Accompaniment, Reciprocity, and the Problem of Foreclosure

The specter of the researcher who parachutes into a community, gathers data, and departs as soon as their own research needs are met is an all-too-familiar trope in social science research. Over the past several decades, there are a number of ways in which researchers have sought to mitigate the vast power imbalances of such a unilateral and extractive approach to relating to interlocutors, especially those belonging to structurally disempowered groups or communities. Among migration researchers, reciprocity has become a core ethical approach demanding that research somehow tangibly benefit the communities with whom one conducts research (Mackenzie et al. 2007). Many of the workshop participants intuitively took this approach to research ethics as a starting point, feeling that it is imperative to “give back” with material or immaterial goods such as time, money, knowledge, and/or networks. Providing tangible support to interlocutors during fieldwork—whether by accompanying them to appointments, aiding with paperwork, or simply lending a sympathetic ear—seemed to be an uncontroversial, albeit personally demanding, practice. Those of us involved in long-term migration research thus generally agreed on the importance of engaging in various forms of solidarity or “accompaniment observation” (Barone and Alioua 2021) even when this did not tangibly translate into “data” suitable for publication (see Yarris 2021).

While concepts like accompaniment or assistance were relatively straightforward for most, however, the term “scholar activism” sparked far more disagreement and even discomfort among workshop participants, re-emerging repeatedly as a point of contention. Understandings of the term ranged from considering any form of intervention that positively affects the lives of our interlocutors as a form of activism, to a narrower conceptualization that defines scholar activism as an explicit effort to advance a normative political agenda. According to one sociologist in the group:

My sense is that there's not a lot of consensus on what activism is, but that the general tone is that activism is going into research with your own political agenda, that you have a prior set of political orientations, beliefs, agendas, ideas that you're bringing with you.

In response, another participant interjected that anything else would be impossible, even if not every researcher explicitly states (or is aware of) their agenda and normative beliefs. Most agreed that research is fundamentally normative. As one participant put it: “As soon as you're there, you're changing everything . . . And so, this idea that you're not going in with some kind of agenda is absurd.” Yet in light of extensive research showing how seemingly unconscious (or, non-declarative) ideologies and cultural beliefs motivate action (see Lizardo 2017; Vaisey 2009), treating intervention motivated by ideology as the criterion for scholar activism renders virtually all researchers who conduct fieldwork “scholar activists.” As a result, there was some consensus among the group that scholar activism is better understood as a deliberate effort to advance a political or moral agenda through one's research, even if we, as social scientists, agree that research is always-already undergirded by normative considerations.

Some participants found it further instructive to question whether there was any meaningful distinction between activist fieldwork and activist scholarship. An often-implicit assumption in discussions of scholar activism is that the research product (e.g., reports, publications, etc.) represents scholars’ primary contribution to furthering social change. Yet, there are also researchers who use activism as their very point of entrée in the field. The concept of activist fieldwork (i.e., entering the field with prior political commitments and acting upon them therein) was particularly contentious. One sociologist in the group argued that there is a difference between aspiring to make an impact through your research and assuming what that impact will look like preemptively. A researcher could inevitably imagine what should change in their field of study, and perhaps it is precisely this conviction that initially drew them to the field. Yet acting on such assumptions during fieldwork could make it difficult to maintain a willingness to embrace new insights. An anthropologist in the group referred to this as the “problem of foreclosure,” posing the following question: “What are the things that we don't let ourselves ask if we start thinking as activists and not as scholars? What are the stories we choose not to tell?”

As Stefan Timmermans and Iddo Tavory (2022) argue, the element of surprise should be integral to research. In line with this sentiment, some participants argued that research and activism should not be linked, that the element of surprise is compromised when one engages in topics too closely tied to personal convictions. Yet the ability to differentiate between one's research and political investments was, to others, highly questionable. “Can we draw all those lines?” one participant asked. They continued their thought, “I don't think we can—if I'm working with Black people and I'm a Black person, I can't really separate my investment in the politics of the people I'm working with from my own freedom and safety.”

According to the same participant, one can be unwittingly “branded” an activist not only by virtue of their subjectivity, but also by a desire to make their academic workplaces more equitable through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the North American context:

Who can be an activist; who must be an activist? . . . A lot of people are asked to do DEI work and asked to do activist work—but it's just defending their humanity and explaining their life conditions. So, does that make you an activist researcher? Does that make you a DEI stooge? Does that make you just a person who wants to exist to be treated with respect?

Research projects or agendas can also suddenly become politicized, putting researchers who had little intention of engaging in activism in the position of raising the political or moral stakes of their research by virtue of responding to unanticipated antagonisms and new political challenges. For example, one anthropologist in the group came to reconsider the political urgency of their work in the aftermath of the Trump election, reflecting on how explicit political alignment might be less of a given and more the result of a negotiated process of attending to, and being affected by, our interlocutors’ most urgent needs and struggles at the time of research:

I don't consider myself an activist, but as you're thrown into one such context, you have to constantly realign yourself to what's going on in the field and—I was doing research during the Trump campaign—vis-à-vis politics, even though I'm not American.

This sentiment was echoed in the observation of someone doing research in Turkey:

Sometimes we don't really get a choice in whether or not we're going to be an activist . . . in Turkey as issues become politicized, just doing research without even intending to be political, you can suddenly become an activist. Or you can be put in the position where adopting . . . a stance that you didn't intend to be political becomes political.

Workshop participants noted how this lack of agency cuts both ways: former interlocutors, too, have vastly limited agency in what the researcher writes on behalf of a group or community once the researcher has departed from the field, and certainly even less control of how their contributions will be taken up politically. During and after the data collection period, interlocutors may thus struggle to ensure that their expectations of advocacy or assistance are being fulfilled as the researcher's agenda adapts, responds to, and is taken up by shifting political currents. What is relevant to people's lives in the present moment may differ from the goals of the work carried out by researchers aiming to critique overarching structures through time.

The question of the “impact” of our research is thus inextricably entangled with how we present our research to potential interlocutors. When engaging powerful or more established institutions, we may, as one participant put it, “use some sort of implicit promise of benefit of our research” when recruiting participants or organizations into our study. This may inadvertently overstate the benefits to participation, including the possible or likely “help” or advantages to individuals or organizations of working with us. There was some ambivalence in the discussion about the necessity of complete transparency vis-à-vis research projects and questions when engaging with powerful bureaucracies or institutions that have control over research access. In the field of migration, specific organizations can have a lot of gatekeeping power, and we might want access to information in order to conduct what we perceive to be useful and important research that can “talk back” precisely to the powers that be. Yet in explaining our research to prospective interlocutors or interview partners or institutions, we might downplay the extent to which we are (also) critical of their practices. In an effort to avoid the problem of foreclosure, the impulse toward reciprocity, transparency, and impact thus becomes further complicated by how we choose to navigate institutions or persons with whom we may have significant political or ethical disagreements.

Disclosure, Betrayal, and the Double Agent

Of equal interest to workshop participants as the problem of foreclosure was that of disclosure: to what extent do we disclose our politics and identities in the field, and what are the consequences of doing so? When engaging with interlocutors whose opinions differ starkly from our own, we may find ourselves in the position of the “double agent,” as one workshop participant defined it:

When somebody's saying something that you find unacceptable—like they're saying something racist or xenophobic—and you let them talk because that's part of your “research.” That's the double agent piece that I felt extremely uncomfortable with when I was doing research. People were saying things and thinking because I was white that I was agreeing with them.

If activist scholarship “begins with an act of political identification and dialogue with collective subjects in struggle for relief from oppression” (Gordon 2007: 96), does being duplicitous and hiding our disagreement automatically foreclose possibilities or worse, make us complicit in upholding existing power structures? If we let interlocutors share racist or sexist views unchallenged, they might think that we are agreeing with them, inadvertently reinforcing their views in the process. If we challenge these views in the write-up phase, this could feel like an act of betrayal to the time and knowledge our interlocutors have afforded us. But if we were entirely transparent about our own views at the outset, they might not have agreed to speak to us in the first place. As two workshop participants noted:

They really might think that you're their friend, and that you're on their side. And you don't want to be duplicitous. To what extent do you fake your agreement?

The things that you say about your research are very different to each party, and the way that you show up in those spaces can be quite different.

This concern was initially expressed as one pertaining to interlocutors who hold some degree of institutional power or privilege. In this context, we came to question whether the commitment to “giving back” and engaging in long-term collaboration still applies when “studying up” (Nader 1974) or in research contexts that challenge one's own moral and political beliefs. Perhaps, as Charles Hale (2008: 7) suggested, “value neutrality” is a much more preferable strategy than explicit political alignment.

However, the question of how to engage disagreement and disclosure among interlocutors with whom we feel more or less politically aligned or in solidarity proved trickier. As pointed out by Richa Nagar (2000), marginalized communities are not immune from unethical conduct or internal disagreement. As an anthropologist in the group pointed out, any view to the contrary risks assigning migrants the untenable role of “the innocent, pure victim,” a familiar trope in which people on the move are only seen as deserving of basic human rights insofar as they can demonstrate their infallible moral character or innocence. The same participant later noted, with respect to those ostensibly working “for” migrants, that one may even harbor “antagonistic relationships sometimes with activists or people that position themselves as activists.” Some of those navigating the “humanitarian industrial complex,” who may be social workers, activists, or scholars conducting research involving NGOs, may themselves, even inadvertently, “do a lot of the disciplinary work of managing and controlling migration flows.” Questions of disclosure and disagreement thus proved even more fraught with interlocutors who may share our own normative commitments, but who nevertheless engage in questionable practices we seek to critique and problematize.

Some of us argued that radical transparency across the board—not only about our standpoint but also about our own uncertainties—was the best way to go when presenting oneself to potential interlocutors. This stance was not only more ethical, reasoned some, but could potentially be more advantageous as well. One person noted, “blunt honesty about your research [could] open doors.” A strategy of openly and actively managing expectations could, moreover, include a warning that interview or research partners might not like what we write about them. However, the temporal disconnect between the research, analysis, and write-up meant that this strategy did not always work. For example, a workshop participant who completed a doctorate and now works as a full-time activist shared the following about the write-up phase of their dissertation:

I told [my interlocutors] before that I was comparing different municipalities, and maybe they would not be the shiniest, best municipality when it comes to accommodating new refugees. When I was writing up my results, I was still sometimes feeling like I was betraying them, because they told me things—they were critical about their superiors or others in their municipality. . . . When we do this as activists, we tell them “We are an NGO, we have a political goal that we want to reach with this data.” So, people are much more careful with what they tell us. We do this with qualitative and quantitative data, and then people know that we have an agenda before we come.

Another way of thinking about the problem of disclosure, suggested by an anthropologist in the group, would be to “push back” on our interlocutors when we disagree with them. To argue, and even dispute with them when they say things that we find ourselves unable to look beyond. For one, such disagreements often become necessary in the maintenance of long-term relationships in the field, particularly ones that are dependent on a mutual expectation of care, reciprocity, and solidarity (see Pulido 2019).

And yet, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1995) noted nearly three decades ago, the notion of “pushing back” produces its own set of questions and actions, particularly with respect to, as one participant pointed out, the nature and fidelity of data. To what extent can a vocalization of our disagreements in the field alter the kind of information we get? As one sociologist in the group argued, “the aim is not to change anything. I think the aim is to gain knowledge.” The following exchange between an anthropologist (A) and a geographer (G) in the group elaborates this tension in instances of disagreement:

A: There's ways that you can disagree: there's ways that you can disagree to end the conversation, and there's ways that you can disagree to push back. I've come across that in ethnographies, where people are pushing back . . . and then they write about that—“I call this person an idiot for saying this,” and then they said, “well, no, you're an idiot.”

G: How is that data? You're trying to change what they're saying, so it's no longer just their story. It's you creating a new story through your push back.

Nonetheless, others argued that disagreement and its emotional content—anger, guilt, confusion, hurt—can also be crucial to the development of certain kinds of data and significant insights. Letting emotions surface, as John Borneman (2011) points out, can be crucial ways in which researchers are able to signal that they are more than their questions, turning intersubjective encounters into productively reflective spaces of interlocution. Another anthropologist in the group, reflecting on their work with migrant men in Germany, pointed out that it was only by pushing back against one of their interlocutor's particularly misogynistic statements that they were able to uncover more nuanced and complex emotions of powerlessness that had been triggered by displacement. Pushing back in this case thus opened up a field of “epistemic affects,” one that made room for the awareness that “[s]ome of the best conversations humans have are veiled arguments that seem to go nowhere, that seem to reveal the impossibility of rapport, and therefore lead to recognitions of profound difference” (Gable 2014: 242).

For another anthropologist in the group, these dilemmas were laid bare in the months leading up to Trump's 2016 election, a time when the feelings of discomfort they had long harbored toward their white upper middle-class participants reached a tipping point. Stepping out of their role as a double agent, they began sharing with their privileged interlocutors their concerns about resurgent white supremacy and the consequences that a Trump election could have for the Latinx communities with whom they had been working. In most instances, this “pushing back” did not lead to the closing off of research relationships. Instead, it brought them into an emotional dialogue with participants, allowing them to gain a better understanding of their shifting worldviews and ongoing investment in whiteness during turbulent political times.

Something that was very helpful to me was reading some activists’ ethnographies from various anthropologists. And I really liked the quote saying, “you align yourself with people's priorities, with a community's priorities in the field,” in the sense that maybe you enter the field thinking, “I'm doing research about, A and B,” but then as you're there, things happen and people might be worried about specific things. And maybe you're there to help them, . . . volunteer, whatever. But then eventually, maybe you end up writing about different things. And to me, that realignment of priorities is also interesting—I wouldn't call that activism, I don't know what activism is, really.

Political and ethical research is intellectually and emotionally demanding, affecting the way we are engaged with research participants, as well as within the wider political field. The ethnographers among us often immerse ourselves in research contexts and become deeply involved in participants’ lives. It can become challenging to distinguish between one's own priorities and the priorities of the group of interlocutors with whom one has become familiar. As one person currently conducting field research put it: “Relationships get really blurry. You're never just a researcher who plops yourself into a context. You become somebody's friend.” When working with migrants or refugees directly, this can sometimes mean that our close ties and dedication to reciprocity leads us to taking on multiple conflicting demands. Some participants expressed difficulty in managing their own boundaries, feeling guilty and helpless if they prioritized their mental health over participants’ concerns that can at times feel more pressing—and even life-threatening. Both feeling obliged to and wanting to “give back” can take a toll, leaving us vulnerable to burnout and vicarious traumatization. As Rachel Humphris and Kristin Elizabeth Yarris (2022) have demonstrated, the affective dimensions of long-term political mobilization often entail a recalibration of priorities over time, affecting the kind of support we might offer interlocutors as our own capacities are impacted.

Research relationships are not based on a neutral transaction, in which we exchange a mutually fungible and valued “currency.” At the outset of a research process, it is not clear at all in what currency we are being paid, what would be an acceptable way to pay back, or when, if ever, the debt has been settled. Relations of mutual obligation change over time, as demands and relationships change, all of which carry affective and political implications.

Employing Activism: The Costs and Benefits of Political Engagement

The third and final part of our conversation elucidated the relation not only between us and our interlocutors, but also between researchers and their institutional sponsors at a time of heightened academic precarity. Concerns about the nature of our work and the boundaries we draw to honor a semblance of “work/life balance” brought to the fore important questions surrounding the conditions of academic labor today. One doctoral candidate shared the following reflections on how to rethink “scholar-activism” alongside the proliferation of short-term academic contracts and lack of union protections:

Academia has never been as precarious as it is today. . . . And part of this question for me is also then, how much of this activism is not just about our research, but perhaps more fundamentally about our own labor positions? . . . I think the language of the role of academia and activism has always been one that assumes the fact that the academic is speaking from a position of nearly untouchable security.

This sentiment was echoed by a professor in the group, connecting our earlier conversation about unstable boundaries with interlocutors to our own difficulty navigating work/life boundaries at our home institutions:

Why do we want to be activists and academics at the same time? It occurs to me that there's also a movement in the US right now to try to treat your job as a job as opposed to this holistic identity, and I can't help but think that scholar-activism efforts are in fundamental contradiction to the idea of treating your job as a job.

Some participants responded to this by pointing out a generational shift, in which it now seems much more common for universities and funding agencies to expect an “activist twist” on one's research, demonstrating how the neoliberal university has effectively co-opted the language of social justice to less than noble ends. Similarly, and especially for those receiving federal funding in the United States or Germany, other participants expressed how contradictory it can be to address the “societal impact” of one's research in funding applications while at the same time fearing the repercussions of “being too political.” As one participant put it with respect to their home institution in the United States, the burden of seeming too overtly “political” falls squarely on the shoulders of marginalized and underrepresented scholars in particular:

And it is often women and people of color who have come into the academy in the last 20 years. They're interested in making a difference in their communities, and it isn't really rewarded. . . . When you get to the actual moment of tenure, they literally go, “one, two, three, four, five” (counting publications). And it's like, “oh, there's some community engaged work down here, how nice for you.” But it doesn't really count.

Several doctoral students and junior scholars in the group pointed to the contradictory demands of the academic job market, particularly in the United States. There is at once a marked increase in the number of academic positions advertised as community-engaged or decolonial, requiring the submission of lengthy diversity or social justice statements, while many of the same universities often deny tenure to marginalized faculty, dole out temporary contracts in the form of Adjunct or Visiting Assistant Professorship positions, and disregard graduate student labor. One's activist commitments, then, can seem in direct tension with the logic of an academic job market in which individual scholars vie for increasingly few permanent positions in direct competition with their peers. This fosters a less-than-ideal climate for collaboration and solidarity—although the recent wave of graduate student unionization in the United States does point to one strong example to the contrary. In an environment where prestige is the name of the game, “activism” can become one more tool to promote one's unique contributions in a crowd of applicants, mobilizing the rhetoric of opposition or collective struggle to individualist and careerist ends (see Gilmore 1993).

Academics from the German context, however, noted that there is often a strong hesitation in German academia to incorporate or co-opt any activist elements at all. One participant attributed this to the stunning lack of diversity in German higher education in general. This has meant that most scholar-activist work is almost entirely spearheaded by marginalized people in the public sphere, who bring their intellectual vigor, activist commitments, and lived experiences to a non-academic public in the form of talks, events, social media, and trade books. The question of academic versus activist labor is thus largely irrelevant. By contrast, a participant familiar with Italian academia noted that there is often a tacit division of labor between tenured faculty who conduct research in universities and precarious faculty who conduct “applied” research. The latter group often produces outputs or “deliverables,” such as reports and other publications, that are not valued since they are not peer-reviewed (in the academic sense). This is despite the fact that their research is necessarily community-oriented and/or policy-focused.

These discussions raised a crucial collective concern: the very process of making our work available to an academic audience entails a certain duplicity, for we are often asked to smooth out the uncomfortable truths and complexities in our research engagements—or worse, excise parts of our identities—to fit the “all or nothing” logics of the neoliberal job market. In the workshop, we repeatedly referred to this process as one where our own orientations toward others and the world are being increasingly “co-opted as brand,” where we are constantly drawn into the “marketability” and “aesthetic games” played by universities, for opting out of them might mean losing out on the opportunity to land an academic job. These dynamics perhaps explain the “allergy” that some members of our group seemed to share toward the term “scholar-activist” in its contemporary declination.

Conclusion

Our consideration of activist research ended by dissecting the disciplining elements of the neoliberal academy in relation to our encounters with migration studies as a field. For some, migration is merely an area of research interest. It is a job that, like any other job, should adhere to strict temporal and professional boundaries. For others, being an activist has never been a choice. This includes scholars who are, themselves, aggressively policed by the same bordering and racializing regimes to which they devote their research, unable to “clock out” at the end of the work day. Such divisions are complicated not only by race, nationality, gender, class, and other categories, but also by the relationship to one's research and political commitments. The differences among us, subjectively, disciplinarily, and methodologically, thus greatly influence how we perceive and define the “impact” of our work, and our embeddedness within it. Our goal in publishing this collaborative reflection is to underscore the importance of honest, cross-disciplinary exchange on a topic that invites more questions, debate, and contention than it resolves. We believe that such conversations will only become more relevant in our academic contexts as the question of political engagement and impact becomes further entrenched under the auspices of the neoliberal university.