Can the subaltern speak through WhatsApp? Unearthing the labour/knowledge of digital methodologies

Prompted by the challenges that Syrian refugees posed to a qualitative WhatsApp survey, this article dissects what researchers and research participants actually do when they ‘produce’ knowledge through digital methods such as WhatsApp. While many refugee participants saw the survey as an opportunity to express their views on social tensions in Lebanon, others launched more fundamental challenges to the abstractions of digital knowledge production. Drawing on Marxist‐feminist standpoint theory, I propose ‘knowledge/life making’ as a more embodied, relational understanding of knowledge production in the context of the decolonial and digital turns in socio‐legal research. Viewing knowledge as intimately connected to the everyday, reproductive work of ‘border crossers’ could help to create more affective knowledge at a time when even qualitative researchers increasingly use digital methods and artificial intelligence. Such a reproductive perspective also highlights the potential of border crossing as a resistive bottom‐up strategy of knowledge production.