Suchergebnisse

Migration scholars, and the universities and institutions who fund them, at times neglect to address the ways in which the traces of the imperial past, and references to the 'post' colonial serve to obfuscate and legitimize discriminatory practices in their work. The 'imperial eyes' of the academy set the terms and limitations on interactions, locations, and relationality in research, reducing the agency of migrants, producing stratified configurations in the positionality of both migrants and researchers and, subsequently, exacerbating dynamics of exclusion and extraction. As early-stage researchers, we see a critical need for an approach to migration studies which undermines the ongoing impact of colonialism and the normativity of institutionalized, hierarchical narratives that haunt academia. Our research builds on the work of scholars who write about the autonomy of migration, liberation theorists, and critical Indigenous perspectives, but our positions are also influenced by those on the 'frontlines' resisting various manifestations of violence and exclusion. In this article, using an interdisciplinary model, we propose the notion of collective self-inquiry to critically question and inquire into our own methods and approaches and provide a set of methodological tools that can be applied by other researchers within and outside of the university. These tools invite us to work collectively and look more critically at the b/ordering of movement(s) across former empires, thus helping us navigate towards the undercommons, a place where the liberatory potential of the academy can be realized.

This powerful book explicates the many ways in which colonial encounters continue to shape forced migration, ever evolving with times and various geographical contexts. Bringing historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and criminologists together, the book presents examples of forced migration events and politics ranging from the 18th century to the practices and geopolitics of the present day. These case studies, covering Europe, Africa, North America, Asia and South America, are then put in dialogue with each other to propose new theoretical and real-world agendas for the field. As the pervasive legacies of colonialism continue to shape global politics, this unprecedented book moves beyond critique, ahistoricity and Eurocentrism in refugee and forced migration studies and establishes postcoloniality and forced migration as an important field of migration research