ABSTRACT
Building on the critical debates around knowledge production in transnational migration studies, the chapter seeks to identify key alternative knowledge tools for reflexive migration research. After reviewing notions of denaturalization, demigranticization and decolonization, it elaborates on two conceptual elements that provide an integrated ‘umbrella’ perspective for implementing alternative knowledge strategies in transnational migration studies. The first conceptual component – the doing-migration approach – allows an appropriate analytical differentiation between ‘categories of analysis’ and ‘categories of social practice’. It is interested in the daily sayings and doings about ‘migration’ both in the ‘immigration’ and in the ‘emigration’ settings. The second conceptual component suggests to extend the optic of transnational migration studies by considering coloniality/ies-sensitive approaches to explicitly study long-term, large-scale power asymmetries and patterns of inequalities in the context of the postcolonial, postsocialist and neo-colonial dynamics. It invites us to consider the interplay of various forms of coloniality experienced by transnationally active individuals while moving across border. Consequently, the chapter pleads for a complementary use of ‘doing migration’ and coloniality/ies-sensitive approaches to expand the critical potential in transnational migration studies and enhance self-reflexivity in European migration research.
