Migrant integration in Turkey: Travels of a concept across borders and domains of knowledge production

Reflexive Migration Studies has emerged as a subfield of Migration Studies. Drawing on moral economy perspectives, we explore how the entanglement of, and tensions between, moral and economic rationalities shape the development of a field of knowledge production in which we ourselves partake. Clearly, Reflexive Migration Studies has not emerged in a vacuum but through socio-material practices and in a specific scientific context and community. Using the case of the Migration Studies landscape in Germany, we suggest that a moral economies perspective allows us to examine the production of knowledge infrastructures, scholarly identities, and research outputs that are key in creating a new academic field. By scrutinizing these infrastructures, identities, and outputs, we point to tensions between some of the morally charged claims and the material conditions and labour contexts of doing Reflexive Migration Studies. With our contribution, we want to raise questions regarding the direction that we, as scholars participating in the field, are taking. We see the risk that the critique brought forward in Reflexive Migration Studies falters in light of prevailing economies of scientific knowledge production and academic labour.

The Moral Economies of Reflexive Migration Studies

Stielike,

Schäfer,

Stierl

et al. 2024

Instituting the global: The racial analytics of migration

van Reekum,

Schinkel

2024

In this article, we regard concepts of inclusion and exclusion as epistemological obstacles for a political (rather than a critical) analysis of migration. Working with the rich conceptual innovations and scientific and philosophical genealogies developed by Denise Ferreira Da Silva in Toward a Global Idea of Race, we seek to show how concepts of inclusion and exclusion, as well as equations between migration and mobility fortify what Da Silva has called ‘globality’ and ‘raciality’. Either explicitly or implicitly according primacy to inclusion means that what Da Silva calls ‘the logic of exclusion’ ultimately folds into what she terms ‘the logic of obliteration’, which revolves around the necessary assimilation of the European other to the Euro-white subject. As we argue, today, the racial institution of the global operates to a large extent by way of the conceptual, classificatory and ocular practices that make up what is known as ‘migration’, which continues to be understood (falsely but constitutively) as cross-border mobility. We seek to show how ‘migration’, and its concomitant binary analytic of inclusion and exclusion, has become an apparatus separating what Da Silva calls the ‘transcendental I’, that is, the universal, self-determining, Euro-white subject, from those primarily characterized and known by what Da Silva calls ‘affectability’, that is, external determination. In the hierarchy of humans that ensues, migrants become recognizable as racially inferior, affectable not-quite-subjects.

Knowledge production in refugee studies from the South: Theorization of refugee labour in the literature on Turkey

Osseiran,

Nimer

2024

This article explores the case of the migration studies industry in Turkey, which has flourished over the past decade, through an examination of knowledge production on refugee labour. Focusing on research about Syrian refugees’ labour and employment in Turkey between 2012 and 2018, the article discusses the ways in which refugee labour is articulated and studied to provide ground for a wider critique of migration-related knowledge production. This study aims to reflexively question academic outputs by (1) exploring the conceptual frames used broadly in research on refugee labour, and (2) developing an overview of the literature on Turkey with a focus on this topic. Through the case of the literature on refugee labour in Turkey, we explore the underlying political economy premises of migration research. This case serves as an example to argue that knowledge produced in a Southern context is mainly incorporated as case studies despite attempts to advance theoretical discussions, highlighting a North–South hierarchization of knowledge.