Paper short abstract:

What role does activist-scholarship have in engaging with the mobile commons and embedded knowledge of the border which does not confine itself to peer reviewed text? Minoring research to the struggles of people experiencing the violence and racism of borders in their everyday lives.

Paper long abstract:

Knowledge production on migration has, and continues to be, authored by people-on-the-move themselves. Those who cross borders and navigate the precarious internal spaces forged by state/colonial violence pen their own routes, strategies, accounts and critiques: whether written, digital or oral. Testimony, video, music, mapping, housing and other digital/material resources form a complex web of exchange about transit and mobility which people draw on to navigate borders. These interlocking practises expressions and resources, often referred to as a mobile commons (Trimiklinioti, Parsanoglou, Tsianos 2015), are a material and epistemological resistance to the border.

Yet claims laid by academia (as well as media and NGOs) have regularly created a sanitised buffer of abstraction in order to make cross-border mobilities legible or palatable to a supposed wider audience. Knowledge then is often presented as statistics, death tolls, aggregated experiences and expert views, rather than the thick, and fluid inter-subjective movement of people who are authoring their own cannon on mobility. The abstraction/extraction of much research leverages power within the border complex to speak for others. This contribution opens up the question of: How can research minor itself (King 2016) to the struggle of people experiencing the violence and racism of borders in their everyday lives? What role does activist-scholarship have in engaging with the mobile commons and embedded knowledge of the border which does not confine itself to peer reviewed text?