Description
My research considers how discourses on migrant masculinities are constructed within anti-migrant politics. Central, is how discourses on migrant masculinities are imbricated with racial logics and histories of Empire and how these logics reaffirm practices of exclusion.
When applying for PhD funding, I was given a list of locations where my research would be deemed ‘legitimate’ within the funding parameters, all located in the Global South. As I started the research, I felt a deep discomfort with my research and I could see the logics I was ‘analysing within humanitarian sites’ being echoed within the UK context. As the pandemic continued and I was unable to travel, I was allowed to shift to situate my research within my own work, organising and relationships within the migrant right’s sector in London
In this paper, I reflect on how colonial logics within academia shape and define what kind of stories are allowed to be told about borders. I consider how whiteness shapes who can research borders and where, and how this shapes the knowledges produced about bordering and borderwork. Overall, resisting borders requires us to go beyond the inter/national and thus I argue feminist research has to tell stories about borders differently.
