Shake it, stretch it, share it. Moving Reflexivities beyond Migration

For about ten years, the so-called ‘reflexive turn’ has been shaping migration studies, especially in the European social sciences. This paper takes the state-of-the-art as an opportunity to tackle chances, risks and challenges of the most recent standards established through this 'turn'. It concentrates on three aspects: First, it discusses the pros and cons of concentrating migration studies on certain migration categories, i.e. sedimented forms of knowledge and classification. In this way, it invites to push the research perspective beyond established power domains for discovering additional fields in which both subversiveness and the ordinariness of the everyday are articulated. Second, it problematizes the reduction of migration studies to contemporary contexts and processes and invites to stretch our knowledge production deeper in the histories of the respective contexts or actor biographies in order to recognize how mobility-related categories and classifications have come into being. Third, this paper deals with the not yet fully explored opportunities of collaborative work, which also pose new hurdles and challenges, especially regarding the reflection of positionalities and normativities. With these three new axes of reflexivity, this chapter outlines ways in which the central paradigm of the reflexive turn of migration studies can be made fruitful for adjacent research fields, in which people are likewise sorted and ranked into different kinds, such as gender and race studies, humanitarian studies or global health studies.

Drotbohm, Heike (2024): Shake it, stretch it, share it. Moving Reflexivities beyond Migration. Arbeitspapiere des Instituts für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) 210.