Enacting Asylum University: Politics of Research Encounters and (Re)Producing Borders in Asylum Relations

While talking about asylum migration often legal and common parlance assumes an “origin” and “destination” country, as well as so-called “host” populations and “newly arriving asylum-seekers”. Further, academic parlance is predominantly based on epistemologies and ontologies that speak of rather than from asylum, inevitably hiding the politics of everyday relations (what I call here enacting asylum) that actors including researchers find themselves in. More crucially, asylum is fundamentally built on fixed epistemologies that often results in enacting asylum in ways that reproduce methodological nationalism and appropriation of migrant voices under unequal conditions of knowledge production.
Building on claims for “writing histories,” “constructing worlds,” and “right to education” by actors seeking asylum, enacting Asylum University emerges as a mode of forging relations based on itinerant action research processes responding to these everyday claims. Such processes acknowledge the deep entanglement of research and pedagogical practices with everyday processes of producing asylum relations. Reflecting on the articulatory processes part of this mode of enacting asylum, I argue for a relational politics of becoming, crucial to understanding (Europe’s) borders. Enacting Asylum University is a plea for un-bounding, un-fixing, and acknowledging “asylum” as a space of
encounter that is opaque and becoming.