Migration Discipline Hijacked: Distances and Interruptions of a Research Militancy

In this paper we reflect on some instruments to interrupt the governmentalization of knowledge production at play in migration studies – mainstream, critical, and radical alike. We take knowledge production as the struggle-field where confronting, resisting, and interrupting the disciplining of migrations that arises from their academic and governmental incorporation as objects (of research and of policies). In contrast, we sketch a political epistemology of migrations, asking: which knowledge practices and interventions account for the contestedness migrations spark, and for the turbulence, excess, and upheavals migrants trigger? The paper discusses two of such paths. First, we sketch an approach to research that works ‘within and against’ the distances that perform and define migration field-sites and their pristine subject positions; second, we argue for the development and deployment of interruptions against those unquestioned chains of equivalences that are embedded in migration knowledge. Building on our engagement with Libyan war refugees in Tunisia and in Italy, we reflect on how these instruments somehow bring scholarly knowledge to its limits while working within its premises