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: ALEENA T. SABO
Border interactions have never been neutral, and people from my country or those from the global south can vouch for that. Interacting with border officers and answering their questions are always a case of anxiety for those travelling from the Global South to the Global North. To me specifically, I am always worried about how my identity as an Indian will be read and categorised. At airports, consulates and immigration counters, there is a pattern of familiarity, essentially of an assumption of my backwardness, or my rurality, and a persistent suspicion that I might not leave their country. The questions at the borders are not about my visit or how long it will take for me to return back to my country, it instead stresses on whether I am allowed to move past those borders.
The reason this blog is so special to me is because I wanted to reflect on my experience as an international summer school student in Europe, more so on my experience in reaching the destination. To attend the summer school which was fully funded, I had to show bank statements, employment letters, sponsorship letters from my parents, their employment letters, travel histories, declarations of intent and also proof that I will leave Europe right after my summer school. It was essential to submit all these documents to the Embassy for a stamp on my passport that would allow me passage to Europe. To me this whole process itself made me want to drop the plan of going to Europe, because the emotional labour and anxiety of waiting, applying and fear of rejections internalised this feeling in me, this feeling that being an Indian was something that I needed to be ashamed of. These experiences reflect how borders not only operate through law but also through affect, doubt, hierarchy and unequal valuations of lies.
Having traveled around in different countries and researched on migration for the past couple of years, I have come to understand migration not just as movement of people but also as a deeply emotional, ethical and relational condition that is shaped by the global power asymmetries. People from the Global North can move easily between countries in the Global South while the vice versa is not possible. This creates a great power asymmetry in who can move and who cannot move in the contemporary geopolitics which is widely shaped by colonial histories. To then understand migration properly, we should see borders as political spaces shaped by power, and move beyond treating migrants mainly as threats by focusing more on ethics, care, and human relationships.
Approaches to migration predominately frame migrants as risks, threats or aliens that need to be managed or securitised. Securitisation theory explains how something as people moving from one place to another can become a security threat. These approaches provide valuable empirical knowledge but they also narrow the meaning of migration to governance tools rather than just as people, families, communities or emotional worlds. The problem when migration is majorly framed as a governance challenge is that mobility requires justification beyond means and immobility becomes normal. Persons from certain countries will be targeted as high risks without taking into account their individual stories, mostly from the Global south. What happens then is that research can become flawed when it is viewed only through the lens of the state, rather than through the lived realities of migrants.
Reflexive approaches in migration studies have acknowledged the researcher’s positionality, but it is often reduced as a methodological footnote. In this research landscape wherein research on migration is gaining traction, I suggest a different understanding of positionality, as not just about identifying one’s identity but about how it shapes you as a researcher. For example, your identity as a person from the Global South shapes the narrative when you speak or write about migration from the Global South, or about asylum seekers more broadly. My positionality is often shaped by my conditional mobility. For example, as a privileged person in my country in terms of access to knowledge and educational facilities, I have access to transnational academic spaces but only through constant verification, documentation and surveillance. So this puts me in an in-between space wherein I am not fully included like my peers from the global North while fully trusted. This in-between position has sharpened my awareness of how legitimacy is unevenly distributed within global mobility regimes. This experience has also shaped my normative commitments to dignity, justice and relationality. The questions I ask, the concepts I find useful, and the futures I imagine are inseparable from these experiences.
The affective turn in the social sciences offers a space to take these experiences seriously as sources of knowledge. Emotions are not irrational residues that distort analysis, they become lenses to relate to the world. Fear, hope, shame, pride, attachment, and longing circulate through migration regimes and shape how people navigate borders, institutions, and everyday life. Attending to emotions allows migration scholars to understand how structural violence is felt and lived; for example, the anxiety produced by visa regimes is not incidental - they are a governing technique built into the system that will discipline mobility with suspicion.
Feminist and decolonial perspectives deepen these insights by digging into questions of power, voice and epistemic justice. Feminist scholarship has for long argued that knowledge is situated and marginalised standpoints offer critical perspectives into social realities. Decolonial approaches challenge the dominance of Global North frameworks in defining what migration is, how it counts as a problem and what is a possible solution. Together feminist and decolonial thinkers remind us that research is always political and value-laden, even when it claims to be neutral.
Migration research has relied on the stories, labour and suffering of migrants without understanding who benefits from the knowledge produced. An ethics of care demands that we understand whose knowledge is valued, amplified and whose futures are imagined. Centering migrant perspectives is a deeply political choice and not just a methodological one. How would one then place connection and care at the centre of migration studies? The answer to this question is within our understanding of the basics of research methodology, that is research shouldn’t be just extraction of information unidirectionally, but it should involve presence, listening and accountability. It recognises the need to extend ethical responsibility beyond institutional review boards and consent forms for example by sharing the results of the research, ensuring accuracy in representing the people and also reflecting on how your biases have touched upon the topic and how it has affected the research. Care then would mean commitment to the research in terms of acknowledging the researcher’s own entanglements not as a weakness but as a source of insight and responsibility. Placing care at the heart of migration research is also a political act in itself as it would refuse the normalisation of suspicion and challenges the idea that mobility must always be justified and belonging must always be earned.
To move towards a world where movement is recognised as a fundamental aspect of human life, and not an exception, it would mean for scholars to engage more openly with imagination. For this to happen, migration studies must take part in discourses that will debate on how the world would be organised differently than how it is now. This would mean moving towards a critique with a visionary lens. I imagine a world wherein borders do not determine whose lives are valuable, whose aspirations are legitimate or whose presence is tolerated. I imagine a world where mobility is not a threat but an ordinary expression of human relationality. I imagine a world in which difference is not something to be managed, but something to be lived with, negotiated, and cared for.
Migration studies can contribute to such imaginaries through the concepts we use, stories we tell and the futures we imply. A shift is needed away from scholarship that focuses primarily on crisis, constraint, and risk. An alternative approach is research grounded in connection, care, and relationality, which can help imagine more hopeful political horizons. Reimagining migration studies from an ethics of connection and a framework of care is a normative and political project that challenges the idea that emotions compromise knowledge. This affective lens not only enriches research but also becomes a source of vision, calling on scholars to be explicit about the worlds their research seeks to imagine and sustain. In the contemporary world where migration is increasingly securitised, daring to imagine otherwise is an ethical necessity. By embracing care, connection and imagination, migration studies can move beyond managing migration toward participating in the creation of more just and livable futures.
BIO: Aleena T. Sabo is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Mahatma Gandhi University in India. Her research focuses on media discourse, migration and identity politics, with a particular interest in reflexive and decolonial approaches. She has a masters in International Relations from Pondicherry University and a bachelor's in Political Science from Delhi University.