Challenging the discipline of migration: militant research in migration studies, an introduction

In the last two decades we have witnessed a proliferation of scholarly interest in migration that, taking human mobility as its focus, has contributed to migration becoming an object of study and to the institutionalization of its stakes, and resulted in an expanding productivity along the lines of Border Studies, Mobility Studies, Critical Migration Studies, Critical Security Studies, and Cosmopolitanism Studies.While, on the one hand, this has coincided with a 'becoming' of the discipline (i.e. its acquisition of the status of a specific field of scholarly enquiry), on the other it has also been accompanied by a kind of 'disciplining' of migration knowledge practices.This institutionalization of migration knowledges has certainly brought attention to issues of citizenship, mobility, labour and the like, but it has also had a particular effect on the contested politics migrants themselves put in motion in their daily struggles across physical, social, and political spaces.Against this disciplining effect, a 'militant research practice' takes migration as a vantage point from which to unpack the processes of subjectification emerging from (but also exceeding) the mechanisms for the regulation of migration, 2 at the same time as allowing us to assess the conditions through which political subjectivities emerge as 'other' to the regular order of citizenship. 3his special issue of Postcolonial Studies actively interrogates this 'discipline/ disciplining of migration' as an academic domain of knowledge, as the governmental conduct of mobility, and as the governmentality at the intersection of these two layers.When migrants are profiled as either the aspirants or the victims of an impermeable state and societal order-of an outside they seek inclusion in or rehabilitation from-then their struggles tend to be read merely in terms of discourses of citizenship (the practices, acts or claims of citizenship) at the same time as they are 'disciplined' within a Euro-Atlantic political imaginary of cohesion, control and security.By contrast, the essays collected in this special issue share an interest in the undisciplined movements of migrants 4 and in the contested politics of mobility, 5 and seek to tackle these issues from within the practice of a 'militant research' where knowledges and day-to-day actions are deliberately brought to bear on one another, and where their interactions and frictions are constantly interrogated.Our aim is to explore whether a critical engagement with the knowledge-based governance of migration may interrupt-if not undo-some of the disciplinary 'captures' of this knowledge of migration, with its governmental underpinnings and security narratives.A clarification of terminology is due.