‘Knowledge that moves’: emotions and affect in policy and research with young migrants

ABSTRACT

Migration is an emotional experience, and so is the policy and research work associated with it. Yet, discussions on emotions and affect remain largely absent from the literature on children and youth migration. Writing auto-ethnographically, I revisit my research with/about young Lao migrants with the aim of teasing out how emotions, of young migrants, of my own and in policy making emerged in relation to various dimensions of young people’s migration. On this basis I make the case for appreciating emotions as knowledge. While emotions are ‘moving’ in an affective sense, I proceed by arguing the productive dimension of emotions through the idea of the emotive as ‘knowledge that moves’. I substantiate this point by discussing instances in which emotions as a particular form of knowledge ‘move’ research decisions, policy making processes, theorizing the youthful dimension of migration as well as the interpersonal relations through which ethnographic research is realized.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• autoethnography
• emotions
• migration
• policy
• Southeast Asia
• youth

Acknowledgement

An early version of the article was presented at workshop ‘Young people’s migration within and through Asia: Managing emotions, identities and relationships’ (York University, Toronto, Canada, August 2014). Constructive feedback from fellow workshop participants has helped improve the paper. I am also grateful for the work of the special issue editors Kabita Chakraborty and Shanthi Thambiah as well as for the very encouraging and constructive feedback from the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A reappreciation, because it builds on earlier work on emotions and affect in the humanist geographies of the 1970s and 1980s and the psychoanalytic geographies of the 1990s (Pile 2010, 5).

2 Marise Lachapelle (2008) claims that prior to 2008 Lao authorities did not issue research visas at all. She argues further that foreign researchers would typically resort to doing research illegally on the basis of a tourist visa or getting a work visa first and on that basis trying to obtain official researcher status (compare with High 2014).

3 In contrast with Samantha Punch I did not keep a separate field diary next to field notes. It took about five month from arriving in Laos till getting access to my eventual field site. During this period I kept a research diary and since there was hardly any ‘field research’ to report there was no need for starting a separate document. In later stages of the research my diary entries became more like ‘field notes’ yet remained written as diary entries.

4 A border pass is a relatively cheap and easily obtained travel document with which Lao villagers can cross the border into Thailand and travel within the border district on the Thai side for a limited period of time.