Three problems without a solution: themilitant research conundrumand the social condition of migration

Do no harm? The impact of policy on migration scholarship

“…Inspired by Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Giorgio Grappi (2013: 323) writes: “migration researchers have only interpreted the migration regime, in various ways; the point is to change it.” In view of this article’s discussion, one could wonder whether migration scholarship has indeed ‘only interpreted the migration regime’ or whether, in fact, some strands of this scholarship have helped consolidate it. Thus, rather than advocating for a move from ‘interpretation’ to ‘practical change’, the question seems to instead be: what change, what sort of ‘impact’ can migration scholarship initiate or produce?…”

Migration ethics in pandemic times

“…There is risk here of ‘ethnography becoming a new kind of surveillance’ (exactly what Tedeschi cautions against), not in the form of categorical fetishism but rather revealing hardship and suffering or glimpses of fortunate changes of circumstances that revolve in ever more detail around individual lives. In order to avoid complicity with and deference to migration regimes (De Genova, 2002; Grappi, 2013), then, it is necessary for research to have an emphasis on enhacing the capacities of migrants, to have ambition to change the circumstances of those in precarious situations, lest our ethical direction become something that leads to disempowering migrants. From this perspective, a theory of individuation that emphasises the individual-environment relation, but without a notion of collective possibility, risks only claiming to know more but not necessarily making visible exactly those avenues where ethical action is already transformation.…”

“…Too often the migration 'problematic' is framed in terms that only reify the nation-state, privilege sedentarism, and reduce accounts of movement to shallow economic drivers and consequences (Carling and Collins, 2018;Nail, 2015). By contrast, experimentation with ideas from poststructural (Collins, 2018), feminist (Bastia, 2014), new materialist (Nail, 2015), and postcolonial (Grappi, 2013) social theory offer scope to recentre migrant lives, and crucially to open up understandings of migration as enduring, mutable, and directed towards but not determined by the temporal articulation of present, past, and future. Incremental and partial as they all are, such interventions are critical to recasting migration studies in a manner that makes it possible for scholarship itself to be more than just a support structure for the codification of migrants, the evaluation of mobile people's worthiness, and the maintenance of repressive forms of state-centred power (c.f.…”

Des affects aux politiques contestataires. Des rencontres perturbatrices avec les migrants le long d’une route transalpine

“…Au croisement entre la recherche et l'activisme (Grappi, 2013 ;Hale, 2001), cet article se base sur un travail de terrain de six mois à la frontière franco-italienne entre le Val de Suse italien et la zone de Briançon, entre 2017 et 2018. Les résultats de la recherche sont fondés sur l'expérience participative de la chercheuse dans les pratiques de secours, et sur 24 entretiens approfondis menés (sous des pseudonymes) parmi des résidents de zones frontalières engagés dans différents types d'activités de soutien, des opérations de recherche et sauvetage à haute altitude (les maraudes), à l´accueil dans les maisons privées et la participation aux activités quotidiennes des refuges locaux.…”