From Impact to Abolition: For an Unruly Migration Studies

If I can summarise, the fascists are winning: whither migration studies? Melanie Griffiths' plenary lecture reminds us that being a researcher in the field of migration, asylum, borders and carceral geographies carries specific responsibilities and ethical commitments. Her talk crystallises two areas that the research and intellectual community of migration, border and refugee studies needs to grapple with: first, our relationship to policy-making, activism and the impact agenda; second, our relationship to the political economy of knowledge production in migration studies. First, Griffiths points to the pressures of the impact agenda, which adds institutional pressure to our own personal and/or collective desires to address injustice. If we accept and internalise a flawed concept of research impact, in which we researchers go out into the world, extract data, produce ‘outputs’ and then produce demonstrable change (preferably a change in policy) caused by these outputs, then we are also accepting a theory of change that contradicts the kind of geography and social science many of us do: we embrace messiness, complexity, non-human agency, contingency. Many of us also co-produce and collaborate with communities, so we do not ‘own’ our research—or act on its insights alone. Participatory and community-based research can create change through the research process itself, a model that predates and yet falls out of national policy-focussed understandings of impact. For those of us engaged in research in which policy veers more and more towards intentional and explicit harm, the legal authorisation of deadly violence and the systematic violation of human rights, engaging in emerging policy debates often requires accepting terms of debate that run counter to any responsible research ethics, never mind individual values. In this context, having ‘good’ impact often means fighting off harmful proposals, rather than the success of particularly good ones. For example, academics regularly contribute expert testimony on detention's harms, the effects of remote accommodation and confinement on legal procedures, and campaigns to support individual cases. These efforts may stave off further harms but they do not create ‘good policy’. But there is a bigger problem with the formulation of impact in UK academia, in particular, and it relates to the relationship between research and politics more broadly: the impact agenda commits to a liberal conceit that data and evidence produce change in the world, that policy is evidence-based, and that an enlightened public and policy-makers are making rational decisions based on evidence. As Baldwin-Edwards et al. (2019) have argued, there is a substantial existing evidence base about all aspects of migration, but there is a big gap between what the evidence says and the policies put in place. In short, there is evidence base showing that our existing evidence base is routinely ignored in national policy making. So if it all feels a bit hopeless at the national scale, there is research to prove it. This brings me to the second point: our relationship to the (often extractive) political economy of knowledge production in research on migration, borders and asylum. Griffiths' paper captures the visceral experience of burnout and discomfort that comes from doing this kind of research and the ethical and theoretical conundrums that are produced by it. A few years ago, I asked Gerry Pratt, a feminist geographer who has done long-term, embedded participatory work with migrant workers in Canada, how she reconciles the power differentials, contradictions and discomfort of working with systematically marginalised communities. And to paraphrase, she said, there is no resolution: we don't get to be comfortable. There is no research design, ethics statement, etc. that can reconfigure privilege and power at the scale necessary to address that fundamental inequality. We just have to dwell in it, to struggle with others, to accept when we are not invited or not welcome as researchers, and when some moments are not for the research. We will be constantly negotiating the terms and modes of our presence and our role as knowledge producers: and we should be called to account and challenged. Humanitarian government, as Fassin (2012) argues, mobilises moral sentiments to address and alleviate suffering to mobilise political action. As Griffiths highlights, migration research appeals to—and presumes—that accounts of woe, pain and suffering will invoke compassion and empathy sufficient to inspire change, that is to ‘have an impact’. In her 2009 article ‘Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities’, Tuck argues that research on damaged, harmed communities in turn reproduces these communities as deficient and broken. It's not just that migration research may not change national narratives but that invoking trauma does harm to those communities (Tuck 2009). Along similar lines, Griffiths' paper poses some difficult questions for those building research careers in migration studies: to what extent does migration research desire and consume the suffering of others? To what extent do migration studies contribute to and participate in humanitarian governmentality? To what extent do we also appeal to crisis narratives of migration, borders and asylum and therefore rely on their continuation? When we work with ‘migrant voices’, do we risk valorising extractive modes of representation that Griffiths highlights? When does methodological rigour tip into extractive knowledge production? Do our own framings participate in this moral economy, in which migrant lives are seen only through their vulnerability and suffering? As an intellectual community, we should also ask ourselves: do crisis formulations open up the richest veins of critique, care and creative thinking? Drawing on Johnston and Pratt's (2019) work, can we instead craft our research narratives in ways that do not cynically appeal to and recirculate various crises? That problematises humanitarian logics that mobilise compassion for suffering rather than relying on that to drive political action? There are already anti-traditions experimenting in this way. There is militant research that employs a ‘disobedient gaze’ against the terms, terminology and knowledge practices that enable state violence against migrants (Garelli Ybarra 2021; Tazzioli 2023). Or from Harker's work in Palestine, in which he refuses to frame Palestinian life in exceptional geopolitical terms, instead insisting on researching everyday financial lives of people living in and surviving occupation (Harker 2021). Because of this kind of work, we have a rich account of the everyday lives, relations of care, aspirations and connections that are being erased. Griffiths' paper calls on us to think carefully, collectively and creatively about how we can reroute resources afforded to research to people and communities who want to create their own analysis, narratives, theories and concepts; even more, directly affected people should have a role in creating and allocating budgets, with funders and researchers alike. Alongside co-production, researching through everyday life can displace migration categories altogether, moving the research gaze elsewhere and focussing on spatialities of living that exceed migration categories, weave places, people and communities together. Can we un-discipline our research and become unruly and unruled? Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.