Although migration between the countries of the Global South is increasingly significant in terms of its scale, complexity and consequences, migration research typically focuses on the movement of people to the countries of the Global North reflecting the political and policy interests of researchers and funding bodies.
As the work of the Migration for Development and Equality (MIDEQ) Hub, draws to a close, Professor Heaven Crawley reflects on the challenges of ‘walking the talk’ when it comes to decentering migration research. MIDEQ is the UK’s largest GCRF-funded project bringing together partners from 12 countries in the Global South to tell a new and very different story of migration and its relationship to inequality. But this process has been far from straightforward.
From pulling together the funding proposal to designing the research, undertaking data collection in the context of a global pandemic, dealing with the fallout from sudden and dramatic funding cuts, and grappling with publishing biases, the project’s researchers have been in an almost constant tussle with dominant assumptions about what and whose knowledge ‘counts’ and how to ensure ‘equitable partnerships’ in the context of deep and long-standing inequalities access to resources for the production of knowledge.
Understanding the processes through which these epistemic injustices happen, rather than just the epistemic outcomes, can help us to identify ways to address the structural inequalities with which the production of migration knowledge is often associated.