The Intersectionality and Diversity working group examines how various refugee groups encounter global refugee policy, and analyzes power relations across axes of difference such as gender, race, class, age, nationality and sexual orientation. Building on a long tradition in refugee studies of understanding the bureaucratic implications of labels and categories, such as the fraught ‘global South/global North’ binary (Zetter 1991; Crawley and Skleparis 2017), this working group also explores how politics, policy, and practices condition the refugee-migrant experience, and how they are social constructions embedded in power relations (Hancock 2013; Behrman 2016). An intersectional approach allows for more critical understandings of human displacement and a focus on the categories that can both empower and disempower individual refugee-migrants (Clark-Kazak 2014; Crenshaw 1991; Hancock 2013).
