Beyond Labelling: Rethinking the Role and Value of the Refugee ‘Label’ through Semiotics

Abstract

In preparation for Journal of Refugee StudiesThe conceptual starting point As I sat down in my doctoral viva across the table from Roger Zetter to present a thesis entitled 'Beyond the Politics of Labelling', the thought resurfaced that my choice of examiner may well have been illconceived. Zetter's work on this topic, published largely in this journal, inspired a generation of researchers to explore the role and value of the refugee label, becoming the automatic citation for any allusion to the ambiguity or malleability of the term. Indeed for Zetter (1988: 2; 1985), the founding raison d'être of the Journal of Refugee Studies was 'to explore the rich research agenda established by the label 'refugee'' and to 'examine and shape the form and extent of the margins at which the label applies ' (1988: 5).At the core of his work, and much of that which it informed and inspired, was a now well-established set of propositions. First, how the label 'refugee' is understood is highly changeable (Bakewell, 2002;

The Role of Schools in Identifying and Referring Refugee Background Young People Who Are Experiencing Mental Health Issues

“…Recognition of refugee status has legally and internationally defined and locally interpreted parameters which affect peoples' rights to movement and services according to local contexts . The use of this single term to describe individuals or groups can be problematic in that it essentializes and potentially diminishes a sense of individuality and complexity of experience . While the researchers acknowledge the problematic nature of this labelling, we use the terms “refugee” and “refugee background” to identify young people and their families with a lived experience of refugee status.…”

Reification and the refugee: Using a counterposing dialogical analysis to unlock a frozen category

“…Such growing restrictionism discourse is further compounded by category use by researchers themselves (Polzer, 2008). Shared meaning around the refugee category facilitates cooperation amongst actors and continually highlights unresolved international issues (Cole, 2018).…”

Pluralising geographies of refuge

“…Historians, for example, have reconstructed global and decolonial accounts of the genealogy of the modern refugee regime (Mayblin, 2017; Kushner, 2017; Marfleet, 2007); international lawyers have criticised the omission of critical Third World perspectives from discussions on the formation and evolution of international refugee law (Chimni, 2007, 2019), arguing that this underpins its ongoing failure to redress its oppressive, colonial roots and contemporary forms of discrimination and inequality (Achiume, 2013, 2018); and international relations scholars have shown how a politics of hospitality has come to occlude histories of imperialism and questions of responsibility for displacement (Danewid, 2017). Within the field of refugee studies, there has long been a focus on the nominal path dependency of the discipline: on how labels and definitions that are contingent upon particular historical and geographical circumstances have shaped research agendas and policy outcomes (Zetter, 1991, 2007; Black, 2003; Cole, 2017b). The intellectual field of vision is shown to have consistently followed dominant legal, normative and administrative categories, leading to geographies of asylum that centre on archetypal spaces of refugeehood: camps, detention centres and borders.…”