Podcast Summary: New Books Network – Interview with Dr. Sarah Kunz on Expatriate: Following a Migration Category (Manchester UP, 2023)
Date: January 9, 2026
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Sarah Kunz

Episode Overview

This episode features a deep dive into Dr. Sarah Kunz’s recent book, Expatriate: Following a Migration Category. The discussion centers on the concept of “expatriate” as a migration category, how it differs from “migrant,” and what these distinctions reveal about race, privilege, history, and the construction of social categories. Dr. Kunz elucidates the complex histories and politics behind who gets called an expatriate, how the term is mobilized and by whom, and why such distinctions matter for migration studies and broader social debates.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Sarah Kunz’s Academic Background and Motivation

• Dr. Kunz is a lecturer at the University of Essex, with a longstanding interest in migration, racism, gender, and social inequality [02:11].
• The personal experience of living abroad yet never being called a “migrant” informed her research questions [02:30].
  • Quote:

    “I was a migrant myself. ... I realized that I was never called a migrant, right? And then I started studying migration at university and ... privileged forms of migration really aren’t studied as much.” [02:26]

2. Studying Categories Rather Than Individuals

• Instead of focusing exclusively on migrants as people, Dr. Kunz examines the category “expatriate” and its production across different domains [05:09].
• Social categories, like expatriate or migrant, are not self-evident; they are constructed, politicized, and deeply embedded in power relations [05:25].
• Dr. Kunz underscores the “polysemic” (multiple-meaning) nature of migration categories and their political uses:
  • Quote:

    “Social categories are embedded in power relations...and they are a product of society, ... not necessarily rooted in any sort of essence or...biology.” [05:26]

  • Migration categories are shaped “not just by the state,” but by corporations, cultural productions, and in daily life [08:40].
• The danger of reifying “the migrant” as a self-evident group is highlighted:
  • Quote:

    “Migration is broader than migrants. And I think it’s really dangerous actually to think about migrants as ... an obvious category or ... group of people...” [09:10]

3. Research Methodology: The ‘Following’ Approach

• Dr. Kunz adopts an ethnographic method of “following” the category expatriate across three research sites [10:31]:
  1. Nairobi (“expat city”): Studied how the term “expatriate” operates and creates spaces, identities, and invisibilities in a global metropolis [12:04].
  2. Expatriate Archive Center (Netherlands): Investigated how the archive curates expatriate histories, influencing which stories are preserved and remembered [13:54].
  3. International Human Resource Management (IHRM) Literature: Analyzed academic literature from business schools and corporate studies, where “expatriate” is analytically constructed [15:54].
• Quote (on archives):

  “By deciding what becomes archive ... we create history as much as that we document it.” [14:29]

4. Race, Polysemy, and the Politics of Categories

• “Race” is treated as a social construct, and racism operates by drawing on and reifying social categories for the justification of inequality [18:22].
• Both “migrant” and “expatriate” are polysemic, lacking universally accepted definitions—allowing them to work as flexible, racialized categories [21:45]:
  • “It is really, I think, through that polysemy that racism often works.” [24:20]
• In the UK, “migrant” historically changed in its associations—from Black populations in the 1960s to Muslim or Eastern European populations in later decades [23:06].
• The malleability of these categories (“polysemic games”) underpins their political utility.

5. Nairobi & Internations: Colonial Legacies in Modern Expatriate Discourse

• Internations, a global social network for expatriates, embodies and commodifies community for “expats” (who are implicitly defined by their structural privilege) [26:35].
• The metaphors Internations employs, such as calling expatriates modern-day “albatrosses” or “explorers,” evoke colonial legacies:
  • Quote (Internations):

    “Like the explorers of the past and scientists of today, expats choose to go where things are unfamiliar... Expats are modern day pioneers. Nothing symbolizes this pioneering spirit like the albatross.” [29:45]

• Dr. Kunz identifies this as “rag picking in the ruins of empire”—using imperial and colonial tropes to construct the heroic expat and masking existing inequalities:
  • Quote:

    “The broader argument ... is that the discourse of the expatriate reinterprets privilege as achievement by rendering invisible... structural privilege.” [31:01]

  • This narrative converts privilege (mobility, passport, class) into accomplishment, normalizing entitlement as merit [31:40].

6. Historical Dynamics: Expatriate, Race, and Colonial Bureaucracy

• Colonial-era “expatriate” categories were always contested—never simply equivalent to “whiteness” [36:25].
• Example: The debate over Asian expatriates in Kenya’s postcolonial civil service revealed how “expatriate” was refined to encode white, male privilege at the moment of decolonization [37:32].
  • Quote:

    “At the end of colonialism ... postcolonial categories were produced that really encoded and reproduced, directly reproduce colonial inequalities.” [38:46]

• The process of defining, contesting, and enforcing these categories exposes “how difficult racism was always to enact and to maintain and to justify” [41:26].

7. The Temporal Turn: Permanence, Temporariness, and Corporate Histories

• Current definitions of expatriate emphasize temporariness—a historical departure from earlier, more permanent associations [43:46].
• This shift is rooted in postcolonial corporate logics: e.g., after decolonization, companies like Royal Dutch Shell created new flexible, temporary, mobile elites to adapt to post-independence political realities [47:23].
  • Quote:

    “What changed was not the type of people, the demographic of people who held power within Royal Dutch Shell... but these people now just had to move, you know, they had to move for shorter terms.” [49:54]

• The temporal framing—privileging short-term, flexible managerial movement—serves to naturalize ongoing inequalities.

8. Academic Divisions: IHRM vs. Migration Studies

• International Human Resource Management literature and migration studies developed separately, focusing on different populations and maintaining artificial disciplinary boundaries [52:26].
• IHRM emerged as an adjunct of US corporate power—privileging the study of (white, male, managerial) expatriates, while migration studies historically focused on racialized, lower-class “migrants” [53:18].
  • Quote:

    “At international human resource management was all about this privileged, you know, male white manager ... and a migrant in migration studies... implicitly, collectively ... means a racialized class subject.” [54:03]

• This separation perpetuates the invisibility of privilege and the problematization of the mobility of the global poor.
• Dr. Kunz recommends migration studies take a broader view, including how business constructs and utilizes categories of mobility [57:27].
  • Quote:

    “If you want to look at that broader politics of migration, you have to study business... academic literature that theorizes corporate mobility and look at how they construct reality and what they render invisible.” [57:36]

Notable Quotes and Insights (with Timestamps)

• “I was a migrant myself...I realized that I was never called a migrant, right?” – Dr. Sarah Kunz, [02:26]
• “Migration is broader than migrants...I think it’s really dangerous actually to think about migrants as...an obvious group of people.” – Dr. Kunz, [09:10]
• “It is really, I think, through that polysemy that racism often works and comes to work and can work so effectively.” – Dr. Kunz, [24:20]
• “Expats are modern day pioneers...albatrosses are explorers...the perfect symbol for our community.” – Internations marketing, read by Dr. Kunz, [29:45]
• “The discourse of the expatriate reinterprets privilege as achievement by rendering invisible the sort of structures ... our desire, you know, our privilege of being able to move...becomes our achievement.” – Dr. Kunz, [31:01]

Timestamps of Key Segments

• [02:11] — Dr. Kunz’s academic background and research motivation
• [05:09] — The value of studying migration categories as categories
• [10:31] — Introduction and rationale for three research sites & methodology
• [18:22] — Race as social construct; racialization of migration categories
• [26:35] — Internations, expatriate identity, and colonial legacies in Nairobi
• [36:15] — Historical intersection of expatriate category and race postcolonial civil service
• [43:46] — Shift from permanence to temporariness in expatriate definition, corporate histories
• [52:26] — Disciplinary divides: IHRM vs. migration studies
• [59:44] — Dr. Kunz’s next research project: “golden visas,” citizenship-by-investment, and global mobility

Memorable Moments

• Internations' “albatross” metaphor ties present-day expat narratives to imperial pasts [29:45].
• Historical vignette of “Asian expatriates” in postcolonial Kenya: an illustration of how categories are negotiated and re-inscribed [37:32].
• Critique of disciplinary silos: Dr. Kunz’s call for migration studies to incorporate corporate-driven forms of mobility and the literature that theorizes them [57:27].

Concluding Thoughts

Dr. Sarah Kunz’s Expatriate challenges both popular and scholarly understandings of who counts as a migrant or expatriate, exposing the racialized, classed, and gendered undercurrents shaping these identities. By tracing the evolution of the “expatriate” category across practical, archival, and academic landscapes, she invites migration scholars and broader society to confront the invisible privileges and structural inequalities embedded in global mobility. Her forthcoming research into citizenship-by-investment schemes promises to further unpack the intersections of wealth, state power, and migration categorization.