By Anne Sofie Gammelgaard Gregersen, Junior Researcher
December often marks the time of year when people naturally begin to reflect on their lives, choices, and the experiences the past year has brought. This seasonal introspection seems to have found its way to me as well. So, in the spirit of reflection and with the freedom that a blog post allows, I’ve decided to look back on the past semester from a more personal perspective. In doing so, I’ll share what some might consider a bit embarrassing – an epic epistemological fail. Or, put another way, a guide on how not to be an interpretive researcher.
I’ll start my story from when I joined ETHOS Lab in early fall. At this point, I had been pursuing a PhD for about 6 months, and as a Junior Researcher in the lab my natural inclination was to continue exploring the same empirical field as my proposed PhD project, focusing on Facial Recognition Technology and its role in migration governance. However, by then, I had already conducted literature reviews, received feedback, made adjustments, and refined my ideas – leaving me unsure about how to proceed further. During the initial meetings, I found myself repeatedly saying, ‘that I had been busy working on other projects’. While this wasn’t untrue, it was an excuse as to why I felt like I wasn’t bringing any new ‘findings’ to the community gatherings.
Through the fall semester, I was working as a Teaching Assistant, which afforded me a lot of flexibility in my schedule. This allowed me to put more energy into projects outside of academia, particularly my volunteer work at Avnstrup Asylum Center. As I started visiting the center more frequently, I began planning more activities and forming connections that extended beyond the volunteer framework. My interactions with the residents began to feel more authentic – we stayed in touch throughout the week, talked on the phone, went for walks, and built relationships that gradually grew beyond the roles of volunteer and asylum seeker.
One of the highlights during this time was celebrating a friend and his family, who have been living at Avnstrup since the Taliban takeover, and eventually were granted permanent residency. When he shared the news with me, he brought me flowers and a swan made out of glass. I’m not sure why, and still isn’t today. Anyways, it made me realize that what we had been building was a true friendship.
During this period, I was also invited to join another volunteer project at Ellebæk, a departure camp (but more so a prison). The project aimed to provide detainees with tools that have been designed to improve mental health, as a general decline in well-being had been observed across several asylum centers – an unsurprising trend.
Over time, however, the sessions evolved into a more informal space for conversation, rather than us volunteers simply teaching these tools. As trust gradually developed, the people living at the center began sharing their stories. Several of them eventually asked for our help in reaching out to journalists, media outlets, or anyone who could shed light on their situation; being confined in an asylum prison, behind fences, without access to personal phones and with inadequate healthcare. After witnessing these injustices ourselves, the volunteers and I started organizing around this purpose – wanting their stories to be told to the broader society. Through these stories, our purpose was to highlight how the probation service (the state) systematically violates basic human rights at the camp sites. After countless efforts and being turned down by basically all mainstream media, we started writing articles and political proposals ourselves, conducted interviews and documented incidents of the detainees’ rights being violated – as we still do.
All of a sudden I found myself deeply immersed in my volunteering and activism which began to change my view on academia. With every visit to the camps, small seeds of scepticism were planted within me. My motivation to remain in academia and pursue a career in this environment began to waver. I started to feel that being in the ‘field,’ rather than sitting behind a desk, was the only meaningful way to mobilize and support the people living in the camps. At the same time, it became a question of integrity, and I started asking myself: how do I justify staying in an institution funded by a state whose policies and practices I was actively trying to revolt against?
I became fixated on the idea that these two paths – activism and academia – could not coexist. Part of my fixations, I believe, stems from privileged notions – particularly those rooted in traditional positivism – tending to disregard those who are too entangled in the mess, as experts, because, in this paradigm, objectivity isn’t an illusion, and can only be obtained from afar (Haraway, 1988). Similarly, research is regarded as something confined to a structured framework and guided by predefined hypotheses (Yanow, 2014) – A rigid notion that left no room for my work in the fields, to be recognized as part of my research. While I align more closely with interpretive researchers and believe that research can be rigorous without following the standard 4-5 phases typically outlined in textbooks, it wasn’t until Henriette, our Lab Manager, pointed out that my activities didn’t have to be separate from my research. I realized I had been gatekeeping my own experiences, imposing positivistic criteria upon both myself and my work. Discovering that I was living according to an epistemology I didn’t even believe in was an eye-opening moment – almost like one of those game-changing therapy sessions.
What I needed was to stop othering myself from my own mess (Law, 2007). Instead of treating my activism as separate or foreign to my academic life – covering up my traces – I needed to embrace it as an enriching part of my research. After all, it was these experiences that generated most of my knowledge at this stage and time. Not only did they deepen my understanding of the struggles faced by asylum seekers, but they also provided critical insights into how being monitored through various digital tools impacts the everyday lives of irregular migrants.
While my work as a volunteer and activist never has been, nor will be, driven by any academic project or pursuit, there is no denying the fact that these interests do morph together at certain intersections, and even complement one another. Acknowledging this interplay, I believe, is crucial – not only for my research and role as a researcher but especially when studying migration, where practices of extractivism have been identified many times (Madianou, 2019). For these reasons, moving forward, I will strive for greater transparency in my work. This includes rejecting the notion that my mess doesn’t belong in academia and instead embracing it as an essential part of it.
In this small contribution, sharing my epistemological fail, I further wish to highlight the meaning of communities. Joining communities like ETHOS Lab and other research groups, played a pivotal role in reshaping my role as a researcher, as they helped me realise my own blind spots. They have further shown me that it is possible to be a researcher, actively engaged with academia while distancing ourselves from work designed to optimize practices of the state. Instead, we can focus on research that seeks to make these practices visible to the public, fostering greater scrutiny and accountability. Once I began framing and thinking about my work as such, having taken my vitamin Epistemology, my motivation to stay within academia started to return. Engaging with the Danish migration system from below, witnessing its impacts on the people living adjacent, is, in fact, now reigniting my motivation for investigating Facial Recognition Technology, as a means of states’ desire to deprive certain groups – whose closeness is perceived as a threat (Ahmed, 2006) – of their liberty.
In the spirit of the season, and like any other Christmas Carol, I’ll conclude this blog post with the return of my joy for academia as the happy ending to the story. However, the fight for a world without borders and ending the criminalization of migrants continues.
Until the next crisis x)
References
Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jk6w
Yanow, D. (2014) ‘Neither Rigorous nor Objective?’, (2nd Edition)
Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Law, J. (2007). Making a mess with method. In: Outhwaite, William and Turner, Stephen P. eds. The Sage Handbook of Social Science Methodology. London: Sage, pp. 595–606
Madianou, M. (2019). Technocolonialism: Digital Innovation and Data Practices in the Humanitarian Response to Refugee Crises. Social Media + Society, 5, 1–13 https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119863146