Creolizing Nordic Migration Research : Entangled Knowledges, Migratisations, and Reflexivities

Abstract

Plural subaltern voices are carving spaces for previously misrepresented or misrecognized experiences and perspectives within Nordic migration and minority research, fields which are however still largely dominated by researchers writing from hegemonic disembodied positions. Recent years have seen more voices of BPoC (Black People and People of Colour) migrants and their descendants, but also voices of Eastern European (EE) migrants in Nordic academia. Dialogues between these emerging perspectives can present multiple tensions and disharmonies, and learning from those is an important step towards more mutually reflexive and beneficial collaborations. Voices of EE Roma migrants are however underrepresented or often absent from those dialogues. Nordic Roma-related (migration) research is still mainly carried out by non-Roma researchers. It is thus necessary to continue imagining and practicing new reflexive, collaborative approaches in knowledge production that bring into critical dialogues Roma and non-Roma EE migration experiences and scholarship with the emerging BPoC, critical, activist, decolonial, and artistic scholarships in the Nordics, and with Romani studies. The hope is to generate interconnected transformative possibilities for decolonizing knowledge production and generating plural research practices from the previously ignored or discredited margins, which go beyond hegemonic gazes and approvals for legitimacy, without erasing power differences and tensions.

To contribute to these endeavours, my thesis investigates what is knowledge in Nordic migration-, BPoC-, and Roma-related education scholarship, who produces it, how, and why. To this end, it scrutinizes the power relations embedded in knowledge production practices. It then looks into how knowledge production relates to self-awareness, subjectivation, and worlding. It thus seeks to trouble knowledge production and weave plural knowledges otherwise. Finally, it explores what the realization of these mechanisms and paths does for potentially making the world a better place and relearning to hear each other and think together for the sake of refuturing. Central to these aims is theorizing and practicing research reflexivity anew to allow openings for plural knowledges in research.

To address the above research aims, firstly, I examined how researchers practice reflexivity and make knowledge claims, as well as how research and education power relations constitute knowing subjects in the Nordic context. Researchers practice reflexivity according to their positionings and chosen paradigms, different positionings determine various affective, theoretical, and practical approaches to reflexivity, and different research paradigms require various degrees of dis/comfort with one’s reflexive practices, although there are also overlaps and intersections between these. In parallel I conducted autoethnographic research in Finnish educational settings involving diverse migrants in multiple positionings on both receiving and delivering sides of migration-related services: a migrant ‘integration’ training at an adult education centre, a pre-‘integration’ training in a reception centre for asylum seekers, and a cleaning work and training project in an emergency accommodation centre for Roma migrants. By bringing into dialogue those three settings, my thesis inter-relates plural and unequal BPoC and EE Roma and non- Roma migration lived experiences. According to my autoethnographic research in dialogue with the literature review, comfortable uses of reflexivity in both education and research practices remain blind to how intersections between race, gender, class, and ascriptions of migration shape (access to) education and knowledge production by creating divides and hierarchies. They identify knowing subjects on the basis of proximity to or distance from whiteness. In other words, comfortable uses of reflexivity reproduce the coloniality of knowledge.

Secondly, I explored how rethinking and practicing reflexivity and collaborations anew and together with art-based methods can creolize onto-epistemologies and methodologies. Besides being one of the theories used in the thesis, creolization is also the main methodological tool through which the thesis brings into fruitful dialogues plural unequal ways of being, knowing, and doing research. These dialogues connect minor-to-minor theories, methods, and lived realities to challenge the coloniality of knowledge and of migration and imagine new possibilities for living together and doing research together. Conceptually and theoretically the thesis uses a relational framework combining creolization, coloniality, entangled migrations, and migratisation/migratism. This theoretical framework intersects with the methods of autoethnography as Anzaldúan autohistoria-teoría, theatre-based methods, storytelling, and creative writing. I thus use creolization as methodology twofold: creolizing research and creolizing social reality. The thesis creolizes research by reimagining and practicing anew reflexivity, research collaborations, and ethics, through interrelating social research with both oral and written literary and theatrical techniques. The thesis creolizes social reality, in particular plural unequal migration lived experiences, through the conceptual tool of entangled migratisations/migratisms. By analysing entangled ascriptions of migration in a relational framework and in small localities rather than national containers, the thesis contributes to the ongoing reflexive turn in migration studies.

Overall, the thesis reinscribes previously ignored or discredited knowledges and lived realities into Nordic migration research and social reality. It thus contributes to new ways of inter-relating minor-to-minor knowledges from BPoC, Romani, and EE perspectives in a Nordic context, while at the same time addressing the tensions, social inequalities, and colonial legacies shaping such dialogues. The thesis does not seek to offer prescriptive answers or definite solutions, instead it presents possible suggestions of future alternatives to epistemic and social inequalities, with issues like appropriation and domination to be further addressed in an ongoing manner. Any attempt at dismantling power hierarchies also runs the risk of reinforcing existing hierarchies and inequalities or producing new ones. Rather than prescribing how to do research more reflexively, I embrace the uncertainty and failure that come with not resolving contradictions but staying with the challenges and imagining what new possible entanglements they can generate.