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Paper Short Abstract

Where and when does participation truly begin and what are the limits of ‘participatory research’ in the funding and academic structures we find ourselves in? What modalities would state-funded, politicizing anthropological research need in order to be genuinely participatory and decolonial?

Paper Abstract

The ATLAS project conducts prospective research envisioning how Brussels’ multi-scalar government can use housing and social infrastructure to reshape precarious citizenship for its growing undocumented population. Drawing on Lemanski’s “infrastructural citizenship” (2017), the research examines how the state and citizens negotiate their relationship through infrastructure, focusing on the “infrastructuring work” of individuals with precarious residency. This work enables citizenship to be enacted (Isin & Nielsen, 2008), challenging racialized categorizations of legality. ATLAS’ politicizing research aims to transform governmental practices from within and redefine the political subjectivities of those deemed non-citizens. Thereto, we explore the embodied encounters between different kinds of infrastructures, and people with precarious citizenship navigating them, using ethnography, interviews, participatory co-creation labs (with ‘sans-papiers’, civil society, policy makers), and critical mapping. However, here we ask what the modalities of participatory research should become if our goal is to prefigure other forms of belonging and enacting ‘citizenship’. Rather than limiting 'participation’ or ‘collaboration’ to methodology or output, we aim to recursively rethink our own deeply held assumptions (Pedersen 2020) as four white, Western, female anthropologists and urbanists— including the distinctions we continue to make between ‘participant’ and ‘researcher’. This raises questions about our own role and participation in the issues addressed, but also what the limits of ‘participatory research’ are in the funding and academic structures we find ourselves in? Can ‘participation in research’ ever be truly decolonial? In short, what kind of modalities would state-funded, politicizing anthropological research need in order to be genuinely reflexive, decolonial, and transformative?