are out there. And in my research I've traced a lot of them, right? So for some people, expatriate is the quintessential temporary labor migrant. For many others, especially in the US context, expatriate is someone who moves abroad, you know, semi permanently, potentially, but does give up their citizenship. Expatriate in the legal sense really is only a term, term, legal term, I think in the US context where it means giving up your citizenship, right? So to expatriate means to give up or to be stripped of your citizenship. And that's a very different meaning than the social meaning of expatriate, who often is someone who holds on to their citizenship, you know, while living abroad. So you can see that expatriate is not an easily defined category. It is polysemic, it has multiple meanings and I think that's maybe more easily accepted. But the thing is that migrant is just as polysemic and I think that often gets hidden because migrant is the supposedly neutral technical category that we all use. But when you think about the UK context, let's think internationally, there's no common, you know, there's no common definition of the migrant. The United nations recommended a definition of the international long term immigrant as anyone who moves to, leaves their usual place of residence for at least a year. So technically a British born person who has lived abroad most of their life and moves back to the UK will be counted as an immigrant in the uk. They'll make it into those statistics. But then you notice other definitions of the migrant, such as someone who holds a foreign citizenship or someone who has been born abroad. And all of these definitions are used, for example in the UK in different surveys. So if you look at the labor force survey, if you look at the Office of National Statistics, if you look at the passenger survey, they use different definitions of the migrant. And legally speaking the migrant is not a category. You only have people subject to immigration law. And for example, Europeans have kind of moved in and out of that category. So long answer short. These categories are both highly polysemic, and it is really, I think, through that polysemy that racism often works and comes to work and can work so effectively. So there's been plenty of research by now that shows that categories like migrant are racialized. It's a bit more obvious when you think about words such as failed asylum seeker or economic migrants who are often associated with people from a particular background. But the category migrant itself has become racialized, and that racialization has changed over time. In the 1960s, researchers in the UK context have found that migrant was often associated with, you know, black. Black people who came to uk and often they weren't even, you know, they were citizens, British citizens in that sense. So they weren't even, in that sense, foreigners. But they came here to. To the UK to work, for example, and they were often thought about as migrants. And more recently, the term migrant is often associated with people of a Muslim faith or, you know, in the uk, people from Eastern Europe. So the way that these categories are used to do racialized work through what I call polysemic games. So we move in and out of, you know, racialized usages of the term. We move from a technical definition to a sort of, you know, more situated racialized definition. And so you can convey many meanings through doing so that. That you convey in subtext and supposedly random examples that evoke a particular subject to this supposedly neutral category. And I think it is this pronounced polysemy that really makes the categories such a powerful tool. And I think I've actually written about. The kind of example I've just given you is from a paper actually, that I've published previously, but it's also picked up in a book where I talked to my research participants in Nairobi. The heck. And I just asked them what their definition was of expatriate migrant. And, you know, the answers are so widely differing. And it was really, really fascinating, actually. So I think if you. If you want to know more about that, you could also look at that article in the journal, I think Migration Studies I've published. But it also, I also covered in the book. So I think if categories like expatriate and migrant are central, you know, to the racialized politics of migration today, it is through their conceptual multiplicity and malleability. So they don't neatly map onto racial categories, and they would be a lot less useful if they did. It's because they're so flexible that they are so useful. Yeah, sorry, that was a long answer again. But I hope it gets there.
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B
Yeah, well, because one thing I think that is particularly interesting in your research site in Nairobi is that in Nairobi, one of the kind of ways that you're following the category of expatriate is through the organization Internation nations, which sort of sets itself up as kind of a expat help, community group thing, talking about sort of malleable categories. Internations itself is a bit. And obviously when we think about sort of racialized categories and the politicization of migration, that's obviously really topical now, but that's also been true historically. And so I was really interested that you. One of the things you argue when you are following Internations in Nairobi to understand the category expatriate is that internations, this very modern website, app based thing, is quote rag picking in the ruins of empire to create its expatriate. So could you help us understand sort of how colonization, decolonization, empire fit into these ideas of expatriate even today?
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C
Yes, yes. And you've picked one of my favorite quotes here. So, yes, Internations has commodified, so to speak, this ubiquitous idea of an expatriate community. So wherever you go in the world, you'll find an internations community that you can join, where you can socialize, where you can, you know, make professional contacts, where you can, you know, join particular activities because, you know, based on your interests. So it's really, really useful for people moving abroad. And Internations does market itself as the biggest expatriate community. And that of course raises the question of who is the expatriate that they are trying to attract, you know, because they are a profit orientated business. So they do want to attract people to join them, to pay the, you know, membership fee in order to, you know, to make a profit, which is the ultimate goal. So I was interested. When I came to Nairobi, expatriate was actually a really difficult category to localize. And Internations was one of the few institutions and, you know, organizations that I came across that explicitly marketed themselves to, to expatriates. And so I joined and you know, I met really lovely, lovely people and it was really interesting and you know, I can see how it is really helpful for people, you know, coming to a new town to join these sort of activities. But as you mentioned, you know, the histories of empire and European empires and colonization and colonialism are really present in the book. And I do trace the Calgary Patriot from the moment of decolonization to today to show some of the ways that imperialism and colonialism and the sort of relationships and inequalities that these political systems created, how they live on today, and how they live on today in the context of migration and so internations, rack picking in the ruins of empire. I kind of use that term in relation to particular quote and I think I just want to read out that quote if that's okay, because I think it exemplifies a lot of what I want to talk about.
- [29:44]
B
Out please.
- [29:45]
C
Yeah, so it's, it's actually I, I quoted in the fifth chapter of the book and intonations on its website writes, we believe there's something unique about expats, a strength and spirit that drives us to move towards the unknown and embrace it. Like the explorers of the past and scientists of today, expats choose to go where things are unfamiliar, where they don't know what to expect. Experts are modern day pioneers. Nothing symbolizes this pioneering spirit like the albatross. These birds travel long distances around the world, all while maintaining a special connection to their place of birth. Their life is a journey constantly on the move. Albatrosses use their formidable wingspan to cross oceans and fly hours without rest. By design and spirit, albatrosses are explorers. During their long life, they cover millions of kilometers and see the world from a unique perspective. The perfect symbol for our community. So this is quite a, you know, ecology. I mean, this is a really, you know, passionate account, really glorifying account of who expatriates are and what unites, you know, expatriates. But what struck me immediately reading this quote is this reference to the past explorer, to the past pioneer. And these, of course, were their imperial colonial figures, right? Even though colonialism and imperialism is absolutely absent, it's not mentioned in this text. And so the broader argument I'm making in the chapter, or one of them is that the discourse of the expatriate reinterprets privilege as achievement by rendering invisible the sort of structures, the international border system, the international inequality. Within that movement happens our, our desire, you know, our privilege of being able to move and I include myself here, becomes our achievement. And while structural privilege, you know, you know, most basic, basically the passport we hold, but also, you know, cultural capital, social capital, economic capital. While these sort of structural privileges often remain unacknowledged generations of the international expert life, casual mobility, you know, going here and there, wherever we please, wherever we are driven to become positioned as normal and as desirable and eventually as an achievement. So privileged access to mobility is not only taken for granted entitlement here, but its exercise becomes an accomplishment or a position as an accomplishment. And so this quote really evokes this heroic image of the albatross, exemplifies I think, par excellence how the rhetorical constitution of the expatriate here not only presumes an entitlement to international mobility, but then imbues it with value. And by association with the albatross, experts become strong, they become driven and restless, they become individuals, you know, individualistic. And these qualities literally and figuratively then elevate them above the world and seem to explain their implicit right to the world. And so the very inclination of, of, you know, the expert to be, to embrace the unknown justifies them doing so. Their desire becomes their right. And I, I want to quote Mimi Scheller here, who's done really amazing work on, on, you know, inequality, mobility and the sort of, you know, inter articulation of, of racism and mobility. And Mimi Shella writes that the iconic masculinist figure of the explorer, the entrepreneur and the frontiersman require implicit other others. And these implicit implicit others who do not exercise that autonomous self directed mobility. And traditionally some being women, children, slaves, servants, bounded workers, lazy poor and wild natives. And that's really where I talked about rag picking in the ruins of empire and I hear kind of meant a discursive, you know, figurative ruins of empire to create its expatriates. So this kind of figures, social figures, categories, narrative discourses that once justified empire and imperial expansion and exploitation and colonialism and all of these sort of processes are now used to, you know, create a heroic figure expatriate who seemingly, you know, is this driven person, you know, who, who moves across the world. But in the narration, the sort of inequalities that allow some people to do that and prevent others from doing it are rendered invisible. And so it recycles imper racialized and gendered tropes really to put it, to put it, you know, simply. So I think that's, that's where I'm coming at. And that obviously is about discourse, right? It's about discursive justification of inequalities and rendering invisible certain inequalities to create certain subjectivities. And we cannot forget here, I think that intonations is a business and they're trying to attract members and they're trying to attract well heeled members. And by telling these people, oh my God, your structural privilege is really quite outrageous. They're probably less likely to sell their services.
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B
Yeah, that's probably not going to work so well, but it does provide a lot of material for you to analyze and help us understand. So that's helpful.
- [35:06]
C
Thank you.
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B
Kind of following on from this idea of trying to see how racial categories and migration categories sort of work in some ways together. This idea of the rag picking of empire. We've kind of of touched on implicitly the impact that these sort of social expectations can have practically right in terms of sort of asylum policies, border policies, structural privileges of passports, that kind of thing. But there's sort of wider impact as well in terms of what society thinks of and even in some senses how we study it. So could you tell us maybe anything else you want to make us aware of in terms of the you're thinking on the impact and effect it has to have this sort of too narrow idea of an expat, whether that's particularly based on white racialization, whether that's sort of, as you said, well heeled, the sort of lazy conflation of those two things. Can you maybe tell us a bit more about kind of those impacts in the past and currently?
- [36:15]
C
Yeah, sure. So I think that, I mean, I'm okay, there's a lot to answer here, but I'm just going to focus a little bit on history because the book does have quite a historical bend and obviously that was actually not intended originally. When I started my research, it became more and more historical in a sense. And I, I do a bit of archival research, you know, in different archives. And I think one of the things that surprised me is that the discourse of the narrative often goes that in the past, when we talk about late colonial past or the early independence period, you know, countries, there seems to be that easy conflation between whiteness and expatriates. So when you, when you, you know, read the term expat or expatriate, more likely in an account of late colonial, like, you know, British colonies, expatriate seems to by definition, you know, mean a white person. And I think that easy conflation of whiteness and expatriate status never worked, not even in the past. And I think that's one of the things that surprised me. So to, to give you an example really. So when I did archival research in, in Kenya International Archives, I came across this controversy, this huge debate about so called Asian expatriates, non designated Asian expatriates. And that term was quite a mouthful. And so as I dug into that controversy in that debate, it took me to queue to the National Archives in the uk, which itself, it's telling, you know, where are these archival sources held nowadays? And who gets to study them, but that's a different story. But I. I came across this debate in the transform of the colonial civil service, the colonial administration in Kenya, in East Africa more generally, into a national civil service at the end of British colonialism there. And what I found was this huge debate that I haven't really, you know, read about in any sort of secondary research. I found, and this is not my area of expertise, right? Colonial, the colonial civil service, even colonial history is nothing I ever studied. So I had to do a lot of reading. But what happened is that at the time, you know, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, as it became clear that Kenya would become independent a lot sooner than the British administration had, you know, hoped, if you may say so, the colonial civil service was still staffed in the traditional way. So you'd have white, you know, senior staff managing the service, so to speak, and then you'd have Asian civil service servants who were recruited from, you know, what is now India, Pakistan, South Asia more generally, or who were recruited from the Asian community in Kenya. And then the majority of the service would be so called African staff, right? And they, the British had failed, whether on purpose or not, to what they called Africanize or localize the service. So they didn't have enough people trained or, you know, educated enough, if you like, if you want to make that argument, to take over those roles of responsibility. And so it became necessary if the civil service was to continue to keep some of these white and Asian more senior staff on, you know, post independence, to train up their successors. And in that context, the British managed really, and it was each debate to define expatriate in such a way really fine, I should say, because that category was different before that it excluded Asian staff and really only included senior white stuff. So they created really a category, expatriate for the postcolonial context that signified and encoded white male, and I should say male privilege, because women were also included, excluded from that category. And so it was at the end of colonialism that these postcolonial categories were produced that really encoded and reproduced, directly reproduce colonial inequalities. And in that chapter, I go into quite a bit of depth and detail, and it was. It was really a challenge to try and condense it down and not become too technical and read up on into all these documents, you know, and try to. To make a narrative out of it. But it was really fascinating because you could see the. In this particular case, you could see the direct translation of colonial into post colonial inequalities and these were racialized and classed and gendered inequalities. But then in the post colonial period, they became articulated not in terms of race, you know, so in the 1940s, the discourse was still that, you know, and this was really explicitly racist, even if they denied it even at the time, but that, you know, white people are just more ready for responsibility and, you know, the quality of the work, quote unquote, of the African on average, is just not as good. And these are the sort of racist tropes you had. And then over time, these, these sort of tropes became dropped and suddenly it was about attracting people from overseas who had to be paid extra to be induced to come to this, you know, really difficult workplace. But then you only had to induce the people coming from Britain because the people coming from Asia, you know, they, they would come willingly anyway. So you had these different narratives who were suddenly deployed to kind of justify the same old inequalities. And I think that nowadays we need to understand these histories because if we just assume that in the past, you know, whiteness and a certain other status, such as expatriate status, mapped easily onto each other, we just assumed that whiteness actually was an easy category in existing category. And it wasn't. It was always contested, it was always difficult. Racism was always difficult to enact and to maintain and to justify. And I think that we need to understand these historical struggles in order to think about the kind of conditions we face today and think about the society we live in, but also think about the discourses that are, you know, reproduced and reproduced to justify similar inequalities and yeah, basically imagine a better future.
- [42:42]
B
Yeah, that, that would be nice. And I think that that kind of brings me nicely to my next question, which is that, as you said, obviously in this book, there's a lot of examination of different definitions of expatriate and you listed a few of them earlier. And one thing that kind of jumps out at them, especially the sort of the official dictionary, the un, the Labour Law Office of National Statistics, is that sometimes the kind of definition is about nationality, but often it's about time. And that seems to have kind of, on the face of it, nothing to do with gender or race or class or anything like that. And yet you've just very, very helpfully explained that all of these classed, racialized, gendered elements have been contested throughout the category. So how kind of why do we have now this focus on the time and temporariness? What work is that doing to hide these other things? It just seems like such an odd gap.
- [43:47]
C
Yeah, it's interesting. I really struggled with, with temporality and I think that the, the first thing to mention is that the expatriate in the US context historically was associated with a permanent form of immigration. You know, and it was those, you know, the Lost generation is a really, is a really famous example. It was those, you know, bohemian artists who were suspicious and you know, unpatriotic who had left the US to go to, you know, live in Paris or live in Accra and Ghana, you know, that was a bit later, but still who had left us to live abroad semi permanently and they were considered expatriates. And that had a certain sense of permanence. And then nowadays expatriate is in the US still more often associated with a permanent form of immigration or potentially permanent than elsewhere, I would say. But then if you look at the business context, the global business, multinational corporations, that's really where expatriate became used for temperature forms of migration. And I think it is that form of business migration. Often it's managerial migration, sort of the migration of management that has inspired a broader thinking about the categories pages as signifying a temporary form of mobility. So if we look at the history of multinational corporations and I have done research in Royal Dutch Shell and I've done research of course was an international human resource management literature that sort of wrote initially about US multinationals in a post second World war context space and thought about these US corporations internationalizing in all of these corporations. You see that in the moment of decolonization and Vinant calls it a racial break, the mid century racial break. Then there was a sort of interlocking struggles, anti racist struggles, civil rights struggles in the US and the colonial movements, you know, that really destabilized white supremacy. And decolonization was a major challenge for multinational corporations. And I think that's also rendered invisible in many ways. But you had a company such or multinational corporations such as Royal Dutch Shell, which really was a group of companies, you know, it's, it's really a bit of a bicentened structure. They it. But Royal Dutch Shell was one of the biggest, if not biggest employer of labor of staff called expatriates, of so called expatriates throughout history and expatriates originally in Royal Dutch Shell in an imperial colonial context where privileged staff managers, white men, you know, who were sent abroad to colonies or to, you know, other contexts, primarily in the Global south or what we now call the Global south to manage the interests of Royal Dutch Shell. And that was of course, in line with the wider imperial and colonial labor hierarchies. That's just how, you know, that's how labor, how empire was administered and that's how business was done. And that's how, you know, natural resources were exploited and put into the service of empire. So if you look at Royal Dutch Shell at the moment of, you know, in the 1950s, in a post war moment when it became clear that more and more countries are actually succeeding in gaining the independence, they were faced with a dilemma. And actually Rochelle was one of the early companies in responding to it. So they realized they were now facing not colonies but independent states. And in independent states you could not have permanent expatriate, so to speak, management. Right? You'd have to involve local elites at the very least in a management of resource extraction and in the profit generation. And so what Royal Dutch Shell did is that it rethought its system of expatriation, a system of management and what previously many expatriates for Royal Dutch Shell had moved, you know, across context. And of course at that point also we saw cheaper international travel and easier international and faster international travel. But what shall this. That it used to keep, you know, management staff in certain locales, often for the whole career. So expatriate staff in, in India, for example, would serve out their career in a particular region and that made sense, right? They knew the context, they knew local elites, they often knew the language, you know, they were experienced. But then independence came and you couldn't do that anymore. So what happened is that staff are now moved around more temporarily and you had now two groups, groups of expatriate staff, so called regional staff, who were employed by local companies. So think about a Venezuelan being employed by a Venezuelan, you know, based company, sorry, operating company, a shell company, being, let's say, moved to Mexico or to headquarters in the Hague for a term for a few years to learn the ropes and then being sent back. That's regional staff. And they might go on one or two expatriate assignments throughout that period, term throughout their career. But then you had international staff. And international staff were still primarily white men until the 1990s, recruited in the Netherlands and the UK and the rest of Europe to some extent, who were moved around the globe flexibly to manage business interests. And they would move with their families and stay in one particular locale for usually three to four years and then move on. But this group of highly socialized managers, you know, 5,000, maybe around 5,000, really made up the, the managerial elites, those are the ones that moved up in central group management. Those are the ones who knew each other, who were connected to each other, who lived in those really famous expat enclaves, you know, oil company towns, whose wives were friends, you know, whose wife organized social, social life. And these highly socialized managers who were very homogenous, you know, who shared an identity as Shell men and Shell wives, those were the real, you know, that's, those were the seat of power, if you like. Those are the ones that have power. But you can see at how that, at that moment of independence, the temporality of that sort of, you know, racialized in class management and management had to change. So what changed was not the type of people, the demographic of people who held power within Royal Dutch Shell. That was broad and to some extent it was diversified a little, but at its core it was reproduced. But these people now just had to move, you know, they had to move for shorter terms. They had to work with local elites rather than, you know, just rule over them. So it was the changed political, geopolitical, international context which necessitated different temporalities of, of management and of movement. And yes, I think that's where, that's one of the histories that explain you some of the kind of temporalities of expatement movements that we think are normal today. And there's other stories to that and there's other histories to that, but that's one of the histories that I think that is really important to recognize when we think about Dick's Patriot just as a temporary labor migrant and that's that.
- [51:04]
B
Yeah, I think a really important history to excavate, obviously for its own sake, but to really understand kind of where we're at now. So thank you for explaining that to us. And obviously there's loads more detail in the book for people who want to get into the nitty gritty of that. As we come towards the end of the interview, I sort of have a, I suppose an inside question kind of. Many of us listen, many of our listeners, I think to this will be in and around academia. I certainly am. Obviously you are. So this isn't just something that impacts politics writ large. There's also some kind of questions about how we study things and what literatures are we using and how are we using them. And I admit as someone who's not a specialist in migration studies, I was kind of surprised to realize that international human resource management literature, the ihrm, yes, the mouthful, is not part of migration studies because logically, coming from history, I sort of would be like, well, okay, that must be a subset of it. It. Because aren't they looking at sort of the same thing? And yet, as you clearly talk about in the book, they're not part of migration studies. Why not? Should they be? What does this, at least from my perspective, somewhat artificial separation tell us?
- [52:27]
C
Oh, absolutely artificial. I agree with you and thanks for asking that question. It's one of my. I think it's one of my favorite chapters, but it was also one of the most difficulties, difficult ones to write. And it's maybe one of the ones I'm least satisfied with in, in some ways. But I think that's partly because I cared so much. If you think about the history of international human resource management as a discipline. And I think that really, that's really where my understanding of academic work as a socially situated practice, you know, comes in. Academic work is never outside society, right? And it's defined by social priorities, by social hierarchies and all of the like. So the history of international human resource management literature really points to the history of US ascendancy, post war corporate driven US dominance. And international human resource management really kind of emerged as a discipline alongside that to theorize the management of US business abroad, to help. It saw itself as a strategic business partner to corporate management in managing its interests, its substitution theories abroad. And so it was aligned very much with the imperial, you know, project, if you like, that was US dominance. And it theorized expatriate movement as something that was, you know, difficult. So it of course needed academics to study it, you know, but as something that was ultimately beneficial for the whole world because expatriates would, you know, bring modern scientific, scientific management. And you can see all of these discourses of modernity, you know, come into the sort of supposed neutral management literature. So this discipline and recycled a lot of the colonial tropes, really, and imperial tropes to justify particular relationships within corporations and in the world. But that's the kind of intellectual history and trajectory of international human resource management literature. If you look at migration studies, it has a very different origin. And I mean there's, there's a very complex, very nuanced, long history of migration studies. But if you look at the critique of methodological nationalism that's been quite, really, really influential in migration studies as a form of disciplinary self critique. It traces the ascendancy or the real success and growth of migration studies to the post war period where nation states were maybe at the height of their power. And migration studies really emerged in this context where Immigrants were becoming the growth, quintessential outsiders to the imagined nation. You know, so it was, it was the role of migration studies to, to study really these cultural outsiders, national outsiders, racialized, implicitly outsiders, and how to incorporate them and assimilate them, if you want to use that language and that was a US term or integrate them as is more commonly used today. And, but also of course, look at how they were discriminated against. You know, so you have had, you have different genealogies here of these literatures and you have different subjects. At their core at international human resource management was all about this privileged, you know, male white manager and how to best utilize that manager in, you know, from the perspective of corporate headquarters and a migrant in migration studies. And that's the argument partly I make in this chapter is that implicitly, implicitly and collectively the migrant and migration studies used to be and often maintained means a racialized class subject as well. And I'm not the only one saying that of course it's the global racialized poor who become visualized and studied as migrants. And that already tells you to some extent why these disciplines, you know, really never met. And that's a separation that's upheld. Of course it's, there's a certain path dependency. They work in different frameworks, they have different aims, as I just outlined, different ambitions. They speak to different audiences. You know, you've got national policymakers on the one side, migration studies, you've got corporate headquarters on the other side and you have different subjects. And the interesting bit is that international human resource management literature recently, in the last 10, 20 years discovered migrants. They were like, oh my God. Migrants are this new source of labor pool. So it is absolutely interesting how the category migrant has been incorporated into international human resource management study as an other to the expansion. So expatriates and self initiated expatriates worth the value of the mobility, the human capital, you know, their talent, their ability, their drivenness becomes constituted against the migrant again. And that migrant is a racialized and class subject. And it's usual, guys. And so there is a good, you know, number of international human resource management scholars who, who explicitly work on differentiating expectations from migrants and say this is not migration studies, these are not migrants we're studying. They're a whole different category of person. And I talk about in the chapter more and migration studies also upholds that distinction. And I think that's maybe even more surprising because you would think that migration studies as a literature would be interested in how this other academic literature theorizes and constructs international mobility. Right. And. And that brings us back to what we talked about in the beginning, how migration studies often are so focused on migrants. Migrants, migrants and who we understand as migrants. But they don't always are. They aren't always as good at studying the sort of broader production of migration as a discursive frame and as a kind of site on which broader politics are carried out. And I think if you want to look at that broader politics of migration, you have to study business and you have to study corporations and you have to study academic literature that theorizes corporate mobility and look at how they construct reality and what they render invisible, you know, and what they. What they construct. And so I think that sort of academic division of labor between these two disciplines upholds again, you know, quite familiar inequalities where, you know, the mobility of. Of, you know, the global racialized poor becomes constructed as a problem, as something that needs to be managed. That's something that's overwhelming. It's something that only happens in multitudes. You know, the floods of people arriving, the invasion of migrants. You know, they need to be managed if for their own good because, you know, they're naive. They don't know what to expect. They can't, you know, all of that sort of really like heavily racialized language. And on the other hand, you've got this whole different, you know, know, this driven, valuable. You've got the global race for talent. You've got these, you know, you know, highly skilled transients. And again, what comes out of, what kind of easily falls out of you are the historical and kind of contemporary inequalities that have structured mobility in these different ways.
- [59:17]
B
Yeah, very interesting critique. Lots to kind of get your teeth into, and a very helpful contribution of the book that kind of ties it up quite nicely. Which leaves only my last question. You've recently, as you said, moved to the University of Essex. This book has been a while in the making. Is there anything that you're looking to work on now or next that you could maybe give us a sneak preview of?
- [59:44]
C
Yeah, sure. I've actually been finishing this book while I was working on my next sort of big project, and it's been quite a challenge sometimes to do both at the same time time. But what I'm looking at the moment. So as I do continue my research on, on the categories Patriot, and I'm looking at sort of doing a bit more Kyber research on the topic. But what I'm really looking at is citizenship by investment at the moment. So these are more popularly known as golden passport programs, golden visa programs. So the increasing use of, of migration to attract wealthy people and, you know, if you want to put it in sort of provocative everyday language, it's states selling their citizenship or their residents and that has become highly politicized in the last, you know, 10 years or so. It's also become highly popular. It's more and more countries adopting it. It's become a huge struggle in the European Union between countries such as Malta, who run such a program. At the European Union itself, the UK recently abolished its Tier 1 investor visa, which I studied in quite some depth, which was a residence program. Notice they didn't sell citizenship, so to speak, but they offered an easy pathway to permanent residence or to residence and from then on to permanent residence and citizenship. If someone was, you know, had £2 million to spare to invest that, so to speak, in bond or share capital of, of multinational, of corporations that are headquartered or that have an office in the uk and then after, you know, those years, five years, you can qualify for permanent residence, you get your money back and, you know, here you are. So these kind of programs have become really politicized and what I study are, is really the industry around it. So corporations, again, have been really, really influential in setting up these programs and lobbying governments to introduce them, in creating the market for them, marketing them. So I am looking at the corporate sector behind or kind of around citizenship. I'm in particular.
- [61:49]
B
Fascinating. Well, if that becomes a book, we'll have to have you back and you can tell us even more about it. But until then, the book that we've been primarily discussing is titled Expatriate Following a Migration category from Manchester University Press, just out in 2023. Sarah, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast.
- [62:07]
C
Thank you so much for having me. This has been really, really fun. And yeah, thanks for the excellent.
- [62:16]
A
Sa.