https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2025-7706
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Abstract
The term ‘intersectionality’ is usually attributed to Kimberlé Crenshaw, a legal scholar, who coined the term in 1989. In this paper, we reflect on how the concept has travelled through both space and time. We trace the longer history and more complex geography of intersectional approaches rooted in grassroots women’s movements in the Global South, where radical claims were made against the dominance of white, middle-class women’s analysis of the situation of women in the world. These, together with the Black women’s movement in the US, paved the way for the emergence and coining of the term intersectionality. We then reflect on how the concept travelled in three domains of migration-related knowledge: academic research, international policy and advocacy politics. We find that, while some academic research is true to the original politics of intersectionality, there is also some research that has strayed much further away from the original aims of intersectionality, to the extent that we would question whether it can be called intersectional at all. In international policy, we find that the original radicalism of the term has been watered down in the translation of the term into policy targets and measurements. Finally, in advocacy politics we find the greatest continuity with the original aims of the term.
Acknowledgements
This paper was first presented at the workshop Engaging with intersectional approaches to the study of migration politics, 6 – 7 July 2021. We would like to thank the convenors, discussants and participants, for their engagement with and comments on the ideas we explore in this paper. We are grateful to the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) [Grant Reference: ES/S007415/1] for funding the MIDEQ project on South-South migration, which brought us together under the Work Package on Gender inequalities and allowed us to consolidate our collaboration. Tanja Bastia wishes to also acknowledge the Leverhulme Research Fellowship [Grant reference: RF-2016-450], which she held while working on this paper. We are also very grateful to the referees who provided very generous comments that helped us improve this paper.
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Notes on contributors
Tanja Bastia
Tanja Bastia (University of Manchester) is Professor at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. Tanja’s research focuses on transnational migration for work, particularly on the relationship between power relations, mobility, and space. She has conducted multi-sited ethnographic research with Bolivian migrants in Bolivia, Argentina, and Spain. She is co-editor (with Ronald Skeldon) of the Routledge Handbook of Migration and Development (2020); sole editor of Migration and Inequality (2013, Routledge) and author of Gender, Migration and Social Transformation: Intersectionality in Bolivian Itinerant Migrations (2019, Routledge).
Kavita Datta
Kavita Datta (Queen Mary University of London) is a Professor of Development Geography and Director of the Centre for the Study of Migration at Queen Mary University of London. Her research spans migration studies and development and financial geography. Contributing to critical understandings of transnational migration, financialization and migrants’ financial practices, her current research projects are exploring practices of care, remittance sending and digitisation among UK migrant communities during the Covid-19 pandemic; food (in)security, mobility and internal and international Zimbabwean migration; and gender, intersectionality and south to south migration connected to the GCRF MIDEQ Hub. Her books include Global Cities at Work: New Migrant Divisions of Labour and Migrants and their Money: Surviving Financial Exclusion in London.
Katja Hujo
Katja Hujo (UNRISD) is Senior Research Coordinator in the Transformative Social Policy Programme at UNRISD. She studied economics and political science at Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen, Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) and National University of Córdoba, Argentina, and holds a doctoral degree in economics from FUB. Katja’s academic work focuses on social policy, poverty and inequality, and the sustainability transition. Her most recent publications include the edited volume The Politics of Domestic Resource Mobilization for Social Development, published by Palgrave Macmillan in July 2020 and a guest edited themed section on “Social Protection and Inequality in the Global South: Politics, Actors and Institutions” published in Critical Social Policy 41(3), 2021.
Nicola Piper
Nicola Piper (Queen Mary University of London), a political sociologist, is Professor of International Migration. She is the Founding Director of the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. The British Academy awarded her a Global Professor Fellowship hosted by Queen Mary University of London where she has been since January 2019 conducting research on global governance of labour migration and the role of the International Labour Organisation in the promotion of decent work for migrant workers. This project is a sequence to her research on advocacy politics in relation to a rights-based and gender-sensitive approach to global and regional migration governance, with particular relevance to Asia.
Matthew Walsham
Matthew Walsham (University of Manchester) is a Research Associate at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester working on the gender thematic work package for MIDEQ. His recently completed doctoral research was on internal migration and social pensions in Uganda, exploring how receipt of the Senior Citizens Grant affected intrahousehold dynamics and pensioner well-being within trans-local households. He has previous research experience in Nepal, Tanzania, Vietnam and Peru and has lived and worked as a development practitioner in both Bangladesh and Cambodia.