Publication project
Co-edited with Inken Bartels, Christiane Reinecke, Philipp Schäfer und Laura Stielike
Laufzeit: seit 2022

The production of knowledge on migration is a growing field of both institutional practice and academic research. On the one hand, there is a ‘migration knowledge hype’ (Braun et al. 2018) among states and international organisations. On the other, migration research itself is increasingly focusing on the role of experts, data and knowledge in migration governance. Calling for a ‘reflexive approach’ to migration studies, a number of scholars have, moreover, promoted critical analyses of migration research’s own processes of knowledge production.

This Special Issue advances the ‘reflexive turn’ in migration research by adding a new dimension to it: its contributions explore the production of knowledge on migration from a moral economies perspective. ‘Reflexive’ migration research, thus far, has focused primarily on the role of individual positionalities of migration researchers, the critique of migration-related categories, problematic state-centred assumptions, and the close relationship between migration research and policy making.

The moral economies perspective put forward by this Special Issue broadens this view to include the complex and often-conflicting relations between (competing) collective values at play in the process of knowledge production on migration and its material embeddedness. Drawing on the theoretical insights from an interdisciplinary range of renowned scholars, this innovative perspective enables an investigation of the entanglements of moral and economic rationalities and practices involved in the production of knowledge on migration.

With this perspective, we seek to advance the agenda of critical and reflexive migration studies and embrace their call to make knowledge production an integral object of migration research. This Special Issue offers a truly interdisciplinary, theoretically informed contribution to a research debate for which the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies is a central forum.

This Special Issue will be published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS).