Anthropologists and others applying ethnographic methods have an ample vocabulary for how we affect or impose ourselves on the field. When it comes to how experiences in the field affect us, the conversation gets quieter (Kristensen 2017). This fragmentation is partly a result of the unresolved role of emotions in research (Fleetwood 2009), partly a consequence of a lack of institutional structures that seriously deal with these matters, and partly an effect of broader patterns of unequal power relations between researchers, the people whose lives we wish to engage with, learn from and document, and the local brokering researchers engaged, without whom much research could not be carried out (Abedi Dunia et al. 2019; Abedi et al. 2020). And it is by no means an easy conversation to engage in; on the few occasions when we expose the often-brutal reality our research entails, it can occasion serious digestive problems among ethics committees, local partners, colleagues, and, not least, ourselves due to personal ambivalence about the relevance and "place" of revealing our emotions publicly, with or without good cause (McLean 2011). It is therefore no surprise that migration researchers occasionally face emotional challenges comparable to those encountered by colleagues in fields such as peace and conflict studies, or by staff working for humanitarian organisations, among whom high rates of anxiety, depression, compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, or vicarious trauma are found (Grimm et al. 2020). We just rarely talk about it and tend to ignore symptoms of compassion fatigue or vicarious trauma when our spirits get low. Some, then, go down with "stress".

Over the past ten years, the question of physically "surviving fieldwork" has become a central concern in research (Shiram et al. 2009; Felbab-Brown 2014; Theidon 2014; Grimm et al. 2020; Mac Ginty et al. 2021). In response, many research institutions have taken steps to reduce fieldwork risks and enhance safety. Safer research is generally understood to involve predeparture preparation and, when deemed necessary, some sort of hostile environment awareness training (so-called HEAT courses). The safety of interlocutors is generally monitored by committees overseeing compliance with core ethical principles such as informed consent, "do no harm", and data protection and storage (Mackenzie et al. 2007; Hugman et al. 2011). Debriefing structures are sometimes set up, offering opportunities to offload shattering experiences, inspired by those implemented by humanitarian actors (Martin-Ortega and Helman 2009). While no one can be against preparing researchers for safety hazards, critical voices argue that one-sided attention to physical security risks encouraging an "us versus them" attitude (Lake and Parkinson 2017) that, furthermore, may contribute to increasing the distance between researchers and our interlocutors (Grimm et al. 2020). Another problem with the one-sided focus on physical safety pertains to the possible contribution to undifferentiated, and at times exaggerated, negative stereotypes of dangerous settings (Woon 2013), contributing to the creation of a "no-go world" of global distancing and endangerment (Andersson 2019). These concerns resonate well with Sara Ahmed's suggestion that judging places and bodies as suspicious, dangerous, or something to be feared may have fatal consequences for those inhabiting them (Ahmed 2014). Awareness of these critical issues does not exactly make the conversation easier.

Attempts to promote safer field research attuned to the reality of the social sciences have been slow to incorporate emotional challenges and well-being, including not only that of contracting researchers institutionally located in the Global North but also of facilitating researchers and other participants in the Global South (Môcnik 2020). Acknowledging that emotional well-being is closely connected to physical security, and that neither of these concerns can be limited to the contracting researchers only, this chapter aims at discussing the emotional challenges involved in contemporary field research among migration researchers. The chapter highlights the contexts and institutional structures surrounding our research, the new opportunities for conducting digital research along with the associated effects of digital availability, and what can be done *prior to*, *during*, and *after* going to the field to maintain emotional engagement while avoiding occupational hazards of compassion fatigue, burnout, or secondary traumatic stress among all those involved.

Before embarking on these issues, I briefly present the methodology on which my reflections are based and describe the current context for conducting migration research. Drawing on fieldwork experiences shared by colleagues, I then present some of the emotional challenges encountered. I conclude by highlighting some of the practices that have proven useful for recognising emotions as intrinsic to field encounters while simultaneously helping to reduce the negative effects and personal costs associated with fieldwork. Since symptoms of vicarious trauma and burnout among researchers are well described in the psychological literature, my emphasis is on the participating researchers' personal experiences, explanations, and suggestions for ways ahead, rather than on the occupational hazards resulting in headaches, emotional extraction, sleep problems, drained immune systems, altered perceptions of reality, selfblame, cynicism, and tunnel vision that most have experienced in one form or the other.1

#### A Note on Methodology

After years of institutional preoccupation with research ethics and the physical safety of researchers and their interlocutors, I have discovered that a "loss of heart" among colleagues often had as much to do with being exposed to seemingly hopeless situations as with being provoked by working in dangerous settings. Before I got there, I took a detour around occupational stress, which seemed to be prevalent among colleagues, especially PhD students, who are almost expected to succumb to stress during their doctoral research. There is much to ponder here, which, beyond questions of the "illegitimacy" of feelings among researchers and inadequate training in dealing with them, also includes the generalised belief—whether true or not—that emotionally "tough" researchers stand a better chance in the struggle for (limited) future permanent positions. Thus, it may be regarded as more legitimate to give in to the pressures of academia than to the emotions fieldwork may have provoked.

The empirical basis for the experiences related here stems from two years of dialogue with colleagues and more structured interviews with ten selected scholars. The researchers contributing their experiences are diverse in terms of gender, academic trajectory, national background, and institutional location. Only one researcher, however, is physically located in the Global South, whereas the rest are attached to Danish or other European research institutions. Their disciplinary backgrounds vary, spanning anthropology, sociology, geography, history, psychology, and development studies, with different traditions of including/excluding emotional aspects in the research process. All have conducted one or more long-term periods of fieldwork in insecure places among people subjected to extreme hardship related to some form of migration, be it among internally displaced persons (IDPs); people fleeing poverty or war involving genocide; people trapped in refugee camps, asylum and detention centres; or smuggled and trafficked migrants. While many of the migrants and refugees interviewed by my conversation partners have managed to find better and more secure lives over the years, others have ended up in prison, died along the routes, or continue to eke out an existence. The disastrous consequences of deterrence-based migration policy and practice—that deliberately ignores the plight of migrants in distress in order to dissuade others—are not limited to any particular region. The participants' field experiences stem from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, as well as from sites within or bordering Europe and the United States. This diversity is not totally random. Several are present or former colleagues; others are people I have met at conferences or through other forms of international research collaboration. While I considered approaching researchers outside my personal networks to avoid "insularity", upon reflection this probably would have led to less focused and less intimate conversations. I already knew about (some) of the emotional challenges the participants had faced; they knew me well enough to feel confident talking about less "heroic" moments of their careers.

All participants were given advance information about the aim of my project and sent a rough thematic "guide" about issues of interest, including specific, demanding fieldwork incidents, whether we are prepared for such incidents to occur, how we tackle emotional challenges during and after fieldwork, and the degree of institutional support in pre-fieldwork training, supervision and—when necessary—psychological counselling during and after completed fieldwork. Everyone was encouraged to make constructive suggestions about what we can do better, both as individuals and as research institutions. Finally, more established researchers were asked to reflect upon whether their field has become more emotionally challenging over the years, an issue I find particularly important in efforts to avoid over-simplification (e.g. that younger researchers, due to a lack of experience, are more prone to emotional hardship or that burnout among older researchers is necessarily due to overexposure).

Our exchanges lasted from one to two hours. Some took place in my or their offices, others in places outside our working environments. Three conversations were held virtually. On all occasions, we discussed the purpose of dwelling on emotional hardship in research before oral informed consent to participate was granted. All conversations were taped and fully transcribed by me. The participants were offered the opportunity to develop statements they found needed further explication than in the transcripts. They have also been offered the opportunity to see a draft of this chapter before publication. Finally, all have been granted anonymity and no names therefore appear in what follows.

Despite my focus on personal experiences, several participants reflected not only on their own but also on situations affecting local brokering partners, be they interpreters or fellow researchers contracted for data collection. Instead of being "oblivious to privilege and positionality" (Abedi Dunia et al. 2019), most were painfully aware of having had access to insurance or counselling structures not available to local partners. Indeed, frustrations over unequal working conditions have, in some cases, exacerbated the emotional strain during fieldwork. Such frustrations have also been found among researchers from the Global South who, for instance, study for their PhD degrees at universities in the North and from that position conduct field research in their countries of origin (Kalinga 2019; Turner 2010).

#### Conducting Migration Research at the Present Moment

Migration research is a diversified field concerned with the drivers, processes, and outcomes of proactive ("voluntary") and reactive ("forced") manifestations of human mobility. Those involved in the field increasingly agree that the distinction between economic and political forces motivating migratory movements is difficult to uphold (Richmond 1994; Stepputat and Sørensen 2014). Similar critical reflections on migration as exceptional human behaviour have begun to take shape (Shah 2020), just as studies of immobility have gained traction in migration research (Carling 2002; Lubkemann 2008). Human mobility, especially over long distances, has always been subject to contestation. Studying these processes ethnographically in real time has more often than not involved dilemmas of privilege and disadvantage, attention to asymmetric and unequal power relations and, in the best of cases, concerted reflection on ethical challenges along with methodological and political investment in research (Castellanos 2019).

Many challenges befall scholars who explore contemporary migration phenomena. On top of the power dynamics between researchers and those whose lives are at stake, the representation, dissemination, and discussion of research results increasingly take place in politicised fora. Public discourse and the media play a major role in framing perceptions of migration. When framed as crisis, migration experiences tend to acquire a specific temporal dimension, largely disconnected from history and related events, that not only directly shapes policies but also favours some research results over others (Menjívar et al. 2019). Indeed, researchers have far better access to policy circles and media outlets than disadvantaged interlocutors, but what we contribute and how that contribution resonates with politics vary according to the prevailing narrative of migration. Or, put differently, conducting migration research may be perceived as more challenging during times when research results have little resonance among political decision-makers and the general public, when the lines between "for" and "against" migration are more sharply drawn, or when humanitarian considerations become subordinated to wishes for control and restraint. Thus, emotional experience cannot be separated from the historical moment and social environment in which is embedded (Åhåll 2018).

Crisis rhetoric and images of "unprecedented flows" have led to new restrictions on human mobility, manifested in ever stricter border control mechanisms or in what Ruben Andersson (2019) has called a "posthumanitarian moment of harsher deterrence". Deterrence mechanisms include the extension of border surveillance and cooperation between coast and border guards with migrant-sending countries (de facto illegalising not only the right to *enter* a given country but also to leave your own), the use of suffering as a means of deterrence, the deployment of security forces in border and desert areas (to perform "pushbacks" and "pullbacks"), the outsourcing of migrant detention and removal to private security companies, and the criminalisation of assistance (Sørensen and Plambech 2019; Distretti 2020).

Alongside the geopolitical changes affecting migrants' and asylum seekers' travel, transit, and arrival conditions, there are questions of extortion, violence, abuse, enslavement, and, in the worst cases, disappearance or death along the routes that demand attention (Sørensen and Huttunen 2020). Such changes and developments are reflected in the places where researchers conduct fieldwork, including insecure border areas or other hostile environments. They are also reflected in the situations in which fieldworkers find their interlocutors. As global inequality is currently manifested in unequal access to mobility and fundamental human rights, many of these situations involve indefinite positions of "not arriving" and "not becoming" (Khosravi 2018), meaning that many migrants and refugees are found in seemingly hopeless situations. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that migration research is currently challenged by increasing media attention to, on the one hand, imagined or real increases in the numbers of migrants arriving at the borders of reluctant hosts, and, on the other hand, traumatic migrant experiences of dramatic journeys, pushbacks, detections, detentions, deportations, and gross human rights violations along the way.

With so much insecurity and human suffering at stake, the central ethical and methodological challenges in undertaking migration research demand renewed attention. Research involving refugees and IDPs has acknowledged the politically complex, difficult, and often insecure places in which fieldwork among vulnerable participants is carried out. This has occasioned ethically reflexive calls for ways to move beyond "do no harm" as a standard for research design and conduct (Mackenzie et al. 2007). However, there has been less concern with the emotional implications and effects of conducting research in insecure places among migrants in extremely difficult situations.

Nonetheless, a small but growing emphasis on the ethical challenges and emotional politics involved in conducting fieldwork on migrationrelated topics in times of intensified border controls is beginning to emerge, often building on personal experiences in the field and published in blog posts. Writing on secondary trauma, Mary Bosworth notes that her research in immigration detention centres is "unsettling" and sometimes "overwhelming", leading to psychological effects such as sleeplessness, anxiety, and palpitations. While Bosworth depicts these emotions as hers to manage and accepts them as an inescapable part of where her work as an experienced criminologist takes her, she finds it crucial to share accounts of challenges and how to overcome them with doctoral students and postdocs, who might be entering the field for the first time (Bosworth 2017). From the position of a younger researcher embarking on field research, Tamara Last describes how conducting fieldwork on border death led to symptoms of depression and the development of PTSS in herself and among her co-workers. Although such experiences have a high personal cost, when subjected to critical (auto-)reflection they may lead to methodological suggestions for reducing vicarious trauma stemming from emotionally disturbing research, including ideas for integrating effective monitoring and intervention protocols into the research design from a very early stage (Last 2020; see also Môcnik 2020).

Attention to the role of emotions in fieldwork provides a pathway to appreciate the imprint of personal relations and feelings that shape research outcomes and the knowledge produced. We go to the field to get a more nuanced understanding of local and geopolitical processes, to enhance the visibility of grounded and alternative visions, and hopefully thereby become capable of decentring assumptions that are taken for granted. "Emotional fieldwork", Chih Yuan Woon argues, "opens up the researcher to different emotional engagements and connections with his/her respondents, which in turn allows for critical reassessment of issues pertaining to danger, ethics and responsibility" (Woon 2013, 32). However, even if such insights provide a powerful argument against positivist research ideals and effectively deconstruct objectivity and distance in favour of emotional engagement, they also hint at the somewhat false dichotomy between the physical and emotional safety of field-working researchers. This has been a recurring theme in the conversations that inform the following discussion.

### Field-Related Exposure, Institutional Drivers, and Emotional Vulnerability

Field-based research often takes us to places that are unimaginable before arriving and unpredictable while there. While predominantly presented as a professional practice, engaging in fieldwork often turns out to be a physical, personal, and emotional experience (Fleetwood 2009). This also applies to fieldwork conducted in the countries we reside in—for example when conducting research in refugee reception or migrant detention centres—with the difference that the researcher can return to her or his home on a daily or weekly basis and maintain direct social contact with family, friends, and colleagues. However, the ability to reach out is not necessarily directly connected to physical distance between "home" and "field".

#### *Insecure Places and Hopeless Situations*

In terms of field-related, emotionally distressing experiences, the participants in this study distinguished between *anxiety provoked by insecure places* and *discouragement provoked by exposure to hopeless situations.* Talking about both proved equally transgressive for most. Anxiety leading to emotional distress was partly experienced as related to physical dangers abroad such as the risk of falling victim to violence, kidnapping, or traffic accidents, whereas anxiety grounded in the difficulty of being able to distinguish what is dangerous in unfamiliar surroundings constituted another group of factors. The daily unpredictability coupled with doubts about whom to trust, feeling monitored by authorities or parallel criminal structures, or feeling manipulated by gatekeepers, were all seen as contributing to distress in the field and the development of stress symptoms upon return, leading to sick leave (three cases) and, in the worst case, vicarious trauma upon return (one case) or even years after leaving the field (another case).

Discouragement provoked by exposure to desperate and hopeless situations was easier to acknowledge on a personal level but equally difficult to talk about. "You cannot afford to succumb to the suffering of others. They have to stay and live with it all the time", said one participant. While doing research among deported migrants in the Global South, an experienced researcher noted: "Well, they live there all the time, and I can leave. So, I have many discussions with myself that are both personal and political. Can I allow myself as a white, middle-class person to say that I do not dare be in a certain place that others are prevented from leaving?".

Many did not receive much guidance before embarking on their first fieldwork. They were familiar with qualitative interview techniques, participant observation, and so on from their basic academic training; but had never spoken to their PhD supervisors or senior colleagues about the potential emotional strain of conducting fieldwork. Along with the lack of preparation for the emotional impact of fieldwork on their wellbeing, younger colleagues also related that they did not have much contact with their supervisors during often-lengthy fieldwork periods. Many, moreover, perceived that it was expected of them to have as little contact as possible with their personal social networks while abroad, to facilitate a deeper engagement with the places and people among whom they worked. Finally, one participant mentioned that supervisors involved in collaborative projects may become vicariously traumatised by the research themselves, which creates dysfunctional supervision and support structures.

#### *Emotional Rewards*

Although most could talk about emotionally challenging situations in the field, hardly any started the conversation there. On the contrary, participants commented that they had felt enriched, and naturally also saddened, by what their interlocutors had gone through, but even so, they felt professionally and personally rewarded by the, often intense, meetings with other human beings. "People always expressed contentment with my being there, of being asked to tell their story", a researcher explained. In his experience, many hard stories led to some form of relief, for the person telling the story as well as for the researcher tasked with making the story known. The latter, of course, places an immense burden on the act of bearing witness (Appelbaum 2008) that may manifest in the process of analysis and writing. To this researcher, however, allowing himself to be emotional in the field and to not be afraid of his personal vulnerability was, furthermore, an essential methodological necessity: "I cried during several interviews, and that was what opened up … in the moment people saw my emotional reaction, they threw away their reservations and opened up completely". Allowing ourselves to feel hurt during fieldwork is therefore not only essential to maintaining a healthy emotional self but also a methodological tool for gaining "access".

Another researcher, who for much of his lengthy career has worked with violent conflict, IDPs, and international refugees, expressed a slightly different dynamic: "After all, we are talking to the survivors, who are often capable of turning the past into some sort of heroic narrative of how they managed the situation". In his view, then, the reward of fieldwork consists in providing interlocutors with a space to create meaning and take on an active role in an otherwise horrific situation.

Such spaces are not one-way, but often reflect on the researcher's emotional well-being: "I think that I grew personally from working with vulnerable people", a mid-career researcher underscored. "And this is not because I compare my own situation to theirs. It is rather because it is in the meeting between human beings that you gain energy … you know, the opposite of compassion fatigue". She further explained:

I believe it is all about accepting that you move through different spaces but maintain the same ethics in them. It is a form of relativism where you accept that we have very different conditions, but basically we are the same. And always respect the persons you work among, never say no, but always accept what someone offers you, you know, somehow being able to show that you are able to see the resources people have. Even in the darkest of situations.

Others nevertheless ended up pointing to the ambivalent place of emotions in research and the institutional structures that prevent taking emotions seriously into account. "Are you really allowed to have feelings in research?" was a frequently asked question, as were statements such as "I believe emotions continue to be illegitimate in research environments" or "ideas of objectivity still prevail and prevent us from bringing our personal emotions to the fore". Giving the discussion a gendered twist, one could further argue that emotions remain associated with the personal, the body, and the feminine, whereas the objective, the mind, and the masculine continue to prevail, even in the sciences that are supposed to be "social" (Åhåll 2018). Younger colleagues pointed to a dire lack of institutional attention to emotional stress both prior to, during, and to a lesser extent after completing their fieldwork, while postdocs searching for permanent employment expressed a fear that showing "emotional weakness" could be used as a sorting mechanism when filling new positions. "I feel that you gain recognition by daring to go to difficult places", one discussion partner stated, whereas another felt that "to be emotional is to be vulnerable and vulnerability is not viewed as a resource when it comes to hiring permanent staff". Younger researchers therefore felt that they could talk to colleagues on their own level, but not necessarily to their supervisors or other senior researchers in the institutions to which they are (temporarily) attached.

#### *Conducive Institutional Cultures?*

Institutional structures reflect power relations with respect to project approvals, grants, and, ultimately, promotions along the career track. Apart from how they are structured, institutional cultures are co-created by how researchers represent themselves and interact with each other. Mirroring the "Bang-Bang effect" among war reporters and photographers (Marinovich and Silva 2000); Kimberly Theidon (2014) refers to the practice of sharing who has seen the goriest scenes (the most battered bodies, the heaviest rain of bullets, or other dangers) as the "horror index" within peace and conflict studies. The stories I have encountered among migration researchers have not necessarily been gory but nevertheless may have contributed to generating what I, for lack of a better concept, term the "Indiana Jones syndrome".

The following incident took place at a party among peers in 2018. The planning committee had done its utmost to create a selection of themed bars. One such themed bar was inside a tent, furnished with carpets, cushions, and dimmed lighting. Malinowski's tent on the Trobriand Islands? A refugee camp facility? Once inside, all attendees were asked to write down a fieldwork experience, either experienced by themselves or by someone known to most. The notes were collected in a bowl. The following game consisted of guessing who the experience referred to: "Who was once hanging on a cliff after a landslide", "who unknowingly attended a party with narco lords", or "who was robbed at gunpoint outside his field residence", and so on. Conspicuously absent were questions such as "who was left sleepless for months after working in a refugee camp" or "who was on sick leave after carrying out fieldwork among human smugglers". People were surprisingly good at guessing whom each incident referred to, a fact I interpret as indicative of the rather high street value such stories have in research environments. But, also, telling of the fact that emotional stress management can take many forms, including performance, good company, and shared laughter. This, then, obviously leads to the question of the extent to which institutional cultures limit or enable attention to research-related emotional distress.

Not everyone buys into the "Indiana Jones syndrome". One midcareer researcher felt "totally misplaced" in settings cultivating this kind of "boyish attraction to danger". After years of working among asylum seekers and immigrants in prisons or detention centres, it was her experience that some male colleagues are attracted to what they believe is work among dangerous inmates:

I find that way of talking about the people we work with quite disturbing, enormously 'other-making'. It is making people far more dangerous than they are, or ever could be, and it results in a way of articulating otherness as something you cannot grasp unless you have been there, done drugs with your interlocutors, shared their weapons.

When asking if she had ever felt emotional distress during fieldwork, she elaborated: "While some of the people I've worked with have been convicted of violence or done other terrible things, only defining them by their criminal act and not taking other facets of their lives into account, including *their* boyishness, the everyday and the adventurous, the poetic and the inspirational, all the other things that go into a person … to omit that disturbs me".

The point here is not to distinguish "hard-skinned" researchers from emotionally reflexive ones, nor to manshame male colleagues, or accuse feminist killjoys, and certainly not to argue for cancelling future parties and opportunities to relieve anxiety-provoking experiences. A good laugh among peers has often proved an effective way to start deeper and relevant discussions about working conditions. However, continuously casting the researcher as adventurous and daring (to not say self-promoting or selfaggrandising) contributes to upholding unhealthy institutional cultures as well as the co-creation of global distancing and no-go zones.

#### *Contagious Field Sites, Empathy and Emotions*

An early career researcher conducting fieldwork in asylum centres connected the field site, the personal and the political in a different way: "In many ways, asylum centres are ideal places for conducting fieldwork. Nothing much is happening, most of the time it is pretty boring, and people have plenty of time to talk with you", she explained. But then she continued:

However, there is a sensory dimension connected to walking around in this boredom. The feeling that everything has stalled but meanwhile your interlocutors could receive a letter from the immigration authorities any day that changes everything. That so much is at stake … it somehow becomes contagious … that everything can go wrong [with the asylum application process] any moment … I found it immensely stressful.

After ending a year of fieldwork, she fell apart. "When everything is so, yes, just shitty, and people are doing so badly and this becomes the norm, well then it becomes extremely difficult to leave the field. Because everything that I find problematic in relation to the handling of asylum seekers is somehow confirmed by my departure, right? And well, I just became very sad". The combination of exposure to human suffering and the "sorrow of parting" (Parvez 2018) simply became too much to bear.

Another researcher turned the question of emotional distress upsidedown by asking: "Wouldn't it be terribly disturbing if you were not affected? If you were not emotionally distressed? To see all that suffering without any reaction. Isn't that in fact a sign of psychopathy?" In her definition, watching and navigating human suffering undisturbed, without letting yourself be touched by it, would constitute a horrific fieldwork ideal. As emphasised by Kasper Hoffmann (2014), the proposition that fieldworkers can or should strive to set their personal histories aside—and thereby divest themselves of their values and prejudices in order to attain an objective understanding of their research subjects—is nothing short of an impossible empiricist dream.

#### *The Process of Writing*

Equally important, participants described how feelings of emotional distress "never end" but continue or reappear in the process of data processing, analysis, and writing: "I found it really difficult to get back to the taped interviews and read the transcriptions. In fact, I had to have another person transcribe the recordings, because I could hardly stand listening to them, even a year after my return from the field", a PhD researcher stated.

It is when I get back to the data that I feel vulnerable. And to this day I have a hard time sitting down to listen to the recordings … it reminds me of how embedded I was and how focused I was on taking physical care of myself, you know: being able to turn the car 180 degrees in two seconds and flee and whatever you learn during those HEAT courses, while I did not consider the emotional damage that feelings of constant insecurity inflicted on me.

In her case too much, or too one-sided, institutional attention to physical security prevented her from grasping her emotional vulnerability.

When field notes or collected archival material contain traumatic human experiences, writing may become insuperable. The collision of pressure to disseminate, institutional demands around formats, and personal expectations contributes to the unbearable darkness of the writing process. Another PhD researcher commented: "Before I was just part of a research project, but you get the sense, well definitely the intense sense, that you need to publish. But here the emotional struggles became a block". In attempts to write she found it impossible to write "objectively", and objective was the standard she was encouraged to write by. "I had to sort of pull all the feelings out of it. And that was very difficult to do, and in the end also very unsatisfying".

A more experienced researcher described how hopelessness, despite years of engaging with the same field, crept under her skin: "I was trained to look for agency, and I have written about agency, but these days migrants are deported anyway". Thus, emotional distress related to writing is not limited to a possible traumatic experience of revisiting field notes and recordings. It is also embedded in the increasingly politicised environment circumscribing our research: "It is my experience that the migrants I work among have an increasingly hard time", she further explained. "When I started out 15 years ago, my interlocutors were granted residence status, some felt lonely and longed for somebody to talk to. And there I was. Today they can be deported at any time … and it makes me feel powerless. To be witness to this development. What difference does it make that I write about it? Because their situation just gets worse and worse, across the board". To underscore the pervasive dilemmas related to writing she stated: "With the changing political situation I feel, well, that it doesn't help, in this political environment, to reveal in writing that the people I work with have agency, because it will only be used against them".

#### *Digital Availability*

Whereas digital technologies have expanded the ways research is carried out, including web-based interviewing and other forms of "netnography" (Kozinets 2015), it has also affected the relationship between researchers and research subjects. The fact that online sociality is multidirectional and increasingly accessible to the people we work with means that it is no longer the sole privilege of the researcher to reach out to interlocutors, as they are now available to interlocutors long after a research project ends. While this certainly democratises research processes and moves research towards more participatory and inclusive designs, it potentially poses an additional stress factor to those already mentioned above, especially if there is so little you can do to change the often dire circumstances our interlocutors find themselves in. As one senior researcher commented:

During the past few years, I have experienced a tremendous level of stress from constantly being in contact with my interlocutors. Hearing about their situation all the time, through WhatsApp, Messenger, phone calls.  What happens if I decide not to? I cannot afford to withdraw for a year and then go back when it suits me and say 'hey, let's resume contact', while they have had a miserable year.

A doctor's order to disconnect from communication with interlocutors during a three-month leave recharged her batteries enough to resume contact. Others talked about the cumulative effect of not handling their field and maintaining contact as well as previously, partly due to the perception that migrants and refugees face ever harsher conditions, partly because their own ability to make a difference has narrowed.

#### Conclusion and Ways Ahead

You will be changed by your research; that is one of the legacies. No, not necessarily turned into one of the walking wounded, but changed in ways that may not be readily or immediately apparent. The awareness of this – and of how the changes manifest across time and space – can make a difference while we conduct our research and when we return from our field sites and sit down to write. (Theidon 2014, 3)

This chapter has explored the difficulties of practicing emotions in the field and in research in general. To that end, I have outlined examples from the research participants' professional trajectories, as well as their reflections on these. One of the issues pertaining to fieldwork is that we never seem to have as much control over what is going on around us as we would sometimes like. Rather, we pretty much must go along with the flow of events surrounding us, which when working in insecure places often provokes anxiety and, when working among people in seemingly hopeless situations, impacts our emotional well-being. None of the participants in this study suggest that this can, or should be, avoided. On the contrary, they have used their sometimes hard-earned personal experiences to reflect creatively: on what can be done to better prepare younger colleagues for their first fieldwork and protect more experienced researchers from compassion fatigue or burnout; on how to enable institutional structures to provide better practices; and on how not to, themselves, contribute further to the co-creation of "no-go zones", or the nourishing of an "Indiana Jones" culture.

It is surely essential to acknowledge emotion as inherent in any research practice. But we must also promote researcher vulnerability as a valuable resource and not something to be prevented or avoided. One way to institutionally support this challenge would be to understand emotional counselling as a natural component of challenging research circumstances, rather than as an offer of treatment to those who return with traumatic symptoms. Potentially emotionally challenging situations should therefore be included in project design and methodology and form part of the evaluation made by ethics boards and the supervision given to younger scholars by their more experienced senior colleagues. One way to facilitate such institutional change, several younger colleagues have reminded me, is the power of the example: experienced researchers could certainly be more open about their own past and present vulnerabilities. For a start we could let go of the Indiana Jones culture and collectively search for more respectful, empathetic—and in the end more effective—ways of building trust with our interlocutors.

Time is a precious resource, especially when seeking to generate as much knowledge as possible while in the field. Participants in this study nevertheless pointed to the need for relaxation and leisure activities when conducting fieldwork over long periods of time. They also stressed the importance of maintaining research diaries, both as a cathartic tool for recording personal fears and shortcomings (Browne 2013), but also for expressing personal feelings of guilt, apprehension, and worry. Apart from serving as a logging device or a mere self-investigatory outlet, field diaries can then be used more explicitly to examine the ways our personal challenges and emotions impact the research process and its outcomes (Punch 2012). Those who have kept such diaries have moreover found them extremely helpful when later experimenting with more dialogical or creative forms of writing.

The attitude to sometimes dreaded ethical review boards and mandatory debriefing after completed fieldwork was more divided. With regard to the first, several have experienced that it is institutional interest rather than employee well-being that is protected. About debriefing, some find that in the best of cases it makes little difference, in the worst of cases it leads to retraumatisation. Others have found available debriefing structures helpful, but note that they ought not to be standardised, nor reflect institutional power structures. Few wish to involve individuals with power over their present and future work opportunities (directors, supervisors, human resource personnel) in such structures, but see potential in creating "safe groups" that meet regularly, can be contacted during fieldwork, and always when someone comes back from the field.

Interestingly, instances of compassion fatigue seem to have as much to do with the prevailing migration policy discourse in the Global North as with overexposure to misery and uphill struggles encountered in the field. This suggests that "compassion fatigue" is not necessarily a sign of a lack of compassion, but rather—and on top of the current emotional politics in research environments—is reflective of the politicised context in which contemporary migration research is carried out.

Stefanie Kappler (2021) reminds us that solidarity is a powerful response to the power differentials that emerge from different levels of privilege. Privilege not only determines mobility—who has permission to move in and out of which spaces—but also what researchers are willing and capable of observing and writing about, and for how long. This obviously makes it crucial to avoid making empty promises to the people we engage with, but perhaps also to be realistic about how much we can do. Ultimately, it offers an opportunity to rethink and push for more ethical—and more equal—research practices, or, as suggested by Abedi et al. (2020), new, non-exploitative forms of knowledge production.

### Note

1. For a more explicit focus on vicarious trauma among researchers, I refer to Appelbaum (2008), Coles et al. (2014), Plakas (2018), Plüg and Collins (2018) and Sloan et al. (2019).

#### Bibliography

Challenges of Fieldwork in Unfamiliar Settings." *International Journal of Qualitative Methods* 12 (1): 420–435.

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# Comments

# On Data and Care in Migration Contexts

#### *Koen Leurs*

[O]ur current political and sociotechnical moment sits at the forefront of philosophical questions about who cares, how they do it, and for what reason.

—Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese (2020, 2)

Offering fresh impetus to the emerging interdisciplinary research focus area of digital migration studies, this book probes how migration researchers, practitioners and policymakers can care for data. In taking a caring perspective, this book offers an important response to the recent trend of seeing migration as a laboratory where experiments with big data can be conducted. In particular, "irregularised migrants", the group of mobile subjects on which this anthology focuses, become guinea pigs. Experimental big-data-driven technosolutionism must be understood in a broader socio-political context where refugee and asylum migratory

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movements are taken to stage a crisis, e.g. the so-called "European migration crisis". Rather than caring for, under the heading of crisis, the key aim is increasingly to control mobile groups through datafied solutions. For example, Frontex, Europe's Border and Coast Guard Agency is carrying out research and innovation based on big-data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) as part of its "Integrated Border Management" (2021, 62), which seeks to identify, contain and deter particular mobile people. Technologies to be tested include "automated border control", "small autonomous unmanned aerial systems" and "geospatial data analytics of operational awareness" (ibid., 35–40). Refugee camps in Greece such as "Moria 2.0" become the EU's "sandbox for surveillance technologies", where data-driven securitisation plans include "camera surveillance with motion analysis algorithms monitoring the behavior and movement of centre residents" (Molnar 2021). The "long summer of migration" in 2015, and additional so-called migration crises, with Rohingya in Bangladesh, Venezuelans in Brazil and South Sudanese fleeing to Kenya, illustrate the allure of what we can call the "big data sublime" (Mosco 2004): assuming technological innovation can disrupt and solve problems (without having to come to terms with underpinning large-scale historical, socio-cultural, geo-political and economic concerns). The UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance sums up by commenting that governments and UN agencies "are subjecting refugees, migrants, stateless persons and others to human-rights violations, and extracting large quantities of data from them on exploitative terms that strip these groups of fundamental human agency and dignity" (Achiume 2020, 1). In thinking further how we as critical, engaged migration, border and media researchers operate in this space, in this commentary, I draw out conceptual assumptions around the two main thematics of data and care that underpin the contributions of this field-setting book.

#### Data

As a philosophical term, data can be etymologically traced back to the seventeenth century Latin plural of "datum", meaning literally "something given" (Lexico 2021). The assumption of (big) data as a given objective, a fixed and factual neutral rendering of reality, remains a key rallying point in heated academic and activist discussions. The notions of dataism and data colonialism have recently begun to dominate these discussions. Commonly understood as mutually exclusive analytic lenses, these opposite sides of the debate can lure researchers and others into the trap of feeling they must choose one or the other. On the one hand, the notion of dataism captures an ideological "belief in objective quantification" and "trust in the (institutional) agents" that gather, analyse and share data (Van Dijck 2014, 198; Harari 2017). From this perspective, data and algorithms gain increasing authority over decisionmaking practices. Ideologies of dataism are also apparent in some domains of academia, including migration studies, as well as migration management, policymaking and humanitarianism, as several chapters of this book demonstrate. For example, in Chapter 5, Laura Stielike convincingly critiques the exploitative machinic vision discernible in big-data-based knowledge production on migration. The assumption that "migration as something that needs to be governed and that can be better governed through better data" reflects the digital sublime aspect of dataism and illustrates how certain strands of migration research reinforce the assumption that contemporary migration is inherently tied to database-driven governmentality.

The concept of "data colonialism" has grown into a prominent alternative critical framework. Jim Thatcher, David O'Sullivan and Dillon Mahmoudi proposed the term to dismantle utopian imaginaries of "digital frontierism" and grasp "accumulation by dispossession" (2016, 990). In a similar vein, Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias draw on the term to address datafication as a new expansive formation of capitalism: "data relations enact a new form of data colonialism, normalizing the exploitation of human beings through data" (2019, 336). There is a growing body of work critiquing experimental governmentality projects that colonise datafied migrant populations under the heading of crisis management, securitisation and risk mitigation or "data-driven humanitarianism" (e.g. Molnar 2019). The book also delves further into the oppressive and exploitative data relations observable in the field of migration.

To account for the multiplicity, heterogeneity and inherent situatedness of data, datafication and data practices, Stefania Milan and Emiliano Treré rightly invite scholars to move beyond data universalisms such as dataism and data colonialism (2019). They argue that "the main problem with data universalism is that it is asocial and ahistorical, presenting technology (and datafication-related dynamics, we add) as something operating outside of history and of specific sociopolitical, cultural, and economic contexts" (2019, 324) and call for epistemic diversity and most importantly epistemic justice. Stefano Calzati similarly argues that to operationalise "pluralisation" of our understandings of data, we should speak about dataisms and data colonialisms (2020, 4).

This book proposes various ways to address data as inherently situated, contextualised and partial forms of representation and narratives. To draw out this understanding further, we can take cues from established theories on the performativity of language and performativity of images. Following J. L. Austin's book *How to do things with words?* (1962) we can draw on speech-act theory to conceptually pursue the question *How to do things with data*? In addition, we can address how data stretches across narrative and visual domains by taking cues from W. J. T. Mitchell's book *What do pictures want?* to ask *What is said about data?* And *what does data want*? For this purpose, in the remainder of this section, I will take the following 4 steps, (I) discuss some of the theoretical premises of performativity, (II) address performativity vis-à-vis power relations, (III) explicate how these processes are constituted through digital networks and datafication and (IV) transpose these insights into the specific context of datafied migration.

I. For the language philosopher John L. Austin, particular types of discourse can be understood as illocutionary acts. Illocutionary acts are performative utterances such as, for example, "You're fired", "I apologise", "You are under arrest" or "I now pronounce you married". Depending on the person making these statements and the contexts in which they are made, these speech acts result in a changed state of affairs or change in our relationships and social world: "The uttering of a performative is, or is part of, the doing of a certain kind of action, the performance of which, again, would not normally be described as just 'saying' or 'describing' something" (Austin 1962, 5). Besides Austin's language philosophy, theories of performativity have been developed in phenomenology and existentialism, ethnomethodology as well as theatre and performance studies (Isin 2021).

II. Theories of power in relation to performativity have been developed in queer and black feminism, poststructuralism, decolonial and postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies (Isin 2021). Articulating the relationship between discourse, gender normativity, sexuality and racism, Judith Butler conceptualised how performativity is inherently power-ridden. With her notion of the performative, Butler goes beyond distinctions between material-embodied and symbolic-discursive domains. Gender performativity is the constitutive stylised repetitious process through which one acquires a gendered subjectivity: "language sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible" (Butler 1997, 6). Performativity establishes and reinforces power relations through "the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices" (Butler 1993, 226). However, theories of performativity seek to create awareness of how room manoeuvre, contestation and agency always remain. For Butler, gender can, for example, be subverted by unsettling and denaturalising it as "an act […] which is open to splitting, self-parody, self-criticism" (1990, 282).

III. In recent years, several scholars have taken up performativity as a critical lens to address big data and datafication. Taking the example of databased search procedures, Rita Raley understands datafied surveillance (dataveillance) as a performative process: "Our data bodies […] are repeatedly enacted. Data is in this respect *performative*: the composition of flecks and bits of data into a profile" (2013, 218). Larissa Hjorth illustrates how families do digital kinship, they also take up dataveillance as an empowering form of agency, to find reassurance in being able to monitor and share mundane performative activities over distance (2021). Focussing on performativity as agential, Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert have theorised digital citizenship as a form of politics in their reflection on "how people perform themselves as political subjects by making digital rights claims […] by saying and doing something through the internet" (2020, xi).

IV. Drawing on Butler's notion of citationality, Tobias Matzner specifies how normativity shapes the performative big-data forms of migration governance (2016). For Matzner, through its diagnoses, or "verdicts", big data develop a "subjectivising force", for example, in the context of border control or processing mobile populations. Through that, they install hierarchy as they "cite a particular norm to count as a subject in the first place": a subject who is allowed to pass or needs to be stopped at a border, a subject allowed or denied a visa or allowed to board a plane (2016, 206–207). Vassilis S. Tsianos and Brigitta Kuster have called for critical scrutiny of datafied migration, while emphasising "doing digital borders", which emphasises the digital "performativity of the border" (2016, 237). From a separate angle, Stephan Scheel, Evelyn Ruppert and Funda Ustek-Spilda address the increasing data-driven knowledge making practices of migration across policy and academic domains into performative enactments (2019). As the processual understanding of "migrants' digital space" by Vasiliki Makrygianni, Ahmad Kamal, Luca Rossi and Vasilis Galis (Chapter 2) illustrates, the present book adopts a constructivist view of the performativity of data practices in migration. The book shows this perspective has the potential to reveal the intricate interplay between how the oppressive workings of technological systems, which variously play out, are contested and negotiated in the everyday lived experiences of distinctively situated mobile groups.

### Caring for (Big) Data

After having articulated further alternative, nuanced and holistic understandings of data as performative, we now turn to the second key term underpinning the book: care. Marie Sandberg and Luca Rossi propose that for digital migration researchers "approaching migrants' digital data collection 'with care' means pursuing a more critical approach to the use of big data in migration research where the data is not an unquestionable proxy for social activity" (in the introductory chapter for this book). Here, they base their productive thoughts on Annemarie Mol's understanding of "care in practice" as a heterogeneous process resulting from a myriad of socio-material actors interacting in specific conditional settings (Mol et al. 2010). Sandberg and Rossi call for a theory and ethics of careful data research in and on migration, and below I address some genealogies to further situate the potentialities of pursuing caring migration data relations.

From an etymological perspective, we can trace caring to the Old English verb of "carian", which is of Germanic origin; and can be related to Old High German words "chara", meaning "grief, lament" and the Old Norse word "k ˛or", meaning "sickbed" (Lexico 2021). Commonsensical understandings of care revolve around forms of provision reflecting what is needed for the health, welfare, maintenance and protection of something or someone; as well as attention applied to doing something right and avoiding damage or risk (Lexico 2021). Over time, these various meanings have lingered variously in care projects, and have exacerbated and deepened inequalities and hierarchies. Daniela Agostinho recognises the potential of care as a generative framework for critical "thinking about life and livability under digital and datafied conditions", but quite rightly cautions that "the racial, gendered, and colonial histories of care make it a difficult concept to think and work with" (2021, 80–81).

Historically, care is a term strongly reconceptualised by feminist theorists, elevating it from its previous marginalised feminine rendering of care duties to a lens for scrutinising academic knowledge production practices. A ground-breaking feminist definition of care was proposed by Joan Tronto and Bernice Fisher, who prioritised care as a material moral foundation to serve reproduction of socially just human life:

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. (1990, 40)

Like the practice-oriented understanding of data discussed above, caring can first be seen as an active practice revolving around the basic aims of survival, sustaining capabilities and avoiding suffering. Ethics of care is further premised on the moral dimensions of attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness (Tronto and Fisher 1990). Caring is often perceived as dominantly other-oriented, but self-care should also be recognised as a legitimate aim, and it functions as a prerequisite for providing care to others (Engster 2005). When informing research practice, a feminist ethics of care potentially provides a paradigm change, in offering alternative guidelines for conducting ethical human-centric research.

Feminist sociologists Rosalind Edwards and Melanie Mauthner offer a productive set of guiding questions that can assist researchers in translating feminist ethics of care ideals into their research practice:

These questions are generative to pursue reflecting on the ambiguous "tinkering" practices that for Mol, Moser and Pols constitute care relations with all technologies (2010).

These questions invite researchers to engage in a reflexive mode of knowledge production on digital migration. Ethics of care concerns include obstacles, refusals as well as positionalities of researchers and research communities, which are often not explicitly addressed in published research output or conference presentations. Elsewhere, colleagues and I have critiqued this process under the heading of "dirty methods" (Bivens, Harvey, Leurs, Luka, Milette, Shepherd, forthcoming) where we argue "students are expected to learn how to do research through imitation, largely as a form of individualized apprenticeship, and consult methodological textbooks that offer clean, rigid, and disembodied recipes but pay little attention to the management of personal, collaborative, and bodily experiences, sensations, and anxieties" (ibid). With the notion of dirty methods, we seek to make generative the careful messiness and tinkering that is inherent in all research encounters.

In this book, (Chapter 6) Leandros Fischer and Martin Bak Jørgensen, Vasilis Galis (Chapter 7) and Ninna Nyberg Sørensen (Chapter 8) either implicitly or explicitly draw on ethics of care principles to articulate their own concerns as they seek to grapple with doing digital data research on migration with migrants. For example, Galis as well as Fischer and Jørgensen reflect on the role of academics and how they may be implicated in the migration industry, and whether, in avoiding complicity, researchers are required to become militant researchers. Another pivotal discussion concerns becoming aware of the plural subject position of researchers and the parallel need to attend to the plurality of informants' lives. Galis and Nyberg Sørensen highlight the complex emotional intensities of fieldwork for the various different types of bodies involved. An additional important reflexive step to be considered here could be to embrace all research perspectives as "partial perspectives" (Haraway 1988, 575). Following the thoughts of Donna Haraway, there is an inherent partiality in all research endeavours, therefore an ethical step could be to account for how decision-making and explicitly specifying how knowledge produced has come from somewhere, is being shaped by specific personal, emotional and epistemological trajectories, gatekeeping procedures and standpoints (Haraway 1988). To illustrate the importance of foregrounding partiality, Fischer and Bak Jørgensen (Chapter 6) propose to operationalise caring digital research with mobile populations by drawing on Maurice Stierl, who provocatively argues that doing engaged research with migrants should amplify the epistemic crisis of European governmentality. For Stierl, "*Do harm* could be the motto for a critical and impactful scholarship of migration" (2020, 16). Fisher and Bak Jørgensen argue that in a politicised landscape, it is important to take explicit sides in social justice research, as not taking sides under the heading of objectivity may lead to the further silencing of already marginalised voices. By not taking sides, researchers are therefore implicated in the migration industry, contributing to an exclusionary and often violent, oppressive structure.

Further cues to reflect about and engage in caring relations with data may be gleaned from emerging discussions in feminist data studies and critical migration studies. In critical migration studies, Stephan Scheel and his colleagues reflect on care as a form of ethical accountability. They reflect on practicing three modes of care developed as part of their collaborative research project "thinking with others", "tinkering with field notes" and "dissenting within" (2020, 522). They built on Puig de la Bellacasa's relational understanding of care in knowledge production, understanding care as an "ontological requirement of relational worlds" (2012, 199). This aspect of relationality also shapes Marie Sandberg, Nina Grønlykke Mollerup and Luca Rossi's scrutiny of narrating mobility and bordering through "thin" social media and "thick" ethnographic data (Chapter 3).

In feminist media and data studies, several scholars have further developed such a situated, responsive and careful approach to, for example, social media data analysis (e.g. Luka and Millette 2018).

So how should performative approaches to data and ethics of care be juxtaposed to stimulate creative debate? To operationalise a caring approach to (big) data, let us start with Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein's seven data feminism principles: (I) Examine power, (II) Challenge power, (III) Elevate emotion and embodiment, (IV) Rethink binaries and hierarchies, (V) Embrace pluralism, (VI) Consider context and (VII) Make labour visible (2020, 17–18). A commitment to power, reflexivity and situatedness underpins these principles. Margie Cheesman's research on the role and imaginaries of blockchain in the refugee camps of Azraq and Zaatari in Jordan demonstrates the strong potential of such a situated, collaborative and careful research encounter with "irregularised migrants" on datafication. She grounds trust in blockchain technology by listening to refugee women and learning how they interpret their experiences through faith-based concepts. Research informants contest the datafication and digitisation of aid provision using the Islamic concept of "barakah" برکة to address the felt temporal inconsistency, immateriality and dependability of digital as opposed to cash assistance (Cheesman 2021). Future digital migration studies research can build on additional recently developed more situated, reflexive and affective forms of data studies, for example, taking the form of "data diaries" (Tkacz et al. 2021), the data "walkthrough method" (Light, Burgess and Duguay 2018), smartphone and social-media scroll-back methodologies (Georgiou and Leurs, Forthcoming 2021) and "data walking" (Van Es and de Lange 2020).

### Conclusions

Migration, irregularised migration in particular, is shaped by a variety of human and non-human actors that sustain either care, securitisation or both. Care and securitisation are increasingly outsourced through automation, datafication and machinic vision. This volume breaks new ground by offering the means to reflect on the role of researchers at this conjuncture. In the present comment, I offer several genealogies of data and care, key themes that underpin the theorisation, methodological and ethical operationalisation of a more caring digital migration studies described in this book. Overall, the essays included urge us to go against the grain and rethink care-datafication technologies not as binary oppositions but as fundamentally relational. Also, in specifically situated contexts of datafication of irregularised migration, care is not to be seen as the absolute opposite of data. Rather, as the contributors show, pursuing careful data engagement allows understanding and reflection on the "ambivalence and shifting tensions" inherent in caretechnology relations (Mol et al. 2010, 14). The genealogies discussed in the chapter remind us that neither migration nor data nor care are singular totalities. Social justice-oriented research on migration demands reflexive, situated and engaged careful tinkering with informants across scales and with human and non-human actors, to begin to come to terms with the paradoxes of data performativity. Data sets promise neutrality and total knowledgeability, but they are fundamentally ambiguous, power-ridden and "uncertain archives" (Bonde Thylstrup et al. 2021), with potentially humanising, dehumanising and abusive consequences for migrant subjects. Further scrutiny is required concerning the implications of the inherent uncertainty of data sets, of missing data, of the datafication of affect, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion that data encodes and challenges. In order to research datafied migration differently and sustain a caring, human-centric, profound and critical focus in the area of digital migration studies, we must encourage interdisciplinary dialogue between critical border and migration studies, social media studies, anthropology of migration, science and technology studies, critical data studies, feminist, queer and anti-racist theory.

#### Bibliography

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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# Caring as Critical Proximity: A Call for Toolmaking in Digital Migration Studies

### *Anders Munk*

The field of digital methods has emerged over the past two decades at the interface between media studies, science and technology studies (STS), computer science, and information design (Marres 2017; Rogers 2013). The core questions and ambitions covered closely resemble the kind of digital migration studies presented in this book. First, a commitment to studying wider sociocultural phenomena on, through, and with digital traces from online media. Second, a desire to critically engage with the role of these media, their platforms, and algorithms as infrastructures of social life. Third, a curiosity about how to wrongfoot entrenched divides between offline and online, actual and virtual, or qualitative and quantitative. And finally, ongoing experimentation with computational techniques for large-scale data capture analysis in conjunction with ethnographic approaches to deep sensemaking and interpretation. Indeed, to begin

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*caring for big data*, as argued by Sandberg and Rossi in the introductory chapter to this book, is not only a welcome call for digital migration research but also rings true in digital methods more broadly.

The fact is that digital migration studies were early and significant contributors to the evolution of digital methods, although this may be relatively unacknowledged in both fields today. When Dana Diminescu began developing her E-Diasporas project in 2006,1 she also began collaborating with a young research engineer, Mathieu Jacomy, who would later become one of the key toolmakers in digital methods (the story is recounted in Jacomy's recent Ph.D. dissertation, Jacomy 2021). Together with other team members, and spurred by the ambition of the project to collect and map relations between websites from thirty different migrant communities online (Diminescu 2008), they devised the concepts and developed the prototypes for two iconic research tools, namely, Gephi2 (Jacomy et al. 2014), which is today one of the world's most popular pieces of open-source software for visual network analysis, and the Navicrawler3 (Diminescu et al. 2011), which was a predecessor for the current state-of-the-art tool for web corpus curation in digital methods (Jacomy et al. 2016).

Reading through the timely and thought-provoking contributions in this book, it seems to me that the E-Diasporas collaboration has an important story to tell. What Jacomy and Diminescu practiced together in the borderland between digital methods and digital migration studies was not only a form of caring for big data, but a very particular form of caring that took place in what Bruno Latour would call "critical proximity" (Latour 2005) with the technical circumstances that surround the production and analysis of such data. Contrary to a critically distant position, which cares for the consequences of new technological practices (in this case data scientific practices) that encroach on a field (in this case digital migration studies), caring as critical proximity undertakes to intervene with such practices, reimagining what they could do and redesigning them accordingly. When Sandberg, Mollerup, and Rossi discuss what it would take to develop a "contrapuntal" analysis of digital connectedness (Chapter 3), or when Makrygianni, Kamal, Rossi, and Galis (Chapter 2) engage with how to map the relationality of digital migrant space, they do so in a form of critical proximity with the Facebook API and its shifting affordances. Like other forms of care, not least those described by scholars such as Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, or Jeanette Pols (Mol 2008; Mol et al. 2015), Sandberg and Rossi draw on in their introduction; caring for big data could thus be construed as a material practice in which data-intensive analysis is *done* differently. Crucially, this *doing* depends on the willingness and ability of researchers to engage practically with the affordances of digital tools and platforms. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, this is not to be mistaken for simply replacing digital migration studies with computational social science. Caring for big data in critical proximity must necessarily entail that data science methods are reconceived and experimentally reassembled from a position firmly inside the field in question.

### Caring for Digital Traces and Relational Spaces

In digital methods, caring as critical proximity has resulted in a wide variety of homegrown tools for harvesting and analysing digital traces from social media platforms such as Facebook (Rieder 2013) or Twitter (Borra and Rieder 2014). At the time of the E-Diasporas project, however, the main interest was still centred on websites. Several tools had already been developed for collecting websites, the so-called web corpora, when Jacomy and Diminescu began their collaboration, but their specific interest in online migrant communities made it necessary to do data curation and analysis differently.

Web pages at the time were (and to a large extent still are) written in hypertext markup language (html), which allows a browser to know which parts of a page to display as headings, body text, links, menus, images, etc. It also allows a piece of software known as a *scraper* to selectively harvest parts of that information, for example, all the links, all the images, or all the text found under certain headings. It does so by "repurposing" (Rogers 2013) the tags in the markup. A hyperlink (or hypertext reference) is marked up with the tag "href = " followed by a web address. Thus, by identifying all the instances of a "href = " in the html code and collecting the accompanying web addresses, a scraper piggybacks on the functionality and conventions of html, as well as the choices made by the authors of a web page, to build a data set. It follows that scrapers cannot simply harvest any kind of digital trace, at least not with equal ease, but must operate within an affordance space that has been designed elsewhere and by others, which is why Noortje Marres points out that such digital methods are "distributed" (Marres 2012), in the sense that they are conditioned by and constituted from a heterogeneous set of actors that are often extraneous to the immediate situation of the researcher.

Digital traces, then, are not simply given as data but actively taken as what Johanna Drucker (2011) calls "capta"—that which is taken as opposed to that which is given, in order to signal that there is nothing naturally occurring about it—with due regard to the specific sociotechnical circumstances of their construction. Caring for these sociotechnical circumstances is of critical importance to digital methods. The most obvious capta—those that are most straightforwardly capturable—are not necessarily the most interesting or amenable for a given research purpose. In the case of the E-Diasporas project, which was interested in mapping the online presence of specific diasporas through their websites and their linking practices, the generic hyperlink was not in itself a relevant digital trace to follow. Websites send links to other websites for a variety of reasons and clearly not exclusively to signal belonging to the same diaspora. The generic hyperlink, however, was the straightforwardly capturable digital trace. At the time, all the available web crawlers that made link scraping manageable and approachable for researchers did not distinguish between different types of hyperlinks. For good reasons: there were no tags or conventions in html that could be easily repurposed to make such a distinction, and in any case, the crawlers had been built for other purposes.

The predominant web crawler in digital methods, for instance, was called the Issue Crawler and had been developed with a particular media studies interest in mind (Marres and Rogers 2005). A crawler (or a spider) is a version of a scraper that follows hyperlinks from page to page according to a set of rules and thus automates part of the data collection process. The Issue Crawler took as input a list of seed pages dedicated to a specific issue (e.g., the GMO debate, a new vaccine, or a contested infrastructure project) and used them as starting points from which it followed all hyperlinks to more pages at a set crawl depth (number of link steps from the seed). This would produce a data set of more pages dedicated to the same issue, but also of pages about tangential issues, as well as news or social media sites, and internet infrastructure such as add servers, trackers, search engines, or content management systems. Rather than viewing this wider entanglement of web pages, which come into view when you generically follow hyperlinks from a seed, as noise, the Issue Crawler catered for a now long-standing tradition in digital methods for studying the infrastructures of online media as an integral part of the issue (Marres 2015).

When the knowledge interest is different, however, as was the case with E-Diasporas, the existence of ready-to-use tools like the Issue Crawler presents a challenge. Because they make certain digital traces, in this case the generic hyperlink, even more capturable than they already were, they require an extra level of care on behalf of the researcher, who must not only be capable of critically appreciating how capture could be different, but also intervene directly in the design of tools that make other forms of capta possible. This was exactly the approach taken by Jacomy and Diminescu in E-Diasporas when they realised that they would need to be able to curate multiple web corpora with a data collection approach that was simultaneously capable of leveraging the power of crawling to find all links from thousands of pages on the same website but also qualitatively select which of the discovered websites to include in a corpus. Rather than including all websites at a set distance from the seed, they needed a crawler that would continuously prompt the researcher to qualitatively decide if links should be followed or not. The solution was a purpose-built application for Firefox, the Navicrawler (Diminescu et al. 2011), which combined the qualitative element of browsing web pages with the quantitative power of crawling. The Navicrawler asks the user to navigate to a website from which to begin building the corpus. The crawler element visits all the pages on the site in question, scrapes all hyperlinks, and provides a list of discovered sites for the user, who then decides which to include in the corpus and which to leave out. When a site is included in the corpus, the crawler automatically reiterates the process on that site. In the case of E-Diasporas, the result was 30 different web corpora representing 30 different online migrant communities, each built from a known website of that community and curated through a selective crawling process whereby only sites relating to the same community were included.

The E-Diasporas web corpora, then, were made possible through caring as critical proximity. Indeed, this is true not only for the collection of the websites, which depended on the development of the Navicrawler, but also for the exploration of the relational spaces emerging from their linking practices, which depended on the development of the Gephi software (Jacomy et al. 2014). Visually exploring patterns in how websites were linked required network analysis and, in particular, force-directed network layouts. A force-directed layout produces a visualisation where nodes (in this case websites) are placed close to each other if they share many of the same connections (in this case hyperlinks). Force-directed layouts are non-deterministic algorithms that begin from a random positioning of the nodes and introduce an energy model that pushes them apart if they are unconnected. The visualisation will be different each time you run the algorithm, and settings for the energy model can be changed, further changing the visualisation. The goal is to exploratively obtain visualisations that prompt curiosity and help the researcher generate questions about the relational space that can be pursued qualitatively. Or rather, that is *one* goal in the use of force-directed layouts and typically one that is associated with practices such as multi-sited ethnography (Munk and Ellern 2015) or actor-network theory (Venturini et al. 2019) in which the phenomenon in question is not presumed to exist in a preexisting bounded space, and the ongoing construction of spatiality is a central object of study. This requires a tool that allows the user to adjust the energy settings for the force-directed layout and experiment with producing different network views. Gephi was born as an answer to that specific knowledge interest (Fig. 10.1).

#### Implications for Digital Migration Studies

It is perhaps unlikely that digital migration studies anno 2021 will have to care much about the curation of websites. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, interest has, as in most other fields, shifted to digital platforms, not least social media. The need for caring as critical proximity has never been greater, though. The dependence on platform APIs for harvesting data has, over the years, proven highly unstable, as endpoints have been changed or deprecated and access denied at short notice. Simply relying on tools that others have built to do digital methods research quickly lands you in situations where whole research projects become untenable from month to month as the infrastructure on which the tool is based changes or is entirely removed. We must therefore be agile enough to not only think about, but also to develop in practice, makeshift alternatives (Perriam et al. 2020; Venturini and Rogers 2019).

This comes on top of an even more central point about critical proximity, which has always been true regardless of API changes and deprecations, namely, that specific digital traces must be repurposed for specific knowledge interests. As the E-Diasporas example demonstrates, this repurposing is often a matter of not capturing the most straightforwardly capturable digital traces but working materially to make other

**Fig. 10.1** An example of a web corpus collected with the Navicrawler and explored with a force-directed layout in Gephi (Munk 2019). By combining manual curation and automated crawling, I collected 2007 websites from food actors in Scandinavia. The relational space resulting from the linking practices of these actors becomes visible and explorable when the force-directed layout places clusters of interconnected websites in proximity with each other. The large yellow (right), red (top), and brown (left) clusters turn out to be national spheres of food-related websites (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish), whereas some of the smaller clusters are communities of interest focussed on practices such as foraging, mushroom picking, beer brewing, or aquavit making. These relational spaces emerge from weblinks of the actors and become visible as such through the intervention of Gephi. This image is used with permission of the author [Rightsholder]

kinds of capta possible. When Sandberg, Mollerup, and Rossi convincingly argue for the merits of thinking about digital connectedness as "contrapuntal" (Chapter 3), then how should the Facebook API be repurposed to best support such an analysis? Is it even possible within the current restrictions on API-based research? If not, should we adopt a more activist stance (as suggested by Ben-David 2020) and begin scraping Facebook instead of accepting how the platform makes itself available for scrutiny through the API, despite its ethical and legal complications? Like many related fields, digital migration research could conceivably very well find itself in a situation where the ethical and societal arguments in favour of documenting a phenomenon collide with the terms of service and/or API policies of a given platform. What if a platform that prohibits its users from scraping and offers no API access for research is also a key hub for human trafficking? What if a closed group with tens of thousands of members on Facebook, which is out of bounds for research except through scraping, is used for coordinating harassment or exploitation of migrants? Does digital migration research have an obligation to document such issues? If so, where is the toolbox that allows this?

Similar questions pertain to data analysis: Are the tools we have available for visualising patterns in Facebook data and making it available for quali-quantitative exploration also well suited for contrapuntal analysis? Is Tableau enabling us or preventing us from doing so? Similarly, when Makrygianni, Kamal, Rossi, and Galis want to "follow a relational approach (…) according to which space is not considered as a life container but as a derivative of social relations and interactions" (Chapter 2), are line graphs and custom error bar charts the visual techniques that really support that endeavour? And how would we go about collecting the relational user data today, now that the API no longer allows it?

These are questions for a research practice that cares for big data as a form of critical proximity. Care as a material practice obliges us to seriously consider how the sociotechnical circumstances of data capture and analysis can be engaged and transformed. This is as true in digital methods as it is in digital migration studies, and this book aptly demonstrates this point. It is not an easy task, however, as there will always be practical motivation to leave the data science to the data scientists and the question-posing to those in SSH with a digital research interest. It is simply convenient. But it is also dangerous and, I believe, the direct path to a version of caring for big data at a distance that will render our story of data science as either one of appropriation, where we accept remodelling our questions and research interests in order to become amenable to the methods of others, or one of antagonism, where we try to protect our qualitative and interpretive approaches by pointing out the biases, shortcomings, shallowness, and ethical problems of various kinds of big social data and computation. What this book promises to do instead—and it deserves a lot of credit for it—is to begin the hard work of reassembling data-intensive computational methods from a position within digital migration studies, in dialogue with the existing methodological landscape of the field, and in response to the research interests that are already articulated by its researchers.

#### Notes

#### Bibliography

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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# What Should We Do as Intellectual Activists? A Comment on the Ethico-political in Knowledge Production

# *Anna Lundberg*

"There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors". This quote, by Adrienne Rich from her book *Your Native Land, Your Life* (1993), has haunted me numerous times while encountering children and their parents in voluntary legal advice groups—families who did not have their asylum claims recognised and therefore were irregularised. I encountered such families while providing counselling or conducting research together with self-organised groups in the Asylum Commission (Elsrud et al. 2021), conducting fieldwork at the Swedish Migration Agency, and working as an independent investigator for the Swedish government proposing legislative changes in the Aliens Act. Fluctuating between anger, hope, and hopelessness, at one time, I cross-stitched Rich's quotation on a pillow, as a gift for a doctoral student I supervised. During our sessions, she had often cried over the violence

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in the European migration control regime, the unjust refusal to permit the freedom of movement, and over her disappointment at not being able to translate the experiences she had gained during fieldwork into information that enabled her colleagues to understand the gravity of the current political situation.

Rich's "those among whom" is meaningful not only because it grants permission or even validates shedding tears, but also for encouraging collective efforts to develop epistemic communities of belonging (Yuval-Davis 2011), that is, spaces where we can converse about and enable transformative ethico-political research. By using the word ethicopolitical, I mean to invoke attentiveness, responsibility, curiosity, and the awareness that each one of us is capable of collective reflection (Bozalek and Zembylas 2017). It may also imply activism in Patricia Collin's sense of the word: politically engaged scholarship that may take place anywhere anytime, "because ideas and politics are everywhere" (Collins 2013, 37). Efforts to develop communities of belonging are also symbolised by a means of channelling frustration (and weeping) and persistent confrontation with the question *What should we do* as intellectual activists?

The classic ethical way to answer *What should we do?* is to either *enquire* what anyone who was similarly situated ought to do (*universalisation*), to ask how, within the scope of given resources, you can do your best for as many people as possible (*maximising*), or to develop *virtues*, such as generosity and truthfulness as a guide in decision making.

In this text, I will not advocate any of these ethical queries as the preferred way forward. Nor will I answer the question: *What should we do?* Instead, I want to speak in favour of creating spaces where we may develop as intellectual activists.

I will propose two concepts that are valuable for the creation of such spaces and that I, while reading the present book, see the authors referring to: epistemic injustice and hope. These concepts are also central to the work we do in the transformative collective initiative, the Asylum Commission (Elsrud et al. 2021). In collaboration between researchers, professionals, civil society actors, self-organised groups, and support networks, we examine and analyse the shifts and restrictions that have taken place in recent years' Swedish asylum regulations, as well as the consequences of these changes for people seeking protection, civil society, and welfare workers. The Commission's primary focus is a critical review and exchange of experiences, combined with continuous knowledge-dissemination work that is carried out based on asylum seekers' perspectives and lived experiences. Moreover, our ambition is also to think and act in new directions to enable a more solidaristic refugee policy in the future, attempting to provide what Fiorenza Picozza describes as "a contribution to an anticolonial political imagination that can sustain daily struggles against the asylum regime" (Picozza 2021, xxvi).

In the DIGINAUTS initiative, I see, in the same vein this endeavour to avoid harm, to be responsibly engaged, and to speak the truth to the powers that be (see Sandberg and Rossi, Chapter 1). The DIGIN-AUTS researchers, as seen in the contribution to this book, strive to provide spaces for exchanging experiences of political work with the unpredictability that such work always implies, whether you are in a mostly scientific or primarily activist milieu. I see an awareness that certain questions must be asked over and over again: How can this research benefit society without reproducing the state-sanctioned methods of violence called detention, deportation, rejection? What is "socially beneficial" research and what should it be in a field as politicised as migration in contemporary times of far-reaching and devastating neoliberal transformations? Is it possible to be progressively exploratory in matters concerning the issue of how people seeking sanctuary can be welcomed, without simultaneously confirming the view that some people are not human enough to count as human, which underlies most political proposals in policy discussions about who deserves protection and (formal) inclusion?

In the chapter on emotional introspection, Ninna Nyberg Sørensen points to these queries in her view that "research results have little resonance among political decision makers and the general public, when the ranks of those 'for' and 'against' migration are more sharply drawn, and when humanitarian considerations become subordinated to wishes for control and restraint" (see Chapter 8). No matter how nuanced and committed we may be, and however valuable our research findings are for future policies, migration research that does not reproduce dominant images of migration and its notions of solutions tends to be silenced or emasculated. This is perhaps not so surprising, because, as Bimal Ghosh aptly observed two decades ago, "no other source of tension and anxiety has been more powerful [in the Global North] than the fear, both real and perceived, of huge waves of future emigration from poor and weak states in the years and decades to come" (Ghosh 2000, 10).

Bearing in mind these challenges and doubts concerning the contribution of intellectual activism, in their chapter, Leandros Fischer and Martin Bak Jørgensen highlight the expectations they faced within academia and when conducting fieldwork. The "complex responsibilities for highquality and ethical research" are expectations that we need to meet (see Chapter 6). What impact does this have on the answer to a question that my colleagues and I are frequently asked when presenting the Asylum Commission's transformative work, namely: How do you distinguish between your role as a researcher and your role as an activist? How do you separate these roles? What do the expectations that Fischer and Jørgensen describe mean for the scepticism that migrants—unsurprisingly and well-justified as they are—convey when yet another researcher approaches them and makes claims on their time and stories (see Galis' discussion in Chapter 7). One argument put forward is that "there is a stronger imperative to publish less, better-quality research" (Fischer and Jørgensen, Chapter 6). Yet, we know that what counts as high-quality scholarship, what is deemed within its remit, and what it may accomplish in the social world remain very different, though this may be deeply unjust. Many articles in prestigious scientific journals are not openly available. If they are generally accessible, they are read-only by academics. They are rarely translated in a spirit of actively questioning the boundary between activism and academia or in contexts of mutual learning at the intersection of theory and practice. Open access in its current forms is not a solution here, because while it aims to combat commercial publishing channels, it simultaneously stimulates emerging platform monopolies.

Another aspect of engaged scholarship that emerges in this book covers the much needed problematisations of language and framing. In her chapter about big-data-based research, Laura Stielike investigates 17 peer-reviewed publications (Chapter 5). Stielike highlights how three mainstream migration narratives are produced in the papers, which boil down to a framing of migration as something that can be governed *more* (which is assumed to be necessary) through *better data* (which implies that research, in turn, is to provide the data). Much data-based migration research of today, Stielike concludes, reproduces an understanding of migration as a phenomenon that changes the size and composition of a population, and that can be influenced to a certain extent through political interventions, an assumed need to integrate migrants into receiving societies, and various forms of humanitarian assistance.

Within my research field, migration law, I also sense such more or less explicit agendas and assumptions, through the use of language, although this is often veiled by the supposedly impartial legal text. More rules are often requested in the name of the rule of law and legal certainty. Consider the concepts of economic migrants, third-country nationals, unaccompanied children, and voluntary return. How do we handle such legal-technical terms as they seep into academic literature? In our quest to influence, we easily unconsciously reproduce a policy or even a humanity that we do not think is good at all, or we realise fails on a multitude of important levels.

#### What to Do?

Giacomo Toffano and Kevin Smets (Chapter 4) present an inspiring pathway for new and transdisciplinary narratives in migration research in the Migration Trail. The trail is a visual representation of spatial data, initially assembled to accompany the narrative of two migrants on their journey to Europe. There is David, an ambitious Nigerian entrepreneur with big business plans that were a driving force in leading him through Libya, Italy, and France. And there is Sarah, a 19-year-old Syrian proceeding through the "Balkan Route" continually exchanging messages with her brother. The Migration Trail is an investigation of the interaction of textual, audio, visual, and spatial elements of communication drawing attention to the political, economic, and social dimensions of migration while, at the same time, reaffirming the humanity of people on the move. It represents something that is different from common press accounts and traditional data visualisations or fiction, where migrants often appear as mere victims: passive subjects of political–economic conditions in need of protection. The Migration Trail is indeed a protest against violent migration management and an example of how the repressive development can be criticised by intellectual activists.

All in all, the authors of this book demonstrate and provide alternate understandings of the dominant notions that permeate migration policies, in which people seeking refuge are depicted as "the other". The chapters reach beyond images of undesirable collective masses that must be kept away at all costs, or a vulnerabilised suffering individual who, if let in, will be admitted because it confirms "the us" as human beings (after all). This is done without ending up at the other extreme of the "curated success stories" (Fernandes 2017) where complex lived experiences are restructured into easily absorbable superficial stories. Even though such stories may be mobilised towards beneficial goals, the conditions under which they are told and the response to them involves a risk that the greater circumstances of global inequality will be concealed.

Epistemic injustice and hope are two concepts that can facilitate the future process of making sense of the question of "What should we do?" and supporting intellectual activists in their solidarity struggles.

### Epistemic Injustice

Epistemic injustice was introduced by the moral philosopher Miranda Fricker in her book of the same name (*Epistemic Injustice. Power and the Ethics of Knowing*, 2007) to catch the interdependency between knowledge and power. Fricker explains how knowledge production is both political and ethical because it interacts with society's hierarchical arrangements, allowing some perspectives to come forward while others are left out. In the same vein, Gayatri Spivak (1988) has previously used the term "epistemic violence" to describe the disappearing of some knowledge, namely, that of marginalised groups, and how this undermines their ability to speak and be heard. And Pierre Bourdieu has insightfully stated that, "Among the most radical, surest, and best hidden censorships are those which exclude certain individuals from communication (e.g., by not inviting them to a place where people speak with authority, or by putting them in places without speech)" (Bourdieu 1977, 649).

The problem here is not just that others do not try to listen. Even though people in vulnerable positions might be asked to speak, they are rarely considered to be people who know and understand (Boochani et al. 2020). This negligence is seen in much migration research, where migrants are often portrayed as objects without being acknowledged as co-producers of academic knowledge (Grosfoguel et al. 2015).

According to Fricker, epistemic injustice is a form of "double structural discrimination" that is enabled because privileged groups have primary control over society's analytical resources. This discrimination is manifested through the questioning of certain persons' credibility as knowers, called testimonial injustice, and excluding collective interpretive resources that reproduce a form of hermeneutical injustice, i.e., injustice based on the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially of biblical texts. This occurs when the narrative and interpretive resources necessary to describe and understand the experiences of marginalised groups are lacking. It leaves the most vulnerable people unable to understand or make sense of some aspects of their experiences. Alternatively, they understand only too well, but lack the channels to be heard. These injustices, in turn, might also lead to a situation where individuals question their right to exist and give up all claims in this respect.

Interpretive (hermeneutical) inequality is very difficult to detect and change, since privileged persons tend to understand those things that it serves them (us) to understand. Consequently, marginalised groups' interpretations of social phenomena remain silenced, even though they might very well be valid and even openly and explicitly requested.

This silencing is indeed a challenge for initiatives such as the Asylum Commission, which gathers actors with various power resources in an attempt to build solidary alliances for transformative knowledge production in the field of asylum rights. In a recent book about the asylum regime, Picozza (2021) reflects on these challenges through ethnographic fieldwork. She argues that the figure of the "refugee" produces its counterpart, the "refugee supporter", "as an embodiment of a specifically European and postcolonial 'good' whiteness, premised on liberal, democratic and humanitarian discourses" (Picozza 2021, xxiii).

Testimonial injustice is easier to spot than hermeneutical injustices. It occurs when a speaker receives less credibility as a result of negative identity prejudice. This injustice is perpetrated against members of groups whose testimonies are questioned and disbelieved because of negative prejudicial stereotypes about those groups. A typical example is when someone seeking protection is not deemed credible due to certain assigned identities, be it "woman", "child", or "HGBTQI+". Another example that has been evident in the Asylum Commission is when people seeking refuge in Sweden turn to politicians to point out shortcomings that have occurred in their asylum process. Such political actions are often based on an experience that the process has not been legally secure and that the concerned people have not been listened to. But for various reasons that may be related to limitations in society's processes for collective understanding and preconceived notions about people seeking asylum, it is very difficult to have one's voice heard. The difficulty is inflated by a strong belief in Sweden as a state governed by the rule of law. It becomes difficult, or even impossible, to put forward arguments that involve a legitimate critique. The image that the Swedish asylum procedure is legally secure seems to have such a deep anchoring in the migration administration's self-understanding that it is difficult to dislodge. This self-deception becomes particularly clear if we consider the "non-political" migration courts, where a ceremonial version of administrative justice is performed, making it extremely challenging to reveal injustices. Indeed, this also applies to the broader asylum regime, an order of inequalities (Achiume 2019) that is overshadowed by legalistic arguments and voluntary initiatives that aim to help (Picozza 2021).

What can we, as intellectual activists, do to contest these epistemological injustices? A way forward is offered by the emerging methodological approach referred to as "a scholarship of hope".

#### Hope

In a recent anthology developed within the Asylum Commission framework (Elsrud et al. 2021), gender scholar Diana Mulinari describes hope as a concept that captures the vulnerability of life but also a human capacity to act and create other worlds. In this context, the organisation in safe spaces (often behind closed doors), various support groups, legal advice, fundraising, etc., may be understood as a practice of intellectual action and a potential methodological approach that may fruitfully articulate academic knowledge with a hopeful political vision. In this context, slogans such as *No frontiers, No nations, Stop deportation; No one is illegal; Not in my name*, are a form of hope for solidarity with refugees.

While Fricker inspires intellectual activism, Mulinari and her colleagues (2018, 2020) provide helpful reflections about hope as a form of scholarship, and this is an essential aspect of conversations concerning "What should we do?" In particular, their review of the processes at the turn of the millennium, when intersectionality took root in Swedish academia, is truly relevant. Intersectional research approaches had an explicit ambition at the time, to be intellectually activistic and provide politically relevant analyses by conceptualising the effect of economies' interdependence on the lives of human beings in a postcolonial world. Intersectionality also brought an ambition to explore and contest inequalities that are produced and reproduced in (white) academic work. The concept was born out of the black feminist critique of hegemonic "white feminism" and its knowledge production that lacked an understanding of the effects of racism. Moreover, intersectional perspectives were introduced to understand the dynamics of power at a time when the logic of capitalist accumulation was articulated through rationalising and effectivising social relationships.

Inch by inch, Mulinari and de los Reyes explain intersectionality as a perspective and political project has then endured a process of academisation and a dissociation of academic knowledge production from everyday struggles. It became "dislocated from the richness and heterogeneity of the Black radical tradition" (De los Reyes and Mulinari 2020, 188). Rather than politicising and re-politicising inequalities, endless discussions took place "about how to put categories together and what categories matter" (De los Reyes and Mulinari 2020, 188). This development went so far that intersectionality was eventually spoken of without naming the role of nation-states in the operations of power and categorisation practices.

One reason that fuelled the depoliticisation was that certain influential scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins emerged as those who represented the intellectual field. This academisation went hand-in-hand with a gradually increasing inattention to the groundup struggles that provided "the historical, political and epistemological space for the understanding of their theoretical work" (De los Reyes and Mulinari 2020, 188). As a result, knowledge also became depoliticised, allowing for an "unawareness" and a legitimised lack of interest in the conditions of black women's lived experiences as well as in the "heterogeneity of black women's intellectual production" (De los Reyes and Mulinari 2020, 191). It is against this background that Mulinari and her colleagues discuss transdisciplinary visionary research (see Martinsson and Mulinari 2018).

What can we learn from these reflections on translations of intersectionality? In retrospect, some of the epistemological injustices present today derive from the academisation of engaged and critical scholarships such as intersectionality. This circumstance is why scholars of hope should come back to reflect on "What should we do?" *and* simultaneously engage practically in work that overcomes boundaries between academic work and political engagement. Put differently, to get engaged with: Transdisciplinary struggles to change the uncertain and insecure conditions that permeate the lives and existence of many human beings in contemporary times—"a theory on the flesh" (De los Reyes and Mulinari 2020, 191)—challenging the modern capitalist system, and creating futures outside those provided by hegemonic social relations, are necessary elements of a scholarship of hope.

As I read Mulinari and colleagues, the answer to "What should we do?" is a constant invention and reinvention of formative spaces. I understand this as an on-going process with no clear and ready answers. In these spaces, various positions can be articulated, and common futures can be envisioned. Future-oriented questions may help in the conversations: What would a society beyond racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism look like, and how can we reach it? What forms of care or interdependency between human and non-human life would evolve, and how can we make this care flourish?

### Intellectual Activism

As intellectual activists, we thus need to commit to people we meet *and* imagine, and we must struggle for a different world than the one in which we live. In my own community of belonging, this means, among other things, listening carefully to lived experiences of legal (un)certainty and that those who have legal knowledge share this when it is requested or needed. Instead of separating roles, we should constantly let the roles of activists, researchers, and professionals interact. I see separating the roles as a direct impediment to gaining a deeper understanding of legal (un)certainty, the (non)right to asylum and racist border practices. The interaction of roles also implies practical attempts to create coexistence without obscuring tensions, to make room for diversity, and to refuse to simplify. This is no easy task. As the Asylum Commission has experienced, joining forces in one struggle is extremely challenging due to the diversity of those seeking sanctuary in Sweden whose asylum claims have not been recognised, the involved professionals, and the scholars. Yet, this plurality does not mean that we cannot learn from others and—momentarily—also learn as equals.

**Acknowledgements** I would like to thank my activist intellectual friends, Torun Elsrud, Mehek Muftee, and Emma Söderman, for valuable comments on this text.

# Bibliography

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