Reflexivities and Knowledge Production in Migration Studies: Pitfalls and Alternatives (IMISCOE Research Series)

This open access book brings together cutting-edge work on reflexive approaches within migration studies and emphasizes the boundedness and political character of knowledge production. Beyond presenting a state-of-the-art of the problematic aspects of knowledge production in migration studies, this volume is innovative insofar as the contributions all formulate alternatives. They should lead to transform knowledge production in relation to migration and therefore contribute to alter our ways to do research and tackle established power relations. By discussing a diverse range of topical subjects – among others, epistemology, power, ethnocentrism, racism, decoloniality, gender and methodology – this volume is a great resource to students, to junior and senior academics in migration studies and social sciences more general as well as to policy-makers in European countries.

Janine Dahinden is Professor of transnational Studies at the University of Neuchâtel and research director of the NCCR on the move, Switzerland. She is also the co-director of the IMISCOE Standing Committee on Reflexivities in Migration Studies. Her research contributes mainly to three domains: Reflexivities and knowledge production in migration studies, the social organization of 'difference' and mobility studies.  In particular, her research is anchored in what has been called reflexive migration studies: she aims at developing theoretical and methodological approaches which can overcome the nation-state- and ethnicity-centred epistemology that still largely informs migration studies and that not only creates particular forms of exclusions but also runs the risk to reproduce hegemonic structures. She proposed a few years ago to 'de-migranticize' research on migration and integration as one possible way to tackle such problems. Meanwhile she became more generally interested in the pattern how knowledge is produced within migration studies and the ethical, political and epistemological consequences that go with it.

Andreas Pott is Professor of Social Geography at Osnabrück University, Germany. He is chair of the Collaborative Research Centre Production of Migration (SFB 1604), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2024. He serves as deputy director of the interdisciplinary Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) and co-director of the IMISCOE Standing Committee on Reflexivities in Migration Studies. His academic work is dedicated to the study of geographies of migration and to the development of a reflexive theory of the societal production of migration.