Transdisciplinarity and migration studies
Aims
The aim of this session is to provide students with a different methodological and conceptual perspective on migration and to explore what transdisciplinarity could mean in migration research. Migration as a social category is much more than a mere legal term. In social reality, it is much less dependent on the legal status, the place of birth, or the actual migration experience. Rather, it is an intersectional category of difference and inequality.
The use of the social category migrant is preceding analysis;and the problem perspective apparent in much migration research reproduces the national identity logics based on some primordial community membership. Such a shift in perspective is intended by critical migration studies. A collaborative project that includes migrants in a transdisciplinary research project would require a commonality, which goes beyond a shared migrant identity and which mostly concerns issues of exclusion, marginalization and failed recognition of their complex transnational and translocal involvements. This session stresses the necessity to engage with social processes and mechanisms of hierarchization and exclusion, but also of cooperation and solidarity that goes beyond social science formalities and disciplinary conduct. A transdisciplinary migration study must involve engagement with gender relations, racism and nationalism, political and economic inequality, and the production of symbolic power. It further discusses two examples of what a collaborative research performance about migration studies could look like, and which challenges and possibilities might arise.
Links to transdisciplinary
Transdisciplinary migration studies intend to alter the directionality of knowledge production in migration studies. Migration studies are commonly carried out in a single disciplinary, multidisciplinary or interdisciplinaryfashion. Transdisciplinarity in migration studies is often implicit and differs from methods which integrate non-academic actors. Critical migration studies are often transdisciplinary in the way they fruitfully engage theoretical concepts and perspectives from different disciplines to address issues, which are relevant to people in their daily lives and negotiationsof identity and belonging. These are often different to those discussed from the perspectives of welfare state protection, social security, economy and demography. They focus on issues of fluidity and dynamics and the intersectionality of the migrant category.
Collaborative research performance and participatory action research are also occurring in migration studies, following a transformative knowledge production framework. Although they do not define themselves as transdisciplinary, they share many aspects of transdisciplinary research design. Often, migrant groups and associations, or individual activists, occur as co-authors. A transdisciplinary perspective and a collaborative project which aims to connect and involve rather than categorize and detach can render the actors’ perspective not only visible but also meaningful, thus changing the way in which knowledge is produced about migration (Nagar, 2013; Pratt, 2000; Rose, 1997).
Summary of the main points
The presentation opens with a discussion on the research design in migration studies, the links between methodological nationalism and the political project of nation building. Migration studies, starting with Regenstein’s The Laws of Migration (1885), which was historically linked to the nation-building processes and the ethnicization of European nations, have always been formulated from the perspective of the nation state, often in the state’s sponsorship. Thus, transdisciplinary migration studies must reflect the foundation of mainstream migration research, and their reproduction of certain categories, its central frameworks and their origins.
The session introduces different scales and perspectives of migration studies in disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways, and tries to elaborate on the shifting boundaries of these studies. From thereitdiscusses the concept of methodological nationalism and its successor concepts of trans-nationalism/trans-localism. Migration is them problematized as a category, changing the meaning from defining an action to anidentity. New perspectives of critical migration studies therefore address processes of identity, difference and inequality from a postcolonial and intersectional perspective. Finally,two attempts of collaborative research performances that discuss pathways of transdisciplinary inclusion of non-academic actors are presented.
Migration and short overview of migration studies
Social and cultural traits of social hierarchies, differentiation through difference
Its links to nation-building (political) and methodological nationalism (scientific)
Difference and inequality, grounds for solidarity politics, identity in / through difference
Collaborative research: transnational women’s rights and migration studies
Use of materials
Inspiring accounts on thoughtful and sensitive collaboration in migration and women’s rights studies are provided byGeraldine Pratt and the Philippine Women Centre (2005) and Richa Nagar (2013). Nagar reflects critically on pitfalls and constraints of collaboration in different academic, socio-political and geographical settings, and states the necessity to make negotiations on issues of power and responsibility an inherent part of the process, as they cannot be fully addressed in advance. Pratt points out the dilemmas she encountered during her collaborative research with the Philippine Women Centre,and her experiences and encounterswith different knowledges, such as role plays. Pratt and the Philippine Women Centre present a study on diverse effects of the Canadian labor recruitment service on Philippine women’s downward social mobility. The program was designed to provide legal migration pathways for Philippine women as live-in caretakers. However, a number of diverging policies and practices constrain the process of occupational and social upward mobility, limit the women’s choices and conflict with their familial involvements and responsibilities. Pratt encourages the use of the material and the results of their collaborative research project in activist strugglesand transnational women solidarity networks to criticize the program’s injustice and to reform immigration laws in Canada.
The suggested reading material addresses the above-mentioned research interest. Stuart Hall (1991) stresses the fluidity and relationality of categories of identity and difference, of belonging and alienation against the backdrop of the Black movement in the UK in the 1990s. Its relevance today lies in the critique of essentializing concepts of culture, ethnicity and identity, which are still central and unquestioned categories of many migration studies. The article provides a perspective different to most migration studies from Thailand and Vietnam, where a positivist paradigm is dominating scholarly migration debates (and other migration research). Aspect of human and labor rights as well as social inequality are very strong in the Southeast Asian migration debates, and they are often linked with environmental issues and the economy. However, there are fewcritical discussionsof the categories used, and their implications.
The suggested reading material relates mainly to my own research focus and Western migration research in its historical and geographic conjunction. Faculty members and regional experts are encouraged to include or critically review their own reading material.
Additional comments
The regional contexts of Europe and Southeast Asia may be different with relation to migration studies. There are several reasons for that: one may be that critical migration studies in Europe have greatly benefited from engagement by postcolonial intellectuals, often migrants themselves, and studies on racism and discrimination. However, after three KNOTS fieldtrips in Vietnam and Thailand between 2017 and 2019 with a focus on migration issues, it is clear that internal colonization, ethnic discrimination and marginalization linked to a strong nation-building and national development programs, and questions of how we built the categories on citizenship, nationality and belonging need to be discussed and questioned.
Concluding Remarks
This reception of the session in an academic setting depends greatly on the academic environment where interpretive paradigms and actor-centered approaches are practiced. Where collaboration with non-academic actors has some tradition, the application of transdisciplinary research to migration studies will be much easier. In Vietnam, transdisciplinary migration research might bring about the revision of policies that prohibit or at least strongly complicate labor migration and family reunification. There is certainly a need for such revision. In Thailand, workers from neighboring countries have strictly restricted access to social rights, transdisciplinarity in migration studies is still at the starting point and the methodologies and epistemological stances are rarely discussed. Departments with longstanding migration studies expertise and an interpretative theoretical framework would have especially good chances to take this theme further. Teaching transdisciplinarity in migration studies could be used to push this groundbreaking work further.
Reflections
Teaching this session on transdisciplinary migration studies requires a knowledge of more general and basic epistemological and methodological preconditionsfor collaboration in knowledge production. This includes: a critical reflection of the academic self-understanding as a neutral observer (see session “Methodologies for transdisciplinary research”) and the assumption that an observation and description can be realized in a neutral, value-free manner. The precondition to conduct and teach transdisciplinary research is to understand the relationality of different social realities and the importance of its meaning to social actors.
Because of the marginality of this position in still too many social science departments, the first step of teaching transdisciplinary migration studies must be the unlearning of the mechanisms and dynamics in scientific knowledge production based on methodological nationalism. These tend to uncritically and often unconsciously reproduce, and thus increase, social hierarchies and inequality between those who have the ‘right’ kind of knowledge and those who do not.