How Does Access Affect Knowledge Production? Entering the Migration Apparatus as Researchers
While institutions of migration control and management are increasingly sought-after research sites, they are and will remain particularly sensitive ones as they evolve in a highly politicized field. Consequently, researchers encounter many challenges associated with gaining and maintaining access to these sites. The posts of this new series of blog posts – originally published on the Border Criminologies Blog – shed light on the way access shapes scientific knowledge.
Accessing institutions of migration control and management to conduct qualitative research raises a wide spectrum of methodological, but also analytical and theoretical, questions. Drawing on the experiences of anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists researching various institutions of migration governance (border controls, deportation regimes, immigration detention), the contributors to this series reflect on the way access shapes researchers’ positionality, the scientific knowledge they produce, and our understanding of the modern state.
The challenges associated with gaining and maintaining research access are obviously not specific to studies of migration management and control – they are omnipresent in any qualitative research and particularly salient for ethnographic work. Setting the focus on these institutions lets us put comparable experiences into perspective. More importantly, it allows us to point out potential rationales of governance shared and applied by political actors, policy-makers, institutions and bureaucrats at multiple levels across the institutions that make up what Gregory Feldman described as the European migration apparatus.
The Methodological Challenges Associated with Access
What “access” means in practice is not straightforward. Permission to study can come in many forms, at different stages and to varying degrees. The primary concern, however, is to get physical access, with or without formal authorization, to the research field – that is, to the places, spaces, individuals, and artefacts that it is made up of.
The process of negotiating access to an ethnographic research field is interactional by nature and always involves multiple subjectivities and interpretations. The roles often shift: during this process, the researcher becomes the object of investigation; the explicit objectives of the research, but also the (hidden) goals and the trustworthiness of the individuals conducting it are scrutinized, interpreted and assessed.
While it is important to scrutinize reluctance or resistance of field actors to grant access, it is also necessary to reflect on the reasons of successful negotiations and to treat the process as data. The way access is negotiated, the way it is granted – or not – and under what conditions (sites, methods, temporalities) all reveal something about the field and its actors and are thus legitimate products of the research.
Once formal authorization is granted questions remain. First, access negotiation is an intersubjective process during which the researcher and the field’s actors develop ideas of each other’s nature and objectives. These mutual representations endure during fieldwork and impact the positionality of researchers, as well as their relationships of trust and suspicion with the field’s actors. They generate mutual expectations regarding how the researchers and the researched will act. This includes expectations related to shared or different national or social origin, sex, political opinions, and other characteristics which can result in implicit expectations of loyalty or dissent.
Second, access is an ongoing process and the field’s actors retain a large room for maneuver as to what exactly is accessed. While access is oftentimes negotiated with and granted by actors in higher positions, the actual participation and cooperation of subordinates remains to be earned. While attempting to impose their physical presence in a research field, researchers concomitantly attempt to impose their own problematics and interpretations onto the field. Negotiating access is thus also about negotiating power relations. In this sense, gatekeeping is about resistance: by keeping (parts of) the field invisible, gatekeepers retain the monopoly of legitimate discourse over it.
What Does Access Say about the Migration Apparatus?
So, what do the posts in this series say about accessing the migration apparatus? While focused on methodological concerns, the posts reveal important aspects about the apparatus itself. Rather than two distinct products of the same process, methodological challenges and research results often appear to be reciprocal.
The state often appears fuzzy and unreadable. The outcomes of research requests largely depend on hierarchies and power relationships that are only partly visible to the researcher. There seems to be no general recipe for how to succeed or fail in gaining access, which often illustrates the considerable discretion enjoyed by individual gatekeepers.
One could argue that the concerns of state officials are understandable; any research subject would wish to control the results of the research and the knowledge produced. However, civil servants are not like any other actor. They represent and embody the state and, as such, their actions require legitimation.
The researcher emerges as a competitor of the state in the production of knowledge and narratives about it. The sensitivity of institutions of migration management as research fields may thus oftentimes be about preserving the authority of their institutional “talk” – the norms and values carried by their structures and rhetoric. Reflecting on the process of negotiating access appears particularly fruitful to grasp these ideational constructs, shared meanings, and performative discourses.
The official justifications for refusing access rarely address such issues, but rather insist on matters of resources. Data protection and confidentiality was also presented as an argument to decline research requests. When access was granted, however, these issues were dealt with easily or not voiced at all.
Another repeated feature was the field actors’ preference for certain research methods. While often accommodating researchers’ interview requests, state institutions were repeatedly less keen to let them conduct observation in their premises. This raises the question whether this choice is based on the preference for data that can be controlled or on more practical reasons. Either way, the knowledge that social scientists can produce is importantly impacted by the type of data they can collect.
Each of the aspects above involves ethical questions for researchers attempting to access the migration apparatus. Access is always partial, polymorphous and loaded with power relationships. It is essential that researchers recognize the ethical implications of access. Finally, while focusing on the migration apparatus, its logics and rationales, researchers should be careful not to lose sight of the people whose lives it is designed to manage and control.
Christin Achermann, Project Leader, nccr – on the move, University of Neuchatel
Damian Rosset, doctoral assistant, Center of Migration Law, University of Neuchatel
This is a shortened version of the first post of Border Criminologies’ themed series on “Accessing the Migration Apparatus” organized by Damian Rosset and Christin Achermann, University of Neuchatel and nccr – on the move. It was originally published on 6 November 2017. The series originates from a panel that took place during the 2017 IMISCOE Annual Conference in Rotterdam. It reflects on the way access shapes the researchers’ position and the scientific knowledge they produce.
