Paper short abstract:

Grounded in ethnographic work in the 'expat scene' assembled and mediated by InterNations in Nairobi, Kenya, this paper traces how the category expatriate is narrated, embodied and challenged to produce subject positions, social relations and socio-spatial arrangements in diaspora space.

Paper long abstract:

Grounded in ethnographic work in the 'expat scene' assembled and mediated by InterNations in Nairobi, Kenya, this paper traces how the category expatriate is narrated, embodied and challenged to produce subject positions, social relations and socio-spatial arrangements in diaspora space. The paper conceptualises the expat not as a specific type of migrant but as an category that denotes ways of knowing and doing migration. I.e. it traces the expatriate as a discursive and performative category that, although focused on migrants, ultimately involves and effects migrants and non-migrants alike. Studying the expatriate in this way, I encountered a variety of related readings of the expatriate. The expatriate was not only not a stable subject, but also did not carry a stable meaning, instead shifting between different if related readings. Entangled with these readings, the expatriate participated in constituting discourses, subject positions and social relations that were shaped by asymmetrical power relations and intersecting social inequalities.