Migrants Epistemologies: smooth/striated perception and collective knowledge production among transit migrants in Morocco

For this presentation I would like to talk about « migrants epistemologies », from the perspective of my recent research and video Crossroads at the Edge of Worlds on transit migrants in Morocco, which was produced in the frame of the Maghreb Connection project .

This presentation may be individual, or be assembled with other voices on related topics. Please contact me if you would like to refine our assemblage.

Now what might “migrants epistemologies” be? One might think of epistemologies that migrate or of epistemologies that are specific to migrants. It is this second meaning that I would like to probe, asking how migration affects forms of knowing the world. After analysing transit migrants in Morocco’s social formation, I will argue that they develop a knowledge that both allows their circulation and is produced by their movement in space. This knowledge is defined by a “smooth/striated” perception and its collective production, and entails a collective belonging beyond the nation. I believe these espitemological transformations may influence our research in important ways today, if we wish to contribute to understanding globalization in general and specifically to augmenting possibilities of life and action within globalization.

It would be interesting to connect these arguments to the wider issue of knowledge and/in mobility: what might migrant’s epistemologies mean today when everything from the military to capitalism and management literature celebrate mobility and nomadism? What kind of spaces is such a knowledge of mobility shaped in and buy (think of numerous think tanks), and how does a kind of deterritorialization of knowledge production of which the Summit is exemplary of influence thought?