From interculturalism to inter-recognition: towards an ethico-onto-epistemological approach in migration research

ABSTRACT

Migration policies and social science research tend to describe and stratify migrants according to bureaucratic and legal categories, which prevent the understanding of the complexity of migration as a process of recognition. Having in mind the migration of healthcare professionals to a semi-peripheral country like Portugal, this paper critically debates ‘multi-inter-cultural discourses’ and the asymmetric power relations it envisions. The case study under analysis reveals the production of different types of migrants’ disqualification (‘overstayers and irregulars’, ‘non-native’, ‘overqualified’, ‘underemployed’ and ‘non-human beings’) and the invisibilities that it promotes (socio-institutional, discursive, educational, professional, alterity). This article is influenced by the recognition framework as a critical approach and the decolonial proposal of an ‘Ecology of Recognitions’ [Santos, B.S. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. London: Paradigm Publishers]. In my view, this dialogic and comprehensive expression represents a turning point concerning the replacement of ‘culture’ as the core domain to embrace the socio-political construction of ‘difference’. A new framework for the ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’ of migration studies is therefore suggested: an inter-recognition approach. This could be an added value for the understanding of the wastage of human diversity as a process of loss of human dignity.

KEYWORDS:

• Multiculturalism
• interculturalism
• recognition
• migration
• ethico-onto-epistemology

Acknowledgments

This article is based on a PhD research, under the supervisor of Professor José Manuel Mendes. I also would like to thank the guest editor – Manuela Guilherme – and three anonymous reviewers for the comments received.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Joana Sousa Ribeiro is a researcher at Centre for Social Studies and a PhD student at the Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra. Her main research interests include socio-professional mobility and migration, longitudinal studies, intercultural studies, social classification and citizenship. She has published on a variety of topics like migrant biographies; health policies and migration; professionalism and migration; skilled migration. Among others, she published in 2018 ‘Being called “skilled”: a multi-scalar approach of migrant doctors’ recognition’. Migration Letters 15, no. 4: 477–489. With other two colleagues, she coordinates an IMISCOE research network group – YAMEC Network – that focuses on issues of mobility of young adults and the socio-economic crisis.

ORCID

Joana Sousa Ribeiro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5779-7503

Notes

1 As stated by Manuela Guilherme and Gunther Dietz the term ‘interculturality’ [interculturalidad(e)] is more used in ‘Iberian-American circles’ (Guilherme and Dietz, 2015).

2 Notice that Bhiku Parekh was a pioneer of ‘intercultural dialogue’, a proposal puts forward by him in the report The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000), known as The Parekh Report. However, the adjective ‘intercultural’ was already used in different anthropologic publications in Latin American countries since the 1950s. Intercultural public-policy philosophy was originated in Canada in the 1980s.

3 For an initial frame of this proposal, based on migrants’ life stories, see Ribeiro (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work is partly funded by the Science and Technology Foundation (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education (SFRH/ BD 23548/ 2005).