Wiebe Ruijtenberg (Law/VVI), Nadia Sonneveld (Law/VVI), Paul van Trigt (Institute for History) and Jasmijn Rana (CADS) have received a KIEM grant of € 10.000 for their project 'Making up Migrants / Disabled: The pasts, presents, and futures of human classifying'. The grant will be utilised to organize an interdiscplinary research hub, collaborate with practioners and enhance research liasions of Leiden University scholars critically investigating the formal and informal processes by which people are classified as specific kinds of migrants/disabled.
Recently, scholars across the interdisciplinary fields of critical migration studies and disability studies have recognized in each other a shared commitment to denaturalize human-made classifications of people. Following their example, scholars at Leiden University are currently exploring the synergies between the processes that historically made and continue to remake migrants and disabled people. Until now, they have mostly been doing so within their respective disciplines - history, law, anthropology - even though they recognize that the tasks at hand require multimethod and interdisciplinary approaches.
Nothing about us without us
With this project, the project members seek to come together, to explore common grounds, grow new projects, and connect to scholars at other (Dutch) universities and, importantly, practitioners and migrant and disability rights advocates, because 'nothing about us without us'. Concretely, they will organize three events: a focus session with committed colleagues, practitioners, and organizers in October 2024; an inspiration day, with an established expert in the field in November/December 2024; and an international workshop in the spring of 2025, during which they will share preliminary insights. On the back of these events, they will publish an annotated bibliography and a research agenda that they will have developed, showcasing Leiden University as a prominent hub for the study of these synergies.
