ABSTRACT
This chapter tells a story of a shipwrecked research project and how it was rebuilt at sea. In this process, the traditional epistemological issues proved less important than framing of the scrutinised objects. Before the research started, the intended object for fieldwork, so-called waiting camps for rejected asylum seekers, was torched and completely ruined. Bereft of the concrete institution intended to be the case study for the research, attention turned to a diffuse set of social spaces constituted by a common ambition and converging rationalities, manifested in dispersed institutional setups. Drawing on Rose (2000), these spaces are governable or irreal spaces: areas construed to execute certain forms of government. The research thus ended up scrutinising ‘irreal spaces’. The project aimed to analyse differences between measures two control two marginalised groups – one with and one without citizenship – street-level drug users and irregular migrants. However, as the research was rebuilt, it ended up focusing on the similarities of politics regarding the two groups. These similarities were understood as a specific frame of understanding termed ‘funnel politics’. The chapter tells the story of this research project and highlights the significance of framing the research topic. Directing attention to the phase of discovery and theorising, the concept of framing shows how results are created from the initial stages of research, including the choice of words to describe the topic.
