Expatriate: Following a Migration Category

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Who are expatriates How do they differ from other migrants And why should we care about such distinctions Expatriate interrogates the contested category of 'the expatriate' to explore its history and politics, its making and lived experience. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, the book offers a critical reading of International Human Resource Management literature, explores the work and history of the Expatriate Archive Centre in The Hague, and studies the usage and significance of the category in Kenyan history and present-day 'expat Nairobi'. Doing so, the book traces the figure of the expatriate from the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonisation to today's heated debates about migration.

Reviews

Winner of British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2024

By focussing on the trajectory of a social category so many of us take for granted, this book offers a creative, critical and provocative engagement with the discursive and postcolonial history of the ways we think about migration more generally. For anyone concerned about the ways migration and mobility have been, and continue to be, governed, imagined and experienced, this book is an essential read.
Tariq Jazeel, University College London

Kunzs delicate, scholarly tapestry of ethnography and Kenyan independence archives reveals how the category expatriate is entangled in the shifting postcolonial power dynamics of migration and the murky politics of oil. A must read for migration scholars.
Caroline Knowles, Queen Mary, University of London

Brilliant, insightful and often surprising, this book leverages the ever changing social category expatriate to explore the intersections of race, colonialism, management and migration. Scholarly work at its best.
Bridget Anderson, University of Bristol

Author Bio

Sarah Kunz is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Essex.