Knowledge production for whom? Doing migrations, colonialities and standpoints in non-hegemonic migration research

ABSTRACT

Building on the representation problem of migration studies, this article identifies current alternative knowledge production strategies in social scientific migration research. After reviewing calls for denaturalization, demigranticization and decolonization, it elaborates on an integrated “umbrella” perspective – the doing-migration approach – for implementing these alternative strategies. First, building on the socioconstructivist and performativist accounts, the article pleads for studying the institutional and non-institutional sayings and doings about “migration” that generate historic-specific and changeable migranticized societal orders. Second, the article synthesizes the doing-migration approach and coloniality/ies-sensitive approaches to explicitly study long-term, large-scale power asymmetries and patterns of inequalities in the context of the postcolonial, postsocialist and neo-colonial dynamics. Finally, in addressing the question “Who has the power of definition within migration studies?”, this article differentiates between the concepts of standpoint and positionality.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge production
• doing migration
• denaturalization
• demigranticization
• decolonization
• transnationality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Concomitantly, decolonially oriented scholars differentiate between notions of decolonization and decoloniality. While ‘decolonization’ is conventionally associated with the political process of independence after the end of colonialism in the second half of 20th century, ‘decoloniality’ (as proposed by Annibal Quijano and developed further by Walter Mignolo and others) aims to disclose the Occidentalist ‘matrix’ in the epistemic foundations of capitalist global power relations and invites researchers to think in terms of multiple temporal prospects toward ‘cultures’ and ‘civilizations’.

2 However, as I will outline below, the ‘doing-migration’ approach relies on praxeological assumptions (Bourdieu 2020), while the ‘doing gender’ approach builds on Harold Garfinkel’s ethno-methodological accounts.

3 Expressions such as ‘categorizations’, ‘performative references to classifications, categories and narratives’ and ‘performative naming strategies’ are used in this article interchangeably.

4 According to their socioconstructivist origins [Brenner 2004]), multi-scalar theories study the historic-specific production and mutual shaping of various sociospatial scales (Amelina 2017).