Conversations about migration are often inside the box: numbers, causes, effect on the economy, how to prevent it.

This podcast unboxes migration. It opens up questions on movement and justice and it disrupts conventional thinking to better understand how mobility, in all its forms, is a necessary part of all our lives.

In this episode we ask, how do people become migrantized, and what does this tell us about both migration and citizenship? Podcast host, Bridget Anderson invites guests Janine Dahinden and Manoj Dias-Abey to discuss these questions from their different disciplinary perspectives. As a social anthropologist and professor of transnational studies, Janine understands ‘migranticization’ as sets of performative practices that ascribe migratory status to certain people and bodies. Manoj, as a socio-legal scholar, considers how such processes shape the laws and regulations created by state institutions.

 In bringing together these different approaches our guests raise questions about how race, class and concepts of skill play into migrantization. They also ask whether the academic gaze should in fact focus more on demigrantizing people by recognising how certain laws, such as those regulating labour migration, impact on citizens more widely.