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ABSTRACT
This special issue (SI) calls for reinventing the politics of knowledge production in migration studies. Academic migration research should make knowledge production an essential part of its research agenda if it wants to remain relevant in the transnational field of migration research. A risk of marginalisation stems from three interrelated tendencies: First, non-academic actors producing authoritative knowledge about migration have proliferated in recent years. Secondly, academic knowledge production is challenged both by counter-knowledge produced by social movements as well as new digital methods and information structures owned by policy-oriented and private actors. Thirdly, academics no longer hold a hegemonic position in the transnational field of migration research. The contributions to this SI interrogate the politics of knowledge production on migration along three lines of inquiry: (1) the enactment of migration as an intelligible object of government through practices of quantification, categorisation and visualisation; (2) the production of control knowledge in border encounters about subjects targeted as migrants and (3) the modes of thought seeking to unknow and re-know migration beyond dominant nation-state centric understandings. This introduction elaborates how the nine articles of the SI intervene in the politics of knowledge production in migration studies along these lines of inquiry.
Acknowledgements
The guest editors would like to thank all reviewers for the valuable and constructive feedback. Earlier versions of the contributions to this special issue were presented at the first online symposium of the STS-MIGTEC network in January 2021 and at two panels organised by the guest editors at the EASST-conference in Madrid in July 2022. We would like to thank all participants for the inspiring discussions during both events Stephan Scheel's work was funded by the European Union (ERC-StG project: DigID - Doing Digital Identities, grant number: 101039758). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 To access the short movies (in German only) refer to the webpage of Kanak Attak which is still active despite of the group’s dissolution in 2012: https://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/kanaktv/volume1.html (30.08.2022).
2 It should be noted that national statistical institutes are also experimenting with and increasingly also using various sources of ‘Big Data’ for the production of official statistics. This is also a response to widespread concerns among statisticians about losing relevance or being sidelined by these new data alliances (cf. Ruppert and Scheel Citation2019).
3 These figures are based on data from Germany’s micro-census from 2018 and have been confirmed by the German statistical office on 16th December 2022.
4 A flat ontology basically follows from ANT’s conception of any entity as the performative effect of sociotechnical networks consisting of elements that are themselves effects of ever-contingent configurations of sociotechnical assemblages (Couldry Citation2020, 1141). The task of the analyst is then to follow and describe these networks and the relations between its elements without making a priori assumptions on how these elements relate to each other. The relational ontology proposed by ANT is then flat in the sense that ANT refuses to assume any hierarchical relations between entities i.e. that one dominates or causes the other, is superior to the other etc. This is why ANT-inspired research refuses the imposition of pre-defined theory on the situation to be analysed, including particular notions of power or social or political order.