What is it about?
In the fields of border studies and forced migration, scholars from Europe and around the world gather to discuss their findings and look for a way forward. As “refugee crises” fuel the businesses that develop around forced migration, ranging from smugglers and governments, to border workers and researchers themselves, pessimism pervades academic discourse. The horizon we see ahead leads to more suffering, suspension of human rights, and marginalization of some people. As we reflect on this tragic path, we may ask what is that we keep to the margins of most academic debates? How do we contribute to the mainstream tendency of knowledge producers to privilege some parts of reality, and underestimate others? Building on these questions, the paper explores the moments of uncertainty that pervade everyday life at the borderlands of Europe, and it deploys doubt as an analytical tool to produce a reflexive turn in border studies and knowledge production around ethics in the context of forced migration. From an autoethnographic perspective, it calls for a re-evaluation of the directions we take as we think and write about borders, and suggests a shift in gaze which builds on self-dialogue as an act of responsibility.
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Why is it important?
How do we observe, analyse, and write about situations of extreme suffering and pain, and what shall we do when with the reflections we collect and choose not to expose because they could weaken our argument or make us sound less convincing? One possible answer is that we should confront them and do it in a public form.
Perspectives
In the world we live in there is little space for uncertainty. Although uncertainty pervades everyday life and discussions about the present and future, there is a tendency to strive for certainty, security, and simplicity. The world we live in is however not simple. In this paper I invite an older and new generation of scholars to reflect on the importance of studying uncertainty and making doubt the strenght rather than the weakness of anthropological work.
Dr Alessandro Corso
University of Oxford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Judgment, Doubt, and Self-Doubt: A Reflexive Turn from the Borderland of Lampedusa, Public Anthropologist, October 2022, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/25891715-bja10041.
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