Season 4, Ep. 7:

Below, you find links to all of the research referenced by our guests, as well as other resources you may find useful.

Media

Carvosso, R. (2010, July 14). Taking a flat approach. (external link)  Tokyo Art Beat.

The Integration Nation (external link) : Public Lecture by Adrian Favell.

Joyce, J. (1986). Ulysses  (external link) (H. W. Gabler, Ed.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1922).

Melcher, M. (Host). (2025, January 9). Sarah Kunz, "Expatriate: Following a Migration Category" (external link)  (Manchester UP, 2023) [Audio podcast episode]. In New Books in Anthropology. New Books Network.

Morrison, T. (2007). The bluest eye (external link) . Vintage International. (Original work published 1970).

Pynchon, T. (2006). The crying of Lot 49 (external link) . Harper Perennial Modern Classics. (Original work published 1966).

Sigona, N. (Host). (2020, November 19). Political demography, Brexit and the borders of membership – with Adrian Favell (external link)  (S1, E17) [Audio podcast episode]. In Conversations with IRiS. Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity.

Torpey, J. (Host). (2022, September 18). Quo vadis Britannia; where is Britain going? With Adrian Favell (external link)  [Audio podcast episode]. In International Horizons. Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

Wolf, C. (1988). Cassandra: A novel and four essays (external link)  (J. van Heurck, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published 1983)

Books & Chapters

Favell, A. (2011). Eurostars and Eurocities: Free movement and mobility in an integrating Europe (external link) . John Wiley & Sons.

Favell, A. (2022). The integration nation: Immigration and colonial power in liberal democracies (external link) . John Wiley & Sons.

Favell, A. (1998). Philosophies of integration: Immigration and the idea of citizenship in France and Britain. (external link)  St. Marten’s Press.

Grillo, R. (2008). The family in question: Immigrant and ethnic minorities in multicultural Europe (external link) . Amsterdam University Press.

Favell, A. (2014). The fourth freedom: Theories of migration and mobilities in ‘neo-liberal’Europe. (external link)  European Journal of Social Theory, 17(3), 275-289.

Kunz, S. (2023). Expatriate: Following a migration category (external link) . Manchester University Press.

Smith, M. P., & Favell, A. (Eds.). (2006). The human face of global mobility: International highly skilled Migartion in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific (external link)  (Vol. 8). Transaction Publishers.

Academic Works

Favell, A. (2001). Integration policy and integration research in Europe: a review and critique. Citizenship today: global perspectives and practices (external link) , 349, 351-352.

Favell, A. (2008). The new face of East–West migration in Europe (external link) . Journal of ethnic and migration studies, 34(5), 701-716.

Favell, A. (2007). Rebooting migration theory: Interdisciplinarity, globality and postdisciplinarity in migration studies (external link) . Migration theory: Talking across disciplines, 259-278.

Adrian, F., Miriam, F., & Michael, P. S. (2017). The human face of global mobility: A research agenda. (external link)  The human face of global mobility, 1-25.

Kunz, S. (2020). Expatriate, migrant? The social life of migration categories and the polyvalent mobility of race (external link) . Journal of ethnic and migration studies, 46(11), 2145-2162.

Kunz, S. (2024). Offshore Citizenship:“Diversified Citizenship Portfolios” and the Regulatory Arbitrage of Global Wealth Elites. (external link)  Antipode, 56(6), 2180-2201.

Kunz, S. (2018). ‘Making space’in Cairo: expatriate movements and spatial practices (external link) . Geoforum, 88, 109-117.

Kunz, S. (2016). Privileged mobilities: Locating the expatriate in migration scholarship (external link) . Geography Compass, 10(3), 89-101.

Kunz, S. (2022). Provincializing “immigrant integration”: Privileged migration to Nairobi and the problem of integration (external link) . Ethnic and Racial Studies, 45(10), 1896-1917.

Maggie Perzyna  

Welcome to Borders & Belonging, the podcast that explores migration through bold research, new ideas and stories that connect those findings to the real world. This season, we're talking with migration scholars whose ideas have left a lasting mark on the field. Then we dig deeper to uncover the past that brought them here, the turning points, lived experiences and insights that shape the theories redefining how we understand mobility, borders and belonging. Each scholar has been asked to nominate an up-and-coming researcher whose work they admire. In the chat, established voices and emerging thinkers come together in conversation to explore the connective tissue between the past, present, and future of migration studies. From the personal to the political, from theory to practice, these conversations uncover not just what our guests study, but how their lives and work have helped shape the field and where they see it heading next. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Migration debates often focus on borders as barriers, but some forms of movement slip quietly through. Adrian Favell is Professor of Social and Political theory and founding director of the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College, Cork. His work is a cornerstone of migration studies, renowned for its rare ability to weave rigorous sociological critique with the deeply empathetic exploration of everyday, lived experiences. But before we get into the theory, we start with Adrian's own journey into migration studies, tracing how his early political instincts and curiosity about the world shaped the questions that would later define his work on mobility, free movement, and Europe's so called borderless future. Adrian's path into migration studies doesn't start in a classroom or a research institute. It begins much earlier, shaped by a small town in the East Midlands of England. Those early influences still echo through the way he writes and the questions he asks today.

Adrian Favell  

I was convinced I was going to become a journalist when I was 14,15. Even to the point of not really, not really imagining going to university, because the old-fashioned way of becoming a journalist was to get a job. Was to leave school maybe at 18 and get a job in a local newspaper and I was also very politically engaged as a teenager. So, you know, there was, there was some sort of aspect of this it was linked to being involved in certain sort of left politics at the time and sort of starting to get politically conscious. This is the 1980s in the UK, so it was a pretty dismal time. You know, I think the politics mixed with the kind of Post-Punk, Indie music of that era was very much the formative influence, and I think it still shows through in the writing and so on that I do. So, I think these are not unusual, really, for teenagers in my generation in the UK.

Maggie Perzyna  

alongside politics, writing becomes a constant in Adrian's life. During his teenage years, Adrian's creative interests expanded into music and books. Those early creative habits shaped how he observes the world and tells stories.

Adrian Favell  

I've been building up a collection of old penguin paperbacks, you know, so the orange type English Library Penguin Books. I've got lots of and, you know, I'm always looking for those, and I spent a lot of time in secondhand bookstores. And also now scouring things online, which is very easy to do. And then, you know, then LPs, the inevitable sort of teenage years of getting into - I was into rock music and collecting, you know, I started going to concerts, but also starting to write about music, is really the first journalism that I did was music related. I've still got all of the all of that plastic is sort of lying around somewhere.

Maggie Perzyna  

Later in his career, Adrian finds his way back to writing by reconnecting with the creative interests that first pulled them in through the arts. He rediscovers a form of storytelling that opens up new ways of thinking and eventually feeds directly into his academic work.

Adrian Favell  

I think contemporary art and writing about contemporary art was much later in my life, a kind of way of going back to the things that I was interested in writing about when I was a teenager, which was music. The contemporary art world, particularly the contemporary art world of the 1990s and early 2000s was a sort of rock and roll for adults. Contemporary art became a kind of central pop culture. And particularly, I was in Japan from around 2006 seven onwards, and going to Japan, spent a year in Tokyo, and started to discover I was interested in contemporary art, then going to galleries, and then galleries having openings and parties and after parties and meeting lots of people. I think it was like finding a little world that was a bit like a sort of rock and roll world, that it was possible, actually, at the time, to get access to and then I started writing about it. You know, I was writing as a blogger and developing a kind of journalism that eventually has turned into academic work.

Maggie Perzyna  

Years later, an idea sparked early in Adrian's career comes back into focus. What began as a suggestion he carried with him for years becomes a book, The Integration Nation: Immigration and colonial power in liberal democracies. In the acknowledgements, Adrian, thanks Ralph, the person who first planted the idea for the book in the early 2000s. It took years to come together, but the moment clearly stayed with him.

Adrian Favell  

The first versions of The Integration Nation argument were already there in the late 1990s. And I was teaching at the University of Sussex in Brighton in England. That was my first teaching job. Ralph Grillo was a very distinguished Professor there of anthropology. I think when he encountered some of the reflections that I was putting together while I was at Sussex that were mapping out this kind of larger critical reflexive agenda on integration that eventually gets captured in the book, The Integration Nation, many years later, I think he just was suggesting at the time that I should write a short, kind of punchy manifesto-like book that that would kind of capture these ideas. That piece of advice stuck with me, and I wrote some long, quite technical articles at that time in the early 2000s, but it always stuck with me that there was a book I could write, you know, that would summarize the critique of integration. I didn't do that book at the time, but I was then approached later in 2018, 19, by polity with the idea of doing a book on integration for their series. That's how the book really then happened. And it was a book that was written during Covid. So, you can imagine, it was a book that was written rather intensively during the period of lockdown.

Maggie Perzyna  

Writing has always been more than a tool for Adrian. Over time, it becomes a way of thinking about audience, genre and how ideas travel across boundaries, both inside and outside of academia.

Adrian Favell  

I've always approached academic writing as a possibility to engage in different sorts of genre. So, if you were to look at all my books, you'd actually find that they're all quite different in terms of the way that they're written. I've had different styles that have varied from kind of the big comparative historical work, which was my first book, Philosophies of Integration, and ethnography, which was Eurostars and Eurocities. A very different kind of ethnography, which is the Japanese artwork. But then I'd also engaged in quite large scale, quantitative type studies, and I feel there's one thing I can do which is quite well, is the ability as a writer to be adaptable in academic contexts and do different sorts of work. And, you know, match the style of work and the style of writing to the kind of audience that I imagine for the work. 

Maggie Perzyna  

As his career unfolded, Adrian started to measure its impact, less by publications and more by people. The collaborations, conversations, and small moments of connection began to matter just as much as the work itself.

Adrian Favell  

I mean actually being able to work with those sorts of research teams and combine scholarship with, you know, kind of comradely relations and really good friendships. I think internationally has been a big part of the work. I do think that the academic career is something that is lots and lots of little things that you do for people. Sometimes you don't even remember the people that you've talked with because you just meet them in a one-off discussion in a conference or something. But those little effects kind of add up over time. And it's certainly not just about the written output or the publications. It's about all of these other interactions that we engage with professionally. And I try and, you know, to help out with people when they approach me. And I'm always delighted when you hear from somebody that's come across your work for the first time, or that tells you, you know, all these years later that you said something to them at a seminar or in a workshop with some grad students or whatever, that that it had some sort of impact.

Maggie Perzyna  

We've just heard Adrian Favell share how his own moves across Europe eventually led to the concept of Eurostars and Eurocities. Now joining the conversation is Sarah Kunz, Lecturer in Migration Studies at the University of Essex. Her work explores how privilege, race and post colonial history shape mobility, looking at the hierarchies hidden within the very idea of free movement. Welcome to you both. 

Adrian Favell  

Hello.

Sarah Kunz  

Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for the invitation, I'm really excited for this conversation.

Adrian Favell  

Yeah. 

Maggie Perzyna  

So, the ideal of a borderless Europe looks very different in practice. Adrian, your research in London, Amsterdam, and Brussels reveals the possibilities, but also the limitations of this kind of mobility. How has your work shifted your perspective on the ideas of free movement and belonging?

Adrian Favell  

Yeah, Eurostars and Eurocities was a study that I started in the late 1990s and it was attempt to do a sociological study of something that had been studied a lot in terms of political and legal categories of EU citizenship, and it reads, now very much as a kind of times capsule, almost of a period of optimism in European integration. The other thing that was, I think, important about the book was that it was an attempt to try and study what might have been seen as a relatively invisible population, you know, privileged West Europeans on the move within Europe, but studying them are using the standard categories of migration theory - so immigration, integration and citizenship - to see how the theories work in relation to these sort of atypical sorts of migrants and what it finds is that the categories don't work very well. And so, in that sense, the book, I think, has endured in some ways, because it has prefigured, perhaps quite a lot of work that has tried to question some of our standard and stable ideas of who are migrants and what happens to them. You know what the trajectories are.

Maggie Perzyna  

Sarah, you've shown how even the most privileged forms of mobility can reproduce old hierarchies of race, class and power. When you look at Adrian's Eurostars, do you see similar patterns playing out now?

Sarah Kunz  

Yes, definitely. In answer to your question, I think that it's not even, it's especially probably the most privileged forms of movement that are reproducing hierarchies, because it is often people in positions of privilege and power who are, of course, invested in reproducing, you know, structural inequalities, the institutions and the kind of orders that maintain those. So, that is, I think, one of the prime reasons, or one of the many reasons, really, that we should study privileged forms of migration in order to understand the kind of migration regimes more broadly, and a kind of inequality structuring those. And I think that's what Adrian really did so well, to some extent, with this book, but also his, you know, his work since.

Adrian Favell  

Yeah, I mean, I was trying to take the normative idea of free movement within the EU seriously, the kind of claim that people could be moving across borders and not face discrimination, and in some sense, race and class are at the margins of the study. I'm rather focusing on a group who we'd think of as the natural movers, who must have an easy time of it, in some ways. As Sarah is suggesting. I mean the stories over time, particularly as the characters get older, encounter various sorts of barriers, problems, even sort of micro aggressions and so on, that reveal that the European of the nation states is still very much a structuring factor, in a way, even, even despite these ideas of free movement.

Magdalena Perzyna  

Adrian, you've mentioned the idea of the 'missing middle' in migration studies, those professionals on the move who don't quite fit into a neat category. How does the idea of middling migration differ from traditional ideas in migration studies?

Adrian Favell  

Middling migration and also lifestyle migration, was an idea that was current, particularly among geographers and others who were pointing to the fact that mobilities were on the rise in this sort of free, moving world of the 1990s - the high point of globalization, so forth. But they didn't always fit this stereotype of a polarized world of very high-flying elites on the one hand, and then the sort of figure of the migrant who are highly disadvantaged coming from the Global South. And the reality in data terms is that a lot of international migration and mobility is in the middle. It is types of movers who may be migrants who or who may be mobile, but who don't necessarily fit those kinds of categories. We were trying to draw attention to both the expansion of middling migration opportunities, in a way, which I think has become characteristic of this era. And also, you know, get us beyond this is the problematic, polarized vision that really wasn't necessarily there in the data.

Sarah Kunz  

Yeah, can I just add to that? I think that Adrian work made a really important contribution to this debate. So, at the time, when I started my master’s degree at the LSE (London School of Economics) in London, and, I had just moved to London in 2011, I felt that those sort of middling and, you know, elite migrations really were rendered invisible in much of migration studies. I thought that Adrian's book was really, really refreshing and made a really important contribution to that debate. And I think speaking from the kind of migration studies nowadays, it's easy to forget maybe how little research there was on thesse sort of, you know, kind of middling migrations within Europe, but obviously also on a global scale. And I think what, the work also shows as to what extent 'middling' is a very relative term, but also moving within Europe, and even moving within Western Europe, 'middling' can mean many things, right? And I think the book really shows how much happens within that middling space that hadn't maybe been explored, especially not in such a kind of ethnographic way.

Magdalena Perzyna  

Words like migrant, expat, or mobile professional can be loaded. What do these labels show us about who's considered an outsider and tell us about Europe's hidden hierarchies? Sarah?

Sarah Kunz  

I think that categories are such a beautiful analytical lens, if you like, or opening to look at issues of inequality and power. Of course, words are loaded and these categories are loaded. I mean all of these migration categories, whether they are official categories that are produced by nation states or international organizations or economic research. Or, you know, categories that are used in everyday life, that might be racial slurs or whatever. All of these categories are not just produced by power and inequality they're, of course, productive of them and involved in the kind of production of an unequal social reality, if you like. But thinking about the terms of expat and migrant, I think they not only show who's positioned as an outsider, but also whose outsider status works to their advantage and whose outsider status really does not work to their advantage. So, if you look at immigrants, they often, of course, position as other to the nation, and that otherness, then, is used, if you like, to disadvantage them and exclude and exploit. But if you look at those who are labelled expatriates in the Global South, those who are called expat often gain through being outsiders, right? And so there's a certain privileged foreigners that they embody and reproduce, really, through their social and, you know, cultural lives that brings certain benefits in places like Nairobi. But to some extent, also in places like the Hague, where I did research. So, I think if we study privileged migrations in a Global South, but also in the Global North, we can not only question, you know, how outsider status is produced, but to what uses it is put. And we can recognize that, especially in a colonial and Imperial context, historically speaking, being an outsider has always been often or well, not always, but has often been coded as being privileged. If you look at kind of settlers who continued their relation to foster their relation to the Imperial metropole, the mother country. So, outsider status itself can, you know, have different uses, if you like.

Adrian Favell  

Yeah, you know, I have a kind of complicated view on this kind of question, because it has, you know, increasingly, studies are showing, you know, the pretty obvious ways in which Europe was constructed out of a particular kind of colonial positioning to the rest of the world and so forth, historically. I do think it's worth taking seriously the idea of non-discrimination cross borders as a legal category that creates something new in the world. That is one of the points of Eurostars in Eurocities. There was a lot of pressure, I think, on third country national, you know expansion of rights for third country nationals as a result of the extending jurisprudence of European free movement. The thing is, sociologically, European free movement, you know, at least if you follow the kinds of stories I was, I was looking at the 1990s was being adopted by, you know, there was, there was a quite strongly gendered nature to it. In a sense, a lot of women were moving from the south of Europe to the north of Europe because of positive choices in a way, to go live and work in other places that offered more opportunities. And I think the big story that we mustn't forget, in a sort of historical sense, is what free movement enabled for post accession east and central Europeans. In some ways, the true Euro stars, if there were any, were those that seized the opportunity to move in that way across Europe, and they were not just low level workers, but all kinds of skilled and educated movers from East Europe who now work in West European universities, for example, or who have integrated the continent in a kind social, social sort of way. But I still want to kind of examine closely the notion of free movement, and free movement also something that doesn't just exist in Europe. It existed for longer in Latin America, for example. There are all kinds of free movement accords around the world still in existence, and it's still creating types of mobility across borders that I think are good for, the sorts of redistributions, in some sense, that we hope would come about in a more integrated world.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, to take the conversation maybe in a little bit of a different direction, you've both lived lives on the move. How has your personal experience of mobility shaped the way that you study migration. Sarah? 

Sarah Kunz  

Well, I guess it's connected to this conversation, because that is partly what led me to Adrian's work. But I remember that I was moving around when I was younger, you know, much like many of the people he spoke to in the book, and I went, you know, to Australia for one of those work and travel experiences. I studied in the Netherlands, and then I moved to the US for a term for semester abroad, and then I moved to London to study here. And that's why I got stuck eventually, I suppose. I studied migration at university level in those different places. And I just always felt that if people like myself were studied, you know, Germans, white Germans, they were often studied in the past, you know, as the migration flows, for example, from Germany to the United States in the 19th century. But it somehow appeared that in the contemporary world, Germans didn't seem to be moving much, or at least Western Europeans, you know. And then I came across that term expatriate, and I was like, oh, well, that's where they all are, just bundled in a different category. And I'm obviously simplifying a little bit here, but it felt to me that migration studies was reproducing a lot of those, you know, implicitly, inadvertent, inadvertently, often, of course, reproducing some of those public conceptions around who is a problematic migrant and who, you know, doesn't need to be studied in those terms. That's why I set out to study, let's say, privileged migrants. And somewhat tongue in cheek, my master's thesis explored the integration of expatriates, you know, in Egypt, I suppose in Cairo at the time. That's how I got that interest in privilege, and it extended to an interest in categories and knowledge production and the politics of knowledge production.

Maggie Perzyna  

Adrian?

Adrian Favell  

My personal aspect is that I am, of course, a character in Eurostars and Eurocities. It was based on 60 interviews, some of whom were couples, that I'm the 61st character in the story. And it, is in that sense. And it was a book also that was quite consciously written to think of in a sort of new genre, kind of sense, as a book that also is a sort of novel, or something that really tells a story from beginning to end. And I've only done that once, really in that kind of way in my work. And I think you have to be careful, I think with drawing everything out of auto ethnography or positionality, sometimes. Obviously, I have been a highly mobile academic, and I certainly would not, you know, not regret for a minute the opportunities I've had to live and work in different countries and get and get the kind of experiences that enable a less particularist vision on on the world, which tends to be the case, if you're only writing from one sort of national perspective.

Magdalena Perzyna  

So, if we revisited the Eurostars today, what kind of Europe would we find? What's happening as mobility and nationalism collide? Sarah?

Sarah Kunz  

I think that to some extent, Europe is probably more integrated than ever in its, you know, right wing lurch toward defining itself against the Other. And I think that as much as, you know, there's movements in most countries, political movements against the European Union, those seem to be, you know, largely performative. I think that a lot of those right-wing movements that are, you know, so powerful and also influential across Europe, are really quite integrated and working together quite nicely in the political projects that they ultimately share. And I think that if we look at how Europe defines itself, and how, you know, different European political parties and movements are drawing on the same sort of right wing, xenophobic, racist discourse, Europe does look quite integrated. But then, of course, if you look at the experiences of people on the ground, that is not necessarily the case. And I suppose, as Adrian said, his book captured a sort of different, optimistic spirit. I suppose at the time. Another thing that stuck with me from the book was the count, I think. And I just looked at the name of Natalie, who was living in London in a hostel, you know, for years and years in the 1990s or early 2000s and that just seems so impossible now thinking about the prices. But I think it wasn't just a different time in terms of politics, but also in terms of kind of economic realities, of cost, you know. And I think that adds to the Europe that we're living in now, which seems slightly more pessimistic and bleak.

Maggie Perzyna  

Adrian?

Adrian Favell  

One of the things that I think that we need to think more carefully about, though, is that we assume that the world is kind of shutting down with rising nationalisms. The borders are getting tougher and more closed and so forth. But the actual reality is there's people, more and more people moving at the moment, and that moving is increasingly stratified and unfair, it's in its basis. So, you know, while migration continues to be a steady, a steady sort of phenomenon, in some ways, generally speaking, it counts for only one percent of cross border mobility, and that mobility is actually rising exponentially. So, it's come it's stopped during Covid which, which introduced a different kind of world based on different sorts of technologies of population control, but it is back. And it's back mostly under the cover of tourism. So, I'm fascinated by that sort of a world of migration control but there's also a world of rampant tourism, which is privileged movement, of course. But it's also mass movement. The one thing that sort of emerged, I think, on the on the legal sort of side of all of this, is that the kind of free movement that we were talking about with EU citizenship, based on non-discrimination, which was open to all people who had access to a particular sort of citizenship status, has been replaced by a different kind of citizenship, which is the citizenship 2.0 kind. This is also something that Sarah is very much interested in studying. Which is, of course, the privileged elites that are able to collect multiple national passports and move around the world that way, but which is absolutely indexed by wealth and privilege and a sort of inequality by birthright of being able to kind of take your initial citizenship and just add lots of other citizenships, so that you can live an offshore life somewhere.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, Adrian, how does it feel to see your work taken up and expanded by a new generation?

Adrian Favell  

Well, obviously I'm delighted by the fact that anybody reads my work and finds something in it that they can run with. And that's obviously why we do, you know, why we do the work that we do. One of the things that I think has been obvious to me is how, you know, I did a certain kind of work in the late 1990s and early 2000s which I then left, and then there was a whole kind of set of new kinds of critical migration studies that came out, kind of critical citizenship and border studies well as all sorts of things coming out of feminist studies. And I felt that there was a need to kind of address that kind of work, but also build a bridge between that and an earlier kind of literature that that had formed me in some ways and so that so, you know, Sarah's been part of that kind of wave of new scholarship, and having that kind of critical angle develop has enabled me to come back to work and come up with some, some new work, in some ways, that addresses the world that we're living in now, which is a much bleaker and more problematic kind of vision, I think, of how migration and mobility work. So, you know, the debate rolls on through these kinds of connections. I think.

Maggie Perzyna  

Sarah, any final thoughts? 

Sarah Kunz  

So the first thing I'd like to say is just, I'd like to note Adrian's generosity. I think I first came in contact with Adrian, I think I was struggling with an article under revision at the time, and Adrian was kind enough to offer me commentary, and was really generous. And I think it is a very practical way of building those bridges that you just talked about. And also, what I think is important is to remind people, and you know, here I'm speaking about myself, that we are not reinventing the wheel. It often happens that when you come to a field and you're maybe younger, or whatever you're entering that debate that you think that, well, maybe sometimes you think that your critiques are newer than they are. And it's always worthwhile to return to earlier work and see that a) some critiques have been around for longer and have been really generative in the past already, but also to get inspiration from that earlier work. And I think when I return to Eurostars now, I still pick up a lot from it, and I get a lot from it, and I think that's just shows the enduring importance of that work.

Maggie Perzyna  

So, before we wrap up, we're just going to do a really quick lightning round. I'm going to throw out some questions, and you just give me the first thing that comes to mind. Adrian, what is your favourite book?

Adrian Favell  

Ulysses.

Sarah Kunz  

Oh, my God, that's a heavy one.

Maggie Perzyna  

Sarah, can you top that? [laughing]

Adrian Favell  

Can I change? Can I change my mind? Let me give you another one. The crying of Lot 49.

Maggie Perzyna  

Sarah, favourite book?

Sarah Kunz  

Well, so in terms of an. Novels. I think my favourite authors are Christa Wolf, who is a German author, and probably ,Cassandra. And then I really like Toni Morrison's work. And I suppose, well, Beloved is a classic, but I I really like the Bluest Eye, I suppose, as well. Yes.

Maggie Perzyna  

What policy buzzword should disappear? Adrian?

Maggie Perzyna  

Impact.

Sarah Kunz  

Oh, yeah, that's a good one. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Sarah? 

Sarah Kunz  

I like that, impact. Yeah, you know what? I'll second that, impact. Go away.

Maggie Perzyna  

Favourite place that you've done field work or research. Adrian?

Adrian Favell  

I really don't like choosing places I've lived and worked in, but I guess Japan was perhaps the most transformative one for me.

Maggie Perzyna  

Sarah?

Sarah Kunz  

I would say archives. You know, I've really enjoyed working in archives, and just because it happened during the pandemic and lockdowns, I really enjoyed going to the Q National Archives in London, because it allowed me, once a week to cross town in the overground during lockdown and, you know, move and enter a different world. So yes, archives.

Maggie Perzyna  

And for the final question, what is one thing that you can't learn about you from your CV? Adrian?

Adrian Favell  

What you wouldn't learn from my CV is is how much I like walking.

Sarah Kunz  

Oh, that's a great one. I love walking too. Well, I think what you wouldn't learn from my CV is that I'm a little bit of a Luddite, you know? I'm, I'm quite resistant to AI and to I'm really trying to cut down on my phone use, not very successfully, but yes,

Maggie Perzyna  

All right, thank you both so much. That was a wonderful conversation. It really means a lot that you took the time to be with us today.

Sarah Kunz  

Thank you. 

Adrian Favell  

Thank you very much for organizing all of this, 

Sarah Kunz  

And it's been fun, yeah, thank you.

Adrian Favell  

It's been a very nice experience working with you.

Maggie Perzyna  

Thanks so much to Adrian Favell and Sarah Kunz for joining me today and thank you for listening. his episode was produced by Toronto Metropolitan University journalism student Kristian Cuarezma alongside executive producer Angela Glover. Special thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and CERC Migration for making this conversation possible. If you're enjoying Borders & Belonging, follow us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn. For more on today's conversation, check out the show notes.