Abstract
Migration scholars, and the universities and institutions who fund them, at times neglect to address the ways in which the traces of the imperial past, and references to the ‘post’ colonial serve to obfuscate and legitimize discriminatory practices in their work. The ‘imperial eyes’ of the academy set the terms and limitations on interactions, locations, and relationality in research, reducing the agency of migrants, producing stratified configurations in the positionality of both migrants and researchers and, subsequently, exacerbating dynamics of exclusion and extraction. As early-stage researchers, we see a critical need for an approach to migration studies which undermines the ongoing impact of colonialism and the normativity of institutionalized, hierarchical narratives that haunt academia. Our research builds on the work of scholars who write about the autonomy of migration, liberation theorists, and critical Indigenous perspectives, but our positions are also influenced by those on the ‘frontlines’ resisting various manifestations of violence and exclusion. In this article, using an interdisciplinary model, we propose the notion of collective self-inquiry to critically question and inquire into our own methods and approaches and provide a set of methodological tools that can be applied by other researchers within and outside of the university. These tools invite us to work collectively and look more critically at the b/ordering of movement(s) across former empires, thus helping us navigate towards the undercommons, a place where the liberatory potential of the academy can be realized.
Highlights
Jodi Byrd, writing about the ‘transit of empire,’ describes a conversation she had with her late father (Byrd, 2011)
None of us are Indigenous, two of us come from former colonial empires, and the third was raised in a settler colonial state
As we aim to demonstrate in this article, collective self-inquiry allows us to detect and undermine our position within the migration industry by moving together towards a more liberatory practice of doing research
Summary
Jodi Byrd, writing about the ‘transit of empire,’ describes a conversation she had with her late father (Byrd, 2011). Though we dedicate our time, money, and power to community organizing and activism work, as doctoral students at our prestigious, internationally-known universities, working for a European Union-funded Horizon 2020 Project, riding the waves of the ‘migration industry’ (Andersson, 2014; Cabot, 2019; Cranston, Schapendonk, & Spaan, 2018), and as EU citizens, these three resources (time, money, and power) remain readily available to us. This privilege situates us often in contrast with the migrants and people in transit who we work with. To what ends? How do we spend our time, what do we do with our money, and are we willing to share any of our power in this pursuit?
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