Shake It, Stretch It, Share It! Moving Reflexivities Beyond Migration

For about 10 years, the so-called ‘reflexive turn’ has shaped migration studies. This paper takes the state-of-the-art demonstrated with this edited volume as an opportunity to tackle chances, risks and challenges of the most recent standards established through this ‘turn’. 

It concentrates on three aspects: First, it discusses the pros and cons of concentrating migration studies on certain migration categories, i.e. sedimented forms of knowledge and classification. This way, it invites to push the research perspective beyond established power domains for discovering additional fields in which both subversiveness and the ordinariness of the everyday are articulated. Second, it problematizes the reduction of migration studies to contemporary processes and invites to dig deeper into the histories of the respective contexts in order to recognize how mobility-related categories have come into being. Third, this paper deals with the not yet fully explored opportunities of collaborative work, which also pose new hurdles and challenges, especially regarding the reflection of positionalities and normativities. With these three new axes of reflexivity, this chapter outlines ways in which the central paradigm of the reflexive turn of migration studies can be made fruitful for adjacent research fields, which likewise sort and rank people into different kinds.

Drotbohm, Heike 2025: Shake It, Stretch It, Share It! Moving Reflexivities Beyond Migration in: Janine Dahinden, Andreas Pott [Hg.]: Reflexivities and Knowledge Production in Migration Studies. Berlin: Springer Verlag, pp. 317-333.