An Open Invitation

Teaching about ethics of witnessing points to the importance of an ethos that understands the world less as a terrain of clashes between individual actors from which to extract simple recognition, restitution or rights and more as a place whereby ethical sensibilities and larger societal concerns are integral to scholarship. Yet the effort to realize this potential requires that we take seriously the fact that witnessing practices often require being directly involved in difficult processes such as facing testimonies of grave injustices, death, destruction and large-scale ills and injuries. Witnessing could provide a way of fleshing out deep-seated societal divides and histories of trauma. This strategy allows pedagogical encounters the kind of spaces that move beyond the demands for mere recognition of otherness and others’ suffering and towards doing something about it. Similarly, educating our students toward an understanding of witnessing as a responsibility would cultivate ethical sensibilities with a transformative potential for thinking about, practicing and relating to scholarship.

The types of commitment and effectiveness of existing strategies concerning knowledge dissemination as mandated by this model of learning and training could be further expanded to provide active promotion of progressive and engaged scholarship by way of determining key questions to be asked. Establishing organically linked exchanges between universities and research centers and those who are ‘studied’ requires the enhancement of improved and structurally sustainable knowledge transfer and translation of expertise, particularly in the area of rights awareness. As such, the methodology of ethics of witnessing could provide a pathway to increase the ability of our students to directly engage with systemic abuses and inequalities, and pursue the definition of a well-entrenched ideal of justice in the context of systemic human suffering that is not conceived as individualized, neutral or naturalized.

Case Study on Affect-Based Learning

The figure of the migrant/refugee/stateless subject reemerges as a new site for reconceptualizing the border, redefining the threshold for subjectivity, and a substantive challenge to the categories of heterogeneity and liminality within the national space if we engage with dispossession as an engaged party. In this latter case, the migrant/refugee/stateless subject does not manifest the absence of citizenship, and reconstitutes agency beyond the universal referent of the citizen. While working with displacement and dispossession, the act of abandonment of the ‘subjects of our interrogation’ has no benevolence. The refusal to apply individual, institutional or political responsibility and accountability could take many forms: giving up responsibility by not collecting data, abandonment of women in a negotiated legal framework of non-recognition, women abandoned in transnational spaces, ignoring methodological challenges by not making adjustments to received conceptual wisdom, refusing to name experienced hierarchies of power, avoiding parallel and ‘grey’ documentation of experiences of abandonment, refusing to engage with testimonies of daily torment, chronicling what has happened but not sharing these documents with the people who are experiencing the pain or are witnessing it, isolation/disassociation/lack of communication with the subjects of our interrogation. Such practices lead to the larger questions concerning academic feminist praxis in the context of forced migration.

Here, we must once again turn our attention to the very context of stigmatization concerning the bodies of the migrants. These bodies are considered risky bodies, they are enumerated as aggregation of bodies, they are considered to have no power of negotiation with the state, they become the sacrificial lambs of the web of relations that link mobility and mortility. They become hyper-visible while negotiating citizenship and rights, they are blamed for the initiation of mobility, they are categorically conceived as masses folding in and folding out of public spaces rather than individuals, families or communities. Against this background, migrant women’s bodies become a site that is only legible through acts of the state, migrant women’s bodies are considered as aggregate data, and the family or the household as the base unit of social reproduction disappears. That is a direct causalty of gender-neutralizing forced migration research. Along with it comes blurred notions of erasure of public health and mobility connection, consideration of care as a secondary or tertiary matter and thus exclusion the life stories of children and elderly from forced migration matrixes.

Overall, forced migration takes place within a paradigm that creates non-grievable bodies, whereby seeking dignity is made into an act that is categorically questionable, witnesses of death and destruction have no stand to speak, the corpses are merely numbers. Conceptualization and research of forced migration primarily as a gender-neutral and often as a male process further eradicates even the most basic understanding of real vulnerabilities of migrant communities. Especially in the context of multiple partitions and resultant multiple borders, unconditional erasure of rights leads to the disappearance of the forced migrant as a political subject, and gender-neutral depictions of migration further removes the experiences of migrant lives from the registers of humanity.