Dr. Inken Bartels, Dr. Philipp Schäfer, Dr. Laura Stielike - Research Group ›The Production of Knowledge on Migration‹ (IMIS, Osnabrück University)
The lecture reflects on the possibilities and challenges of researching knowledge production on migration. Drawing on six years of collaborative work, we present a four-dimensional approach to study migration-related knowledge and its production. Building on four analytical perspectives – enactment, language and power, care and harm, and moral economies – we analyse the seemingly objective processes underpinning knowledge production in three distinct areas: computational migration research, statistical knowledge production, and police knowledge. The lecture demonstrates how attending to the situated practices, categorizations, ethical implications and moral-economic frameworks inherent in each of these fields of knowledge production reveals the constructed nature of ‘facts’ about migration and their often-unintended consequences.
Finally, we argue that a reflexive perspective, grounded in these four analytical perspectives, is crucial for critically engaging with and potentially reshaping the ways in which migration is understood and governed.
Inken Bartels, Philipp Schäfer and Laura Stielike are members of the Research Group ›The Production of Knowledge on Migration‹ (2019-2025, sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation and its funding initiative "Niedersächsisches Vorab"). The interdisciplinary group investigates the production of knowledge on spatial mobilities. Its research focuses on the categories, concepts and data that shape representations of spatially mobile people and that inform the various practices of dealing with their mobilities. Inspired by debates in the History, Sociology and Philosophy of Science, the group analyses the production of knowledge as a situated process that involves specific practices, networks and institutions. Read more
