December 18th marks
the true Christmas of the migration world, as disciples of all things-migration
meet and tweet their way through a copious amount of reflection on the
developments of the last year. They will have talked about a global protection
system in crisis and rising anti-immigration sentiment in the West; burgeoning
South-South migration and global development; labour rights and the World
Cup… Yet they will not, I surmise, have
talked much about themselves: a sprawling network of migration geeks united by a
common obsession with understanding why people move.
So I’ve decided to make some
sweeping statements about the characteristics of those who inhabit the field in
a bid to provoke some group reflection on what it means to be a researcher of
migration. I do so with the aim of shining a light where light is not usually
shone, but without any kind of moralising agenda. We all know self-reflection
is important in research, but what does this look like collectively? Who are
the migration geeks of this world and why should we care?
Migration researchers are mostly women. This is in many ways
refreshing as it bucks the general
trend in European research which sees women underrepresented in almost
every subject area. Yet one has to wonder where all the men are at. I’ve
started calculating the gender balance at conferences in Brussels and, with the
caveat that expert panels tend to reflect the dominance of men in senior
policymaking positions, audiences are always clearly weighted towards women. I’ve
found a similar imbalance in studies and at work, where far more often than not
I’m the only man in the room. My unscientific hunches lead me down the
dangerous path of conjecture: are there more women in migration studies because
of this long-standing habit we have of portraying migrants as victims in need
of (feminine) care? And are the men in migration largely confined to economics
departments because policymakers, despite all the progress in the social
sciences, still favour overtly economically rational (and masculine) approaches
to understanding the world? Priya
Deshingkar’s recent post brilliantly underscores the importance of taking a
gendered approach in understanding the close relationship between social
mobility and human mobility. Maybe we
should also be extending the approach to research and policy itself, where
gender divisions between disciplines are part of wider gendered structures that
affect the quality of our migration policy.
Migration researchers are often closet activists, supressing the urge
to shout aloud about how ridiculous the stance on migration is in the north. I’ve
heard more than one person express feelings of restlessness whilst in the thick
of a major piece of research or trying to produce a piece of ‘dispassionate’
policy analysis against the grain of a growing internal rage at the injustices meted
out by sovereign states and borders. We know that evidence is crucial to
better, fairer policy, but sometimes the desk-based approach to changing the
world just doesn’t feel like it can ever faithfully reflect the urgency for
change.
Migration researchers often feel guilty about deriving pleasure from
their work. Stephen Hopgood’s thoroughly engaging ethnography on Amnesty
International - Keepers of the Flame – (which I read as part of a reading
group organised by the Religion Cluster at the Asia Research Institute), dealt
with the conflation by Amnesty staff of hard work and personal suffering, i.e.
if you’re not in great pain and anguish yourself, then you are not doing
justice to the topic. Hopgood paints a
picture of research staff who could not be satisfied with work that did not
take them to the same dark places inhabited by the victims of grave human
rights abuses they support. Most migration researchers perhaps aren’t at that
extreme, but I think there is a fairly constant sense that enjoying what you
are doing can somehow invalidate it. For instance, a friend of mine told me of
his guilt that his PhD research proposal doubled-up as the perfect strategy for
making his long distance relationship work. But his supervisor told him he was
being ridiculous, he produced an excellent thesis, his subsequent work is
original and well-respected, and the relationship is (so far) happily ever
after.
Those studying mobility are hyper mobile and often migrants themselves.
It stands to reason that we study those things that reflect our personal
experiences and interests, but do we think enough about what this means for the
subject we’re studying and the agenda we bring to our work as a consequence? Of
course, many of us regularly write up reflexive pieces to accompany our work,
but there’s more to this: I find, for instance, that my increasing mobility as
I entered adulthood and started doing things of my own accord made me feel
strangely detached from the places to which I was supposed to belong; the
increasing ease and need for international travel made distance and difference
less consequential. This has to matter for studying migration. Our place in the
world and our understanding of what that means has to be especially important
for those responsible for generating knowledge about other peoples’ place in
the world. It’s not the most straight-forward conversation to have, but maybe one
worth taking up.
Migration is both the Holy Grail
and the poisoned chalice of contemporary global challenges, simultaneously
propping up our economies whilst undermining the sacred principle of national
sovereignty. Given the amount of energy expended year round through conferences
and seminars trying to make sense of all of this – and the emotion that
pulsates through the debate in constant duel with evidence – International
Migrants Day offers a great opportunity to step back and take a minute to
consider who is actually doing the talking.
