Using pragmatism to approach ‘diaspora’, its meanings and political implications

Calls for more reflexivity in the field of migration, ethnicity and diaspora studies are increasing. They are based on two main concerns: a sedentarist, nation-state- and ethnicity-centred epistemology that informs a large share of research in this domain (Amelina and Faist 2012; Bommes and Thränhardt 2010; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003) and a use of ‘migrant’ as an a priori rather than an analytical category. The conflation of common sense and analytical categories – as scholars have demonstrated – contributes to the reproduction of essentialist perceptions of migration and ethnicity. Consequently, differences between migrants and non-migrants appear to be ‘natural’ (Crawley and Skleparis 2017; Dahinden 2016; Gillespie et al. 2012).