This post is part of the blog series titled Visions for migration, published by the Standing Committee Reflexivities in Migration Studies (SC REFLEX), and edited by Sorina Carstea, Iva Dodevska, Stefan Manser-Egli and Anna-Lisa Müller. The series discusses the question: how does who we are shape how we do migration research, and what kind of world do we hope our research can contribute towards? Find the introduction to the series here.
Author: AYAN YASIN ABDI
Movement I: Writing from the Folds
There is something about time. Not linear, but folded, curling around me, refusing to move forward without dragging the past along. Yet in my mid-thirties, I often feel as though I am still at the beginning at that moment when arriving in Denmark was not a choice, but a displacement. Sometimes I look further back, to the time before migration, before separation, before language became a wall rather than a bridge. In narrating the folds of time, the coded body of the inner child, and the maternal voice that anchors my fieldwork, I do not seek to describe migrant objecthood; I seek instead to encounter the contradictions that give it shape.
This reorientation carries me into migration research not as a detached observer, but as a writer from the South, a position that is not geographical, but metaphorical and epistemological. The South is where silenced knowledges gather, where struggle shapes how knowledge is made, and where being ‘out of place’ becomes a source of insight. Writing from this position is not neutral; it is intentional and situated. It is from this grounded yet forward‑facing position that I envision ‘a politics of accompaniment’ that traces not only what has been silenced but what might still emerge. It resists translation into the language of neutrality and breaks from the ‘zero‑point epistemology’ that claims universality while erasing location, body, and history.
What I offer here continues that work, grounded in a voice forged through displacement, memory, and refusal, experiences not merely witnessed but carried. My commitment to documenting Somali contemporary history is not merely academic. It is deeply personal, shaped by histories, bodies, and presences that resist simplification. What I once feared would be read as liability, displacement, untranslatability, and embeddedness in community has become the grammar of my research: not a detour from legitimacy, but its very redefinition.
Movement II: Listening with
Despite these commitments, it is often my role as researcher that elicits distrust; the field does not open simply because I arrive with credentials. Refusals in the field are never abstract: the faces, the names, the exact places where someone said “no” remain vivid. One potential participant told me: “To you, as a Somali, I will share. But my stories must not enter spaces that are not ours.” At first, I carried these moments as shame, a quiet ache that I had unsettled something, that I had failed to earn trust.
Over time, I came to understand these moments of withholding not as personal rejections, but as responses to the institutional shadow that trails my presence. Their hesitation was not about anonymity or the act of sharing, nor even a fear of being misunderstood. It reflected a refusal to engage with institutional spaces where Somali narratives risk circulation beyond the community. Even as a Somali embedded in the community, I am often read through affiliation with institutions such as academia and media that are described as “unsafe” and “mind-polluted” sites where stories are distorted, stripped of care, context, and accountability.
Distrust in this sense is structural, rooted in the institutional histories and epistemic violences associated with academia and media. It rarely arrives as confrontation; it surfaces quietly, in hesitation, in the decision not to be interviewed, in the subtle recalibration of relational boundaries. It lingers like sediment, resurfacing each time a researcher calls, a journalist arrives, or someone asks, “May I write about you?” That question carries a history not only of curiosity, but of repeated encounters, patterned misrecognitions, and the ache of being seen without being understood. Distrust here is not hostility, but memory, a social experience and a protective mechanism that says: “We know what happens when we open the door.” It does not say “no”. It says “we remember.”
These gestures of withholding carry more than the residue of past encounters; they bear the imprint of decades of marginalization. Glances that pass over. Such acts do not merely mark relational limits, they signal a deeper struggle over visibility and recognition. This stance echoes Glissant’s ethical and aesthetic commitment to opacity, not as a failure of understanding, but as a right to difference without reduction. To remain opaque is not only to protect, but to refuse readability within dominant frames.
Glissant’s poetics of opacity unsettles the fantasy of transparent meaning, inviting us to dwell in ambiguity, honor multiplicity, and resist the urge to fully comprehend. Writing, once imagined as a conduit for pure intention, becomes a site of distortion and mediation. Language refracts rather than reflects. These engagements—how we write, listen, and interpret—are not paths to certainty, but negotiations shaped by risk, positionality, and care, moving within opacity rather than beyond it. Opacity, here, is not failure. It is Relations.
It is in this space that I also engage with what Khosravi describes as accented thinking: a refusal to be made intelligible within dominant frameworks, and a struggle to speak from the margins without being absorbed by them. Like Glissant’s opacity, accented thinking unsettles the demand for transparency, but does so by foregrounding the friction of expression itself, speech marked by displacement, hesitation, or divergence from dominant idioms. Both opacity and accented thinking resist the extractive impulse of total comprehension, insisting that survival and relations emerge not from being fully understood, but from preserving the right to difference.
I extend this into the methodological and ethical fabric of migration research, where opacity is not a breakdown in communication, but a practice and a right to remain partially unknowable, untranslatable, and unexposed. To honor opacity is to accept that refusal, silence, and withholding are not gaps to be filled, but ways of marking history, memory, and agency. What remains unsaid is as significant as what is spoken. Within these gestures, ‘a politics of accompaniment’ emerges, shaping not only what we can know, but how we move alongside those whose stories we are entrusted to hold.
Movement III: Accompaniment as Method
The quiet hesitations and boundary-setting gestures I meet in the field do not simply show me the limits of my role as a migration researcher. They reshape the ground I walk on. In these moments, opacity becomes part of the work. Not something to overcome, but something to respect. Refusals and silences are not gaps. They are signals. They tell me how people want to be approached, and what kind of relationship they are willing to enter.
I believe the starting point in migration research should not be a research question. It should be a stance. A politics of accompaniment. It begins with staying close, listening carefully, and refusing to take what is not mine to carry. I do not enter the field to collect stories. I enter to move alongside them, to listen from the side rather than from above, and to stay accountable to the relationships that shape what becomes knowable.
Sometimes I feel caught in time, as if the past keeps returning in unfinished sentences that insist on being heard. These conditions shape not only what I write, but how I write. My writing emerges from this struggle, articulated through what Khosravi calls doing migration research “with an accent.” It is an effort to speak from displacement without being reduced to it, to write from the South without being translated into the North’s expectations. The South, as I use it here, is not merely a geographical location but an epistemic space where silenced knowledges gather and where methods must be rethought. Yet this work is not written only for those privileged by ‘an accent’. What follows is not a claim to epistemic exception, but an invitation to scholars ‘with’ and ‘without accents’ alike to rethink how we relate and practice the ethics of being with. This is where my vision begins.
I imagine a future where mistrust is not a methodological problem but a historical memory, where refusal is not a lack of data but a form of protection. In that future, a researcher’s presence does not automatically introduce risk, and research cannot simply borrow methods from dominant traditions. It must begin differently, resisting the pressure to tidy up complexity or force coherence where there is none. Communities define the terms of their own visibility, and research is not something done to people, but something shaped with them. Many participants did not ask for invisibility; they asked for “a different kind of space — one where stories are told by us, to us, and for us to explore and understand.” That is not only a preference. It is a political demand.
From this, a simple proposition follows: refusal and silence are not failures. They are part of the field, ways of marking history, memory, and agency. Taking them seriously honors opacity and accented thinking, acknowledging that some things are not meant to be explained, translated, or extracted.
This approach can shift migration research away from extraction and toward accompaniment, away from representation and toward relations. It challenges narratives that make migrants visible only through crisis or risk, imagining a field where people are not asked to expose themselves for the sake of academic clarity. These gestures shape how knowledge is approached and held, calling for methods grounded in with.
I offer this as a way to imagine futures where mobility, displacement, and accented expression are not deficits to be corrected, but conditions through which new forms of relation can emerge, and worlds can be made.
Bio: Ayan Yasin Abdi is a Carlsberg Postdoctoral Fellow at the Malmö Institute for Migration Studies (MIM) in Sweden, holding a Ph.D. from Roskilde University in Denmark. She teaches and publishes on migration studies, citizenship, and diasporic life, with a commitment to inclusive scholarship and public engagement.