dans le cadre du cours "Technologies of Migranticization: The Invention of the Migrant, Technologies of Power and Everyday Categorizations"

The final program will be published by the end of November.

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Migration is at the top of the political and public agenda in most European and North American countries. Students, journalists, politicians, scholars, and many others use the figure of the ‘migrant’ to make a variety of claims: as a (naturalized) object of study; to draw attention to state violence; to call for their ‘integration’; to point to ‘cultural others’; or simply to instrumentalize the figure of the migrant for nationalist purposes, among other things. At the same time, this obsession with migration means that migranticized people continue to experience high levels of violence, discrimination, and exclusion. But who or what is a migrant in the first place, and what is this discourse on migration really about?

This graduate conference examines the central role that knowledge production plays in constituting migration and the migrant as objects of study, as well as in policy-making, political debate, normative claims, and other forms of intervention, including the consequences these processes entail.

The conference hence seeks to join the growing body of critical and reflexive scholarship that has highlighted the manifold challenges migration studies are confronted with over the past decades. Scholars have for example criticized the field's embeddedness in methodological nationalism, as well as its migranticized and ahistorical epistemologies. In addition, this body of work has demonstrated that migration studies, and the social sciences more broadly, risk consolidating violent border and migration regimes and reproducing state or other policy-related categories and hegemonic power relations. Furthermore, this research brings forth an analytical shift from the study of ‘migration’ to an examination of the production, invention, enactment, and construction of the ‘migrant’, and resulting consequences.

Building on these critiques, different propositions to produce migration knowledge otherwise or to re-know migration have been made—such as a politics of demigranticized knowledge production; the denationalization and decolonization of migration studies; the perspective of doing migration; or the production of impactful migration research through epistemic interventions or counter-empirics, to name a few.

Contributions will, drawing on concrete empirical examples, discuss the challenges migration studies face and advance alternative narratives and forms of knowledge beyond the idea of the ‘migrant as a problem.’