Contested Categories - Issues at the Intersection of Development and Forced Migration Studies

Workshop objective and background  

The aggregation of information is a mundane procedure in research processes. Clustering, labelling and categorising are basic tools used by researchers to structure data and order information with the objective to systematically make sense of “the world out there”. This process is crucial for reaching higher abstraction levels and create broader meanings of the data generated. However, research categories always emerge in a specific context and time, and therefore, it is not surprising that they are often contested by diverging perspectives, revisited and replaced. Hence, categories seldom endure longer time periods.  

This workshop addresses the critique of categories and the debates about them in development research and considers their relevance and utility for forced migration studies (FMS). For this purpose, three critically discussed categories in recent years are used as examples: “global South and global North”, “new actors – self-empowerment and emancipation of marginalised groups”, and “digitalisation”. For better contextualisation, the workshop will be accompanied by a keynote lecture on categorisations in development and FMS.