In-person event only. Teas and coffees will be provided on arrival.

Ethnographic research and migration studies: between migrant objecthood and refusal (PhD workshop)

Complicating common assumptions about “fieldwork” as something temporally bound and external to the researcher, a field “out there” waiting to be extracted, we collectively endeavor what “ethnographic fieldwork” entails when we do migration studies. What stories and power relations are enacted when we endeavour to do ethnographic fieldwork in migration research? How and why quick positionality statements can become a tool to simply reinscribe whiteness of migration industry complex? What does it mean to write ethnographically avoiding mere representations of ‘a bunch of disembodied thoughts that come out of subjects’ mouths’? (Duneier and Back 2006, 554). Critically reflecting on some still-normative ideas about ethnographic research, we examine fieldwork as a tool that can reproduce descriptive migrant objecthood or offer a potential for refusal. With the latter in mind, please write a question that has emerged as you have designed your research project or a story from your fieldwork that you would like to discuss in this workshop. Please, send an abstract with your reflections a week before the workshop.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Daria Krivinos' work is the question of how race, class, and gender are revised and remade in the contexts of East-West migration, and how global and local processes of racialisation produce valued and devalued categories of workers. Their research has examined young post-Soviet migrants’ “claims to whiteness” en route to the imagined “West”, and the commodified inclusion in the low-paid gendered racial economy. In their work, they locate postsocialist migration and “Eastern Europe” in the global racial orders to analyse racialised subjects' own active participation in sustaining racial hierarchies as they try to fashion themselves as Europeans 'proper'.