I cannot read from a safe distance, and I have stopped trying to. Something in me wants to give every person a nation, a name, a column they fit into, and I catch the same wanting when I sit with someone whose life will not be sorted that way. This is what I mean when I speak of intersectionality: not identities stacked neatly on top of one another, but the lived experience of being several things at once, none of them quite holding. Who am I, I must ask, when no single category holds the whole of me? And what right have I to hand others a category I could not bear to live inside myself?

I notice this across the different rooms I work in. In my small private practice, it is one person in front of me and the slow labour of staying with who they are. In the international networks of academics and scholars I belong to, and in the UK-wide initiatives I take part in, it is the same question scaled up: how do we hold one another across borders, disciplines and languages without flattening anyone into a heading? And in my work on the Scottish Human Rights Defender Fellowship, the question turns sharpest of all, because there I am alongside people for whom being named the wrong thing, in the wrong place, has carried real danger. The category is never only academic. Sometimes it is the difference between safety and harm. I think a great deal about displacement, and in more than one register. There is the leaving and the arriving, and so many of those I work with carry the arriving somewhere that does not quite receive you. But there is also a psychic displacement: the sense of being exiled from a part of oneself. And a temporal one: living in a time that is no longer now, the past still happening inside. When I sit with someone who is grieving, or who has migrated, or who has survived, I am often sitting with all three at once. For human rights defenders, displacement is rarely a metaphor it is a country left behind, a home that cannot be returned to and yet the psychic and temporal exiles travel with them, too. And I am rarely outside any of it myself. Here I find myself drawn to Nelson Goodman's idea that we do not discover one ready-made world but actively make worlds through the versions we compose of them. This matters to me because the people I work with, displaced by conflict, violence and war, have often had their world unmade, the version they lived by torn up by forces they did not choose. The work, then, is not to return them to a lost world but to accompany them in the slow, courageous making of a new one: a remaking that future people, too, will inherit and continue. To support someone in worldmaking after catastrophe is perhaps the most hopeful thing I do. So much of my work lives on a threshold, that liminal place where trainees are no longer students and not yet practitioners, where clients are between an old life and one they cannot yet imagine, where a defender is no longer at home and not yet anywhere that feels like one. The threshold withholds the relief of arrival, and yet it is so often where the truest contact happens, because no one can hide behind a finished identity. Can I stay there long enough for something honest to form, rather than hurrying us both across into a false certainty?

What I watch for most in myself is the slide from difference into indifference. I want to meet each person in their particularity. Still, it is so easy to retreat into the bureaucratic shrug, into the institution that classifies someone and then stops attending to them. This is the very machinery a human rights fellowship exists to resist the systems that name people and then look away. Difference can begin a relationship; indifference forecloses it. Am I meeting this person, or have I quietly slipped into the comfort of the category?
And I cannot forget that displacement and liminality are not only tender things. They are also where power does its damage. The people pushed onto the threshold are rarely there by choice. So I hold this question close: how do I honour the strange creativity of that in-between place without romanticising a position that, for so many I work with, was imposed rather than chosen?

I close more unsettled than I began, and more awake to the crossing points where I live and work between identities, between places, between times, on thresholds I did not always choose. Whether in the quiet of the consulting room, across a scattered network of scholars, or alongside those defending the rights of others at real cost to themselves, perhaps the gentler question is not how to escape into some settled belonging, but whether I might learn to stay with others there: in the difference, against the indifference, through the displacement. Might that accompaniment itself be a kind of home enough to hold us, for now?