Negotiating research in the shadow of migration control: access, knowledge and cognitive authority

Abstract

This article recounts the failure to gain access to the Swiss asylum agency's ‘country of origin information’ (COI) unit and how it negatively impacted access to similar research sites in Europe. As producers of indispensable expert knowledge, these units play an important instrumental and symbolic role in asylum procedures and policies. Interpreted as a situated case of knowledge control, rather than a general resistance to research within the institution, the denial of access reveals how the intended research challenged gatekeepers’ idealised construction of COI – both as a type of knowledge and as a field of practice. The negotiation about access gradually shifted to other topics, such as the researcher's competence, the field's situation and the nature of legitimate knowledge – all related to politics of expertise and the COI units’ legitimising functions in the wider migration apparatus. The negotiation became a competition over cognitive authority and the monopoly of legitimate knowledge production about the field. By black‐boxing country information, the gatekeepers fostered the illegibility of bureaucratic processes and the legibility of the state as discourse. Analysing the 30‐month negotiation process also reveals the difficulties to seize the contours of the state when encountering transnational bureaucratic fields.

Between suspicion, nicknames, and trust—renegotiating ethnographic access with Swedish border police

“…Are we assessed as credible, or do we also face general disbelief (Jubany, 2011), based on the fear “that people [here, migrants or researchers] are not who they are” (Bohmer and Shuman, 2018, p. 164)? While this work has given a rather positive account, prior research also brought up continuous struggles (Rosset and Achermann, 2019). What unites this research is the attempt to study up, in contrast to studying down, suspicious interlocutors and to show the inverted power position we, as researchers, retain, when negotiating with state actors instead of migrant individuals or other potentially vulnerable groups.…”

“…Hence, access becomes more of an administrative concern (Chughtai and Myers, 2017; Neyland, 2007), which can be seen as formal testing, followed by a complex navigation of (more informal) entrance rites “to get in” and the potential danger of not being accepted “on the ground”. Indeed, once the researcher has passed the often crucial, as well as stressful, initial negotiations (see Rosset and Achermann, 2019), there are more tests to come. In the context of organisational ethnography, it is often the street-level bureaucrats who become the gatekeepers (Reeves, 2010) on different levels of our negotiating processes.…”

Shaping migration at the border: the entangled rationalities of border control practices

“…On occasion, forbidding observing in certain places was justified by citing tactical or security concerns. Whether such restrictions were intended to control our knowledge (Rosset and Achermann 2019 ) is difficult to assess.…”

Exquisite Corpses and backward glances: European social anthropology 2019

“…The collaboration between the two states allows, on one hand, one state to be present in the territory of another and, on the other hand, the other state to receive no opposition for the act of deporting unwanted citizens – all of this within the EU. The denial of access to key areas of migration data by state authorities is revealed by Rosset and Achermann (2019) to be a considered and strategic bureaucratic process establishing cognitive authority over a field in which researchers are prevented from reaching the emic or the para‐ethnographic in the representations at work within. Greece has been in the eye of the migration hurricane (Rozakou 2019) with clear evidence of a fragmentation of governance being the consequence of the state being overwhelmed by the sheer scale, not simply of the refugee crisis (more than 800,000 refugees crossing the Aegean Sea in 2015) but of the vast humanitarian landscape that has emerged in its wake.…”