Searching for Hope in Nativist Times

What the paper says

Melanie Griffiths' paper presents a bold and critical challenge to the status quo of migration studies, particularly telling at a time of contentious politics, rising authoritarianism and the mainstreaming of racism in debates over migration. This intervention is timely for both academic and political reasons, accepting of course that the two are interwoven. Academically, as Griffiths notes, ‘migration studies’ as a named field of study has reached a point of critical maturity in which questions over its growth, purpose and future are being asked. Concerns that migration studies may have become a ‘crisis industry’ tied to the charting of exclusion but with little capacity to effect change (Rozakou 2019, p. 80) have grown since the ‘migrant crisis’ in Europe a decade ago led to a renewed appetite for research on migration from policymakers and funders alike (Stierl 2022). How migration studies responds to this demand for knowledge, how it navigates the politics of ‘policy relevance’, and how it maintains a normative promise of advancing social justice in the midst of those demands are all points of contention that Griffiths reflects on. Politically, the ethics of migration studies matter now more than ever given the critical convergence of, on the one hand, a political climate that promotes authoritarianism, nativism and anti-migrant sentiment in much of the Global North, and on the other hand, an educational context where the independence of research is under attack. Knowledge about migration that does not ‘fit’ with prescribed political positions is increasingly dismissed as policymaking becomes a ‘hostile environment’ for inconvenient evidence. In the United States, we have witnessed a transition in Trump's second presidency from the strategic mobilisation of ‘fake news’ as a means to question inconvenient truths, to the full scale delegitimating of social scientific data, with everything from unemployment statistics to demographic projections being redefined (Tait 2025). In the United Kingdom, despite exhaustive evidence of the failure of such measures, successive governments have reproduced ever more repressive policies in a drive to ‘deter’ those seeking refuge. In doing so, they show an active disdain for the possibility of ‘evidence’ influencing policy. Migration studies is thus faced not only with a gap between evidence and policy, as identified by Baldwin-Edwards et al. (2019) in their account of ‘the politics of policymaking’, but with a more profound denial of influence, such that evidence is unable to enter into the political process of policymaking in the first place. It is in this contentious present that Griffiths situates her intervention, posing questions over the potential influence of migration studies, its ethics, choices, commitments and future. Should migration studies seek to influence ‘policy’ in such times, and does the desire for policy relevance close potentially disruptive modes of knowledge making and engagement? How can migration studies address the ‘epistemic injustices’ of unequal claims to knowledge, influence, and focus that mark a field that remains stubbornly tied to forms of knowledge produced in, and through, contexts of whiteness and racialised migration controls? And perhaps most notable for an intervention that speaks across both the professional and the personal ethics of the field, how can better futures be envisioned from within the political, and personal, exhaustion of nativism and racism? Griffiths' response is to chart a sympathetic, but critical, path through discussions of policy relevance, creativity and the potential for change. Running through this account is a frustration with the disconnect between many of the aims and intentions of much migration research and the realities of what that research has been able to achieve. Despite these limits, it is notable that many third-sector organisations still look to the academic sector for knowledge and resources. As Griffiths indicates this demands careful consideration of the ways in which collaboration and connection are manifested. But it also, in my view, means rejecting the idea that researchers offer little that NGOs do not. In part, this means recognising the privileges that many academic researchers still benefit from, even if these are highly unevenly distributed. The space and time to think critically, carefully and collaboratively is fundamental here and whilst this resource is under immense pressure across the academic sector, moves to value and defend ‘slow scholarship’ point to the importance of resisting fast-paced policy demands and rapid evidence production at the expense of more detailed place-based insights and collective engagement and action over extended time periods (Mountz et al. 2015). Negotiating the multiple uses and intentions of research, encompassing policy relevance, charitable engagement and activism at different points and in different ways, means not retreating into a silo of uncritical ‘policy relevance’ or an equally uncritical embrace of activism as a space of ‘purer’ politics and possibilities. Griffiths' call for an ethics of creativity, connection and care offers resources to navigate this landscape with generosity and political purpose. At the same time, Griffiths' ethics draw on the blurred nature of the academic role within this field and the overwhelming demands that emerge from being positioned as an academic, activist, advocate, migrant, collaborator and political subject in different ways and at different times. As Griffiths notes, many academics occupy relatively privileged positions within these conjunctures, but this is not to say that the impacts of persistently hostile environments don't have ripple effects that spill outwards in often unpredictable ways. The demand to respond, to give attention, effort and emotion to research but also to the communities and collectives that many academics rightly see as part of their role produces an exhaustion that is all too common in contemporary academia, the third-sector, and wider social movements (Proctor 2024). These experiences are racialised, gendered and classed in complex ways, such that exhaustion and its impacts cut differently along axis of inequality and privilege. With these convergences in mind, several critical questions are raised by Griffiths' intervention. First, running through the paper is a fraught relationship with the role that research plays in actively constructing ‘migration’ as an object of study. In part, this speaks to the question of policy relevance and the reproduction of harmful categories that construct migration ‘status’ as an irrefutable, and politically actionable, fact. Griffiths' call to normalise migration is an important political reminder. How far can such normalisation travel in a context where the construction of knowledge about migration far exceeds the boundaries of ‘migration studies’ as an academic field. Academic knowledge and expertise on migration is increasingly situated alongside, and often superseded by, a wealth of think tanks, charities, media organisations and social media platforms, that themselves are invested in both producing and politically exploiting, knowledge on migration in specific ways. How should a careful and critical migration studies seek to engage with, and potentially challenge, this wider knowledge landscape and its politics? And how should such an agenda engage with research that is entirely comfortable with a status quo of violent bordering and assertive state sovereignty? Should there be a place, and a time, for confrontation alongside the modes of care, creativity, and communication advanced in Griffiths' paper? Reading Griffiths critical questioning of the field, I was reminded of Khosravi's call for ‘accented thinking’ in migration studies, a decolonial mode of challenging the assumptions of the field. For Khosravi (2024, p. 2354), accented thinking is inherently disruptive and seeks to build new relations to forms of knowledge that ‘are not articulated in the mainstream processes of knowledge production about migration’, not to apolitically ‘diversify’ knowledge, but to ‘challenge the way we know what we know about migration’ (ibid, p. 2355). The invitation to self-interrogation, rather than self-reflexivity, that runs through such accented thinking was, for me, reminiscent of the questions over knowledge production, power, and influence that Griffiths raises. In a context of decolonial thought, how can the ethics of migration studies advanced here support efforts to understand what Beaman and Clerge (2024, p. 1729, original emphasis) refer to as ‘the roots of racialized migration’, and the continued centrality of colonialism as an organising force for migration? Third, like many readers, I was engaging with Griffiths' paper in the midst of a busy term. This led me to consider an aspect of the argument that is less reflected on, namely, the role of teaching as a critical part of the construction of knowledge around migration. A mark of the maturity of ‘migration studies’ as a field is the growing number of discussions over the pedagogy of migration studies, asking whether there may be something distinctive about the educational challenges, and opportunities, of teaching on migration (Clark-Kazak 2017; Piacentini 2024). With this in mind, what might it mean to teach migration studies ethically in the contemporary moment? In my own teaching, I've found staging debates to be a valuable way to encourage students to consider and confront the pervasive nature of today's borders. In practice, this has meant running a workshop in which students are randomly assigned to either supporting, or rejecting, the idea that a world without borders would be a better world to live in. This poses critical challenges for both sides of the argument, either defending a status quo that many students recognise to be unjust and deadly, or making a case for the profound changes required to live without borders. In the back and forth of these debates, I'm often struck by the imaginative work that students do in envisioning alternatives to the present, but also by the barriers that are very readily put before such imagination. Griffiths' intervention points us to some of these challenges and to the possibility of narratives that hold out hope for different futures, but it is also worth considering what pedagogic practices are required to both fire radical imaginaries and retain a focus on thinking migration differently in the classroom? Finally, in the ethical project Griffiths outlines I was drawn to the importance of care as a guiding orientation point. Starting with small-scale moves of human contact is critical to the ethos this paper argues for, and is an increasingly evident aspect of work that looks to build forms of solidarity and connection in migration studies through modes of radical care (Darling 2022; Clark-Kazak 2023). The forms of human connection valued here are those we see readily denied in bordering, as cutting people off, isolating them, and denying both a right to care and the capacity to expect care is a critical tool of the cruelty of many hostile environments (Griffiths & Yeo 2021). In Britain, the ongoing effects of austerity continue to dismantle forms of social infrastructure that connected people in mundane ways, from libraries and nurseries to public space, and this has helped foster a landscape in which resentment around migration, public resources and a failing state has fuelled the rise of right-wing politics. Care in this context is a critical resource to develop and sustain connections, to revive collective engagement and ground solidarities, but how can narratives and practices of care at the level of the community and the individual be connected to sequences of structural change? What is the connective tissue that may bind together stories and narratives that understand migration and care differently? In closing, I want to draw on Les Back's reflections on finding forms of everyday hope as a political activity. He argues that part of ‘the role of a hopeful scholarship is to portray and document an inventory of those moments of repair that suture damage’ and that in our time of resurgent nativism, ‘[c]areful thought, reflection and evidenced argument seem more precious qualities perhaps than ever before’ (Back 2021, p. 18). Griffiths' bold questioning, and creative thinking, on migration studies is an example of this hopeful practice, one fully aware of the challenges and exhaustions of the present but nevertheless tied to a restless ethics of seeking more, seeking better, in and beyond the present. No conflicts of interest are known in relation to this commentary. Data sharing not applicable to this paper as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.