Keywords

1 Introduction

Casa para TodesFootnote 1 (House for Everyone) is a Casa de MigrantesFootnote 2 (Migrants’ House) located at the southern border region of Mexico, where people who have crossed the border from Guatemala, relatively outside the regular channels and procedures of the state, find temporary accommodation, food, basic physical and mental health care, and free legal assistance regarding their claim for asylum and the regularisation of their migratory status (Merlín-Escorza et al., 2021). Iedereen Welkom is a Bed, Bad, BroodFootnote 3 (Bed, Bath, Bread) shelter located at the eastern border region of the Netherlands, where people who have been rejected from the procedure for obtaining asylum find accommodation, along with food, basic physical and mental health care, and free legal assistance related to their asylum cases.

In their own ways, the two shelter organisations discussed here are part of regional and national networks of NGOs and grassroots initiatives filling the gaps left by the state in the provision of such basic services for so-called migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. At the same time, these organisations are (in)directly implicated in the architecture of migration management. However, this chapter aligns with the volume’s intention to not focus exclusively on the migration management and governance aspects characterising the work at these organisations and the border cities where they are located, but rather on their quality as spaces for ‘transit and in transition’ (Triandafyllidou et al., Chap. 1). Shelter organisations are thus presented as spaces for the transit of people and their knowledges – some of which are also in transition to becoming academic knowledge.

Shelters have been understood in literature from a spatial/material perspective as places in which temporary protection is provided (Colosio, 2020, p. 195), mostly in emergency contexts of displacement. Ian Davis (1978) proposed a shift to understand shelters as processes, more than objects (Colosio, 2020). In this sense, recent elaborations on shelters point to the process of sheltering as fundamental for the facilitation of living-environments for ‘crisis-affected communities and individuals’ (George et al., 2022, p. 12), highlighting the importance of an even fulfilment of such peoples’ needs along with those of the ‘host communities and environment’ (ibid.). Migrant shelters, in particular, are important in the protection of people in mobility across national borders experiencing risky journeys (Mainwaring & Brigden, 2016; Infante et al., 2012) and different kinds of violence (Jones, 2017; Olayo-Méndez et al., 2014; Vogt, 2013). Shelter organisations have also been studied through lenses questioning the humanitarian (e.g. Gomez et al., 2020; Sandri, 2018; see also: Cuttitta, 2018; Malkki, 2015) and hospitality-related practices and discourses, highlighting the degree of discipline and control within their dynamics (e.g. Ticktin, 2011, 2016). Moreover, and despite their undeniable importance for the protection of migrants’ lives and the advocacy for their rights, shelters are also implicated in bordering dynamics (Angulo-Pasel, 2022) as at the same time they perpetuate and destabilise migration management architectures (Merlín-Escorza et al., 2021) in many of the world’s regions.

Situating the above-mentioned organisations within these intersections, this chapter explores the power relations inherent to sheltering practices, especially when migration research is performed while or within sheltering. While many studies focus on aspects of ‘controlling mobility’, as suggested above, I focus on questions of controlling and transference of knowledges. This is important for two reasons. First, with the entanglement of trajectories, knowledges are central to people’sFootnote 4 navigation of shelter spaces and the practice of sheltering. Second, it is through questioning the research practices framed in sheltering that we better understand what knowledge is foregrounded and valued and what knowledges are marginalised and ignored. Throughout the chapter, the word ‘knowledge’ refers to that which is valued by the shelter organisations and thus formalised within their practices, as well as the knowledge resultant from the process of academic research; in contrast, the word ‘knowledges’ refers to that which has not yet been formalised by the shelter or extracted to produce academic knowledge. In his paper ‘The dynamics of epistemological decolonisation in the 21st century: towards epistemic freedom’, Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2020, p. 18) argues that ‘epistemic freedom is about democratising “knowledge” from its current rendition in the singular into its plural known as “knowledges”’, emphasising that ‘knowledge cannot be reduced to “philosophical and ‘scientific’” forms only [as the] recognition of various forms of knowledge and knowing is called for in decolonisation”’ (ibid., p. 19).

As a consequence of this focus on knowledge/s, this chapter goes beyond dealing with dynamics between the two archetypical actors present at the shelter, i.e., the hosts and guests, or migrants and volunteers, or indeed people-looking-for-shelter and people-looking-to-shelter. It focuses on the questions of whose/which knowledges and experiences are important for the production of academic migration-related knowledge? How has the shelter been naturalised as a space for doing fieldwork and what does this daily practice entail? In that sense, it turns the analytical gaze to ourselves – the researchers in question (including me), our daily situated (research) practices and choices to access ‘the field’. To deal with these questions, I relate the reflexivity of Migration Studies to the notion of extraction. For Acosta (2012) extractivismo is a massive form of accumulation that began 500 years ago (1492) with the conquest and colonisation of the Americas, Africa, and Asia – regions from which the extraction of natural resources served the demands of the European metropolis, giving birth to the capitalist world-system (see e.g. Galeano, 1971). Because it is such an inherent dimension of how our world continues to unfold, Grosfoguel (2016, pp. 41–42) sees extractivismo as ‘a form of being in the world…a form of existence, an ontology’. In this chapter, this notion of extraction relates to the question of academic knowledge production, often produced by the double-role of volunteer/researcher, or indeed by people looking to research while sheltering.

The chapter is divided in three parts. First, an analytical lens to understand extraction in sheltering practices and the naturalisation of the shelter as a space for doing fieldwork. Second, context is given by positioning the shelter as a space where knowledges entangle and become differentiated through sheltering. Third, (auto)ethnographic insights on research practices are analysed to scrutinise the implications of extraction in migration research. The final section consists of a reflection on how to prevent extractive practices in research projects.

2 Knowledge, Extraction, and Reflexivity: An Analytical Lens

This analytical lens is informed, firstly, by the reflexive approaches to migration taken by Janine Dahinden (2016) and Anna Amelina (2021) that help reflecting on the naturalisation of difference and sheltering in the production of academic migration-related knowledge. Dahinden’s work on de-migranticisation criticises the entanglement of migration and integration research with a migration apparatus producing discourses that naturalise ‘migration- and ethnicity-related difference’ (Dahinden, 2016, p. 2208). In this sense, categories originated from a ‘national-container’ logic of inclusion and exclusion as ‘the migrant’, ‘the refugee’ or ‘the asylum seeker’, appear as anomalies and primordial markers of difference to be investigated and theorised (ibid., p. 2210; see also Crawley & Skleparis, 2018). Since migration-related difference is fundamental in the epistemologies of state and academic migration apparatuses, it has become one of the dominant criterions for developing ‘research questions, research design, data collection, analysis and theory’ (ibid., p. 2211). Amelina’s doing-migration approach appears as a tool to identify ‘processes that, on a daily basis, transform individuals into “migrants” and that coin some practices of spatial relocation as “migration” and others as “mobility” and/or “flight”’ (Amelina, 2021, p. 2399). In her work, Amelina gets in conversation with ‘coloniality-attentive thinkers’ (ibid., p. 2397) like Mayblin and Turner (2021) and Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2018), suggesting that her approach might help detect ‘patterns of spatial relocation and colonially coined power relations’ (Amelina, 2022, p. 2398) in sites often used for migration research, while questioning ‘the epistemic privilege of “Northern” knowledge in migration sciences’ (ibid.).

The reflexive approach helps to understand why migration scholars are particularly interested in knowing about the experiences of people fixed as ‘migrants’ and other ‘categories of inequality’ (Amelina, 2021, p. 3). Moreover, as we will see in the following sections, it helps to understand why some knowledges and experiences seem worth being selected, taken, and processed into academic knowledge (Aparna et al., 2020). Shelters thus become ‘naturalised’ as sites where researchers assume they will find the information they look for, others being camps, borders, ‘slums’, etc. Using tools and techniques such as (auto)ethnographic and qualitative methods/analysis and framed on daily-basis research designs, the in-situ embodied quality of the research process is legitimised. In this sense, doing fieldwork is the researchers’ daily practice of transforming people into ‘migrants’, contributing to their migranticisation by differentiating them and their knowledges from those of ‘non-migrant’ subjects to then select, take, and process them.

Secondly, the analytical lens of this chapter delves into the issue of extraction within the doings of producing academic migration-related knowledge. Acosta (2012) insists that extractivismo has served as a looting mechanism for colonial and neocolonial appropriation through which not only natural resources but other kinds of raw materials are extracted from the Global South for the ‘industrial development and well-being of the Global North’ (Acosta, 2012, para. 12). Grosfoguel (2016) works with Acosta’s argument, adding that extractivismo is justified by the ‘euro-centred’ (p. 36) notion of ‘nature’ for which the human subject and the natural object are unconnected, with the former (human subject) using the latter (nature) as a means for obtaining something. He expands on the notion of cognitive extractivism, introduced by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson since 2013 (Grosfoguel, 2016). Simpson denounced the pressures for the extraction of knowledges from indigenous peoples as the Mississauga Nishnaabeg by scientists who aimed to integrate these into a Western-produced narrative on environmentalist matters (ibid., p. 38). Grosfoguel argues that this attempt, to extract such knowledges intends to de-politicise, re-signify, and appropriate them as Western-centred ‘symbolic capitals’ more suitable for the market and the ‘academic machinery’ (ibid.). In that sense ‘colonialism and capitalism are based on extracting and assimilating’ knowledges (Betasamosake Simpson in Klein, 2013, pp. 03, 06). Following this argument, in relation to migration research – and more precisely the practice of researching – the shelter becomes the ‘natural’ space where researchers find the source from which they ‘mine’ raw materials in the form(s) of information, processed and assimilated into the Northern migration apparatus via theoretical and analytical frameworks with the potential of re-signifying and de-politicising the experiences, knowledges, and claims of peoples found in such space. However, we are yet to discuss the complexities and nuances intertwined in such assertion.

3 Sheltering and Knowledges; Differentiation and Formalisation

This section contextualises how knowledges are shared, differentiated, and formalised in the daily practices at the shelter. I begin by explaining what I mean by sheltering. Next, I move to examples of how the differentiation of knowledges is embedded in sheltering practices, and finally describe which knowledges are formalised.

Sheltering consists of the wide variety of practices of shelter organisations through which a number of services, aid, and assistance are provided to people categorised as ‘migrants’, ‘refugees’, or ‘asylum-seekers’, but also the effects and consequences these practices have for the people interacting in such places (Merlín-Escorza et al., 2021). At Casa para Todes people looking for shelter are considered to be in transit and ‘en route’ not only by the organisation, but also by migration scholars and activists; at Iedereen Welkom they are usually seen as having reached their final destination. At the same time, at both organisations it is considered that people looking to shelter volunteer with the intention of assisting people looking for shelter. Many are volunteers, only present at the shelter for short periods, while many also have international trajectories related to study programmes. Shelters are thus defined by the inward and outward mobilities of actors whose life-trajectories are ‘characterised by movement and stillness, loss and hope, and emplacement and displacement’ (Merlín-Escorza et al., 2021, p. 12; see also Schapendonk, 2020).

These persons’ lives entangle with each other and with the communities outside the shelter, being in place, working, waiting, caring, and being cared for while also learning, teaching, planning, and exploring future life-possibilities (Merlín-Escorza et al., 2021). Despite the points in common these actors may have, their mobilities, motives, interests, needs, and aspirations for which they have arrived to the shelter are differentiated through sheltering practices. ‘Migrants’ are expected to be in need of safety, care, or protection; ‘volunteers’ are expected to provide such things. For the former, ‘need’ is expected to be the main motivation to access the shelter, while for the latter, the need to shelter is related to acts of solidarity, humanitarianism, or ‘interest’ in practicing and improving professional skills or knowing more about the context (see also Malkki, 2015). By normalising these differences, sheltering produces a divide between both actors, migranticising the lives and aspirations of the former while not doing it for the latter. From a doing-migration perspective (Amelina, 2021), sheltering practices thus help to transform specific people into migrants.

Through (auto)ethnographic insights I have extended such understanding of sheltering in relation to knowledges, problematising how these are transferred, differentiated, and recognised (or not) as useful for sheltering. For example, it is generally assumed by the organisations’ staff that only volunteers have knowledge and skills relevant for undertaking sheltering tasks – something evident in the expectations the shelters have on both actors to perform as either ‘the migrant’ or ‘the volunteer’. At Casa para Todes, only volunteers with an educational or professional background on immigration law (or law in general) can be part of the team in charge of assisting people, for instance with their asylum procedures. ‘Migrants’ knowledges’ are not formally considered relevant for this practice, even if people have experienced the process of applying for asylum. They are not expected or even allowed to officially assist or advise others who are going through similar situations. This is not to disregard the preparation and professional experience volunteers may indeed have in such matters or the positive impact their work has in people’s asylum procedures, but to highlight that some knowledges are foregrounded and formalised, while others remain hidden and unacknowledged. Undoubtedly, the validity attached to ‘higher education’ plays a role in considering the knowledge framed within such validation system to shape formal sheltering tasks. Besides academic or higher-education knowledge, those coming from formal local and international organisations are also considered to have a certain authority in sheltering, as in the case of NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders or Doctors of the World, which are given the space by these shelters to provide workshops or courses to both typical actors at the shelter who are also encouraged by the shelters’ staff to attend these.

The formalisation of knowledge, however, is not only linked to the question of academic degrees, but also to the recognition and formalisation of skills gained through the shelter. For instance, at Iedereen Welkom volunteers receive recognition for their effort in teaching the people being sheltered computational skills and the Dutch language or for helping them navigate bureaucratic aspects of Dutch society, e.g. making appointments with the doctor or enrolling in sports or education courses. Besides these moments framed as part of the formal sheltering tasks, volunteers share their knowledges with the people being sheltered on matters they consider important despite not being included in the organisations’ workplan. At Casa para Todes, for instance, volunteers have given workshops on gender identities, toxic masculinity, and sexual harassment even though these topics are not necessarily part of the organisation’s agenda. At this organisation, the topics and how these are communicated to the people being sheltered result from a continuous negotiation between volunteers and coordinators (paid staff) that is shaped by the hierarchical positions these actors hold. Despite both organisations’ efforts to communicate knowledge to the people they shelter, I have not yet witnessed moments in which such people are given the space to teach volunteers anything that might contribute to the formal knowledge structure sustaining sheltering practices.

Both organisations under study do design moments where people being sheltered are asked or encouraged to share elements from their cultural, ethnic, and linguistic knowledges. When such sharing is planned and organised by the shelters – thus framed within sheltering practices – a type of formal recognition, albeit less prestigious and authoritative, recognition is given to the knowledges of people being sheltered. Casa para Todes, for example, organises fairs and kermises and ask people to participate by sharing their knowledges, mainly through cooking and handcrafting. These events aim to create moments for the local (mostly Mexican) community to know the city’s ‘guests’ by learning from their ethnic, cultural, and national identities. Iedereen Welkom connects their ‘residents’ with people interacting at spaces in the city, such as community gardens, community kitchens, and social centres where they can participate by sharing their knowledges with the local (mostly Dutch) community outside the shelter. In both cases (and in other sheltering activities) people being sheltered work as volunteers for these spaces, usually without receiving a payment. Although these are moments especially produced to achieve conviviality (Gilroy, 2004; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2020) between the people being sheltered and the communities beyond, the power relations from the shelter resonate in these interactions as these relations of potential conviviality are mediated by volunteers.

Knowledges are informally shared between people looking for and looking to shelter when they perform daily chores of cooking, cleaning, and maintenance together. At the same time, these moments shape how formal sheltering tasks are performed, e.g. by sharing stories containing knowledges regarding for example a specific way of washing bedsheets, possibly helping both actors to better perform this sheltering task. This implies a constant passing between formal and informal exchanges of knowledges, of which only some get recognised by the organisations as part of their sheltering practice. This process of recognising some knowledges, even to the degree of formalising them, while others remain ‘unknown’ is a complex and multi-layered process that is gendered and racialised. It is worth considering knowledge dynamics not only in terms of their usefulness for sheltering, but also in terms of their usefulness for people on their way to better futures. Shelters are places people share their knowledges about asylum procedures, borders, and mobility pathways, where new contact details are shared, where a lot of comforting occurs, and where new friendships are created. These knowledges are perhaps not central to sheltering as a formalised activity, but they are crucial to the process of social navigation of the sheltering practices and the wider migratory landscape, including its border violence (see also González, 2018; Triandafyllidou, 2019; Schapendonk, 2018). At times, however, the same kind of information is appropriated by the shelter organisation. At Casa para Todes, for example, people’s travel stories are stored in databases and transformed into statistical reports subsequently used by journalists, NGOs, and researchers like me. In this process of transition from knowledges to knowledge, the issue of extraction becomes visible. The next section delves further into this issue.

4 Extraction and Migration Research

Having described how knowledges are differentiated and formalised in sheltering practices, I now focus on how knowledges are extracted through migration research. The argument questions the naturalisation of the shelter as a space for research and doing fieldwork as the daily practice of re-producing people as ‘migrants’, thus, as subjects of migration research. First, a self-reflexive analysis of my practices and choices is presented, followed by an analysis of dynamics in which extraction is at stake, and finally a reflection on the linkages and implications of such extraction with greater circuits of research practice for academic knowledge production. The analytical take on extraction points to the colonial difference implicit in the practice of doing research at the shelter and the transition towards knowledge related to it.

Scholars, undergraduate students, journalists, practitioners, and independent/NGO researchers interested in migration-related topics approach shelter organisations to have access to people and situations from which they aim to obtain valuable information to produce papers, theses, articles, reports, and audio-visual outputs. In disciplines such as anthropology or geography, the use of methods and tools providing ‘first-hand’ information have gained importance and prestige in the production of attractive or promising research designs. Such logic has driven me and other researchers to choose the shelter as a site for research. Many of us combined the research with volunteering as part of our methodological strategy and tools. For us, volunteering, as both (auto)ethnographic tool and research strategy, seemed a promising way to gather information. For the shelter organisations presented here, volunteering is the core of their daily practice and is promoted as a practical and educational enriching experience to attract people driven by the ‘need’ to experience the shelter (Merlín-Escorza et al., 2021; see also Malkki 2015). However, as Khosravi (2020, p. 294) so powerfully argues, we need to ask ourselves how our focus on ‘migrant/refugee experiences of border crossings, journeys, camps [and we may add shelters], or asylum processes does not contribute to the othering of them’. This question only gradually entered my research project, as explained below.

As a master student and then PhD candidate, I decided to volunteer at Casa para Todes and Iedereen Welkom as part of my fieldwork strategy, both to access these ‘sites’ and participate in their dynamics while making observations and gathering information. As I saw value in having ‘embodied experiences’ from a situated perspective, I chose to use autoethnography as my main methodological tool and analytical lens. For other researchers too, volunteering seemed ethically right, in the sense that there was something to offer in exchange for the access given by the organisations. Over 2 years, I met at least six anthropologists, three lawyers, and one international relations expert volunteering at Casa para Todes as part of their internships or research. In addition, I know of a dozen papers and theses written from the same shelter organisation. However, researchers are certainly not the only actors seeking stories and knowledges in this shelter. I have seen numerous journalists and NGO representatives come and go for the same reason. At Iedereen Welkom, I met at least six master students from anthropology and geography programmes volunteering as part of internships or research projects, in addition to several students who applied or had the intention to volunteer and finally did not do it. In the 3 weeks following this chapter’s submission, fellow academics and the shelter’s coordinator, asked me to speak with four students who intended to do research at this shelter. Such abundant presence of people looking to research-while-sheltering showed me how naturalised the idea of the shelter as a space for fieldwork has become.

Now, the choices and views sustaining such naturalisation of the shelter embed with my way of doing fieldwork. Following Amelina (2022), I can claim that my choices and research practices contributed to the re-production of ‘migrant subjects’, not only from engaging in the academic research performance but also by participating in sheltering dynamics that control and discipline such people (Merlín-Escorza et al., 2021). From my proposal’s research questions, my first interviews and diary notes to my first reflections and presentations in academic settings, I overlooked the question why ‘the migrant’ was so central. Reviewing these moments, I realise that after having formed relationships with people at the shelter, listening to and empathising with their stories while also sharing my stories and daily struggles with them, I still described their lives as migrant lives, their movements as migrant trajectories, and their resistance to oppressive migration regimes (present in their border-crossings) as part of the nomenclature foundations making them undocumented or irregular migrants. In this sense, doing migration (Amelina, 2021, 2022) as transforming people into ‘migrants’ appeared central in the reasonings and interpretations that composed my daily practice of doing fieldwork.

Looking through the lens of extractivismo, three elements have facilitated extraction in my fieldwork doings. First, the geopolitical privilege of having a Mexican passport and a Dutch temporary residence permit, which allowed me to go in and out ‘the field’. Second, the use of academic authority to request these shelter organisations access to encounter people interacting there. Third, the fact that I am being paid to do a job that encourages people to ‘collect’ information containing the experiences and knowledges of people oppressed by migration regimes. Determinant for doing fieldwork, these aspects allowed me to select and grasp (Aparna, 2020, based on Glissant’s notion of graspingFootnote 5) pieces of information from these spaces and produce specific sets of ideas. It was the feeling of ‘taking’ that particularly helped me question the extent to which migration research is implicated in dynamics of extraction. I illustrate this with two cases below that are situated in the Casa para Todes shelter.

Marc is an anthropologist and PhD researcher working at a Canadian university who also volunteered and conducted research at Casa para Todes. He focused on collecting stories related to people’s traveling experiences – something he did at different shelters of the region. Very soon after meeting, we discussed and disagreed with a few aspects of our research methods and objectives. While I argued these should generally aim to achieve more immediate transformations striving toward social justice, Marc considered that although this is important, it is also important to acknowledge our researches’ limitations for having a positive immediate impact in people’s lives. He was convinced that his research would not have that kind of impact, thus, he would rather be honest and tell his interviewees he could not do much about their life situations. What I interpreted as Marc’s passivity toward the structural conditions of inequality affecting the lives of his interlocutors and his complaisance with methodological choices focusing on ‘the migrant’ and ‘grasping’ their stories at different shelter ‘sites’ made me imply his collusion with extraction.

Alex, a writer and the editor of an audiovisual production funded by a major public university in Mexico, was given access to interview people at the shelter. She was interested in collecting the stories of persons who had travelled through the Darien GapFootnote 6 and use them to write a fictional book. Alex left after conducting a few interviews over 2 or 3 days, then came back with eight 2.5-litre Coca-Cola bottles that she had brought as a ‘donation’ in return for the access she was given by the shelter. Although I never had the chance to ask Alex about it, her ‘donation’ and the way she had conducted interviews, going in and out of the shelter rather quickly, raised concerns among a few of the volunteers. This was mostly because we knew how difficult it was for people to talk about traumatic and violent events, which we realised was an important part of the target information she aimed to collect. Besides, it was concerning to some of us that someone wanting to voice the injustice implicit in the mobility of people often displaced by extractive corporations would not be able to see the symbolic violence implicit in her donation. In Mexico, the Coca-Cola corporation is implicated in the dispossession of water from indigenous communities, extracting and transforming it in Coca-Cola, with consequences on the public health (Pskowski, 2017, pp. 9, 13). Furthermore, during her stay, Alex approached Marc and me separately and invited us to write something related to our experiences regarding sheltering for a scientific magazine published by the same university, which would pay us 5000 Mexican pesos each for our contributions. After leaving the shelter, she kept contacting us to ask if we could assist her in getting more informants to interview, and although she had explained that she would use these stories to write a book, about 1 month after her visit to the shelter, the audio-visual production company she works with broadcast a show in which a ‘migrant’ was invited to tell about his journey through the Darién Gap.

Regardless of our different research approaches and outcomes, Marc, Alex, and I – as well as the students doing research at Iedereen Welkom – approached the shelter considering it a source of information, thinking of people’s experiences as valuable for our work. To engage in extraction, the three of us used our geopolitical privilege to get in an out the shelter as a fieldwork site; we presented ourselves as part of national and international academic institutions, which justified our research engagements there; and we were paid to collect and use people’s knowledges and experiences for producing academic outcomes that would serve our careers. In consequence, the department where I work at the university will receive a monetary compensation if I obtain my degree on a specific time and shape. Universities benefit from the fees paid by students ‘choosing’ to do their internships at these types of ‘sites’ or by reproducing academic content to be massively consumed. Publishing companies and scientific journals benefit from the fees researchers pay to publish their work and the earnings these obtain from doing so. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2012, p. 104) notes: ‘…just as in the global market for material goods, ideas leave the country converted into raw material, which become regurgitated and jumbled in the final product’. People’s knowledges and experiences are the raw materials that gain value once transformed into scientific/academic outcomes (Burman, 2018, p. 50) – like this chapter, Marc’s papers, and Alex’s audio-visual production. In relation to extractivismo, the shelter can be seen as a mine, from which resources are extracted and the activity of ‘mining’ information a part of research practices.

Based on a coloniality-sensitive lens, the productivity that is related to extracting data seems to operate through a long-lasting effect of colonialism through which the difference existing between people entitled to humanity and people who are not takes the spatial configuration into ‘zones of being’ and ‘zones of not-being’ (Fanon, 1963 in Grosfoguel, 2016, p. 35). Fanon’s notions, opportunely worked by Grosfoguel in relation to extractivismo, help us understand that shelters, as spaces emerged from colonially-shaped power dynamics, are places where only the ‘wretched of the earth’ dwell (Fanon, 1963). Following Fanon’s and Grosfoguel’s ideas, I argue that the shelter, as an institution shaped by migration governance, regimes, and architectures (van Riemsdijk et al., 2021) produces within itself zones of not-being. Students, practitioners, and researchers embedded with Northern migration apparatus(es) via study programmes, internships, grants, and work contracts access these peripheral zones to take or grasp some-thing(s) through the daily practice of doing fieldwork to then transform what has been taken in products to be consumed at the centre.

Although my overall intention in this paper is to critically address extraction in migration-related research, there are ways in which researchers might in many cases have the possibility to counter it via their research practice. At Casa para Todes, I was able to contribute to the conformation of a more thorough protocol to better assess the intentions, methods, and strategies of journalists and researchers who approached the shelter for research. It is an unfinished process in which hopefully other volunteers and researchers will become involved in the future. At Iedereen Welkom I have contributed in a more indirect way, by thinking along with students at the university and helping them question the presumed centrality of the shelter and ‘the migrant’ in their research designs. These efforts to go against extraction aim at creating spaces in mainstream Northern academia from which we can undertake research practices that also contribute to shelters as zones of being.

5 Concluding Remarks: Transit and Transitions in Migration Research – A Stubborn Reminder

The research projects I have come across while working at the shelter varied considerably in terms of doing research, including its ethics. However, even in case every individual project has taken into consideration research ethics as a central component of their doings, the aggregate reality of all these projects together still results in something problematic: the naturalisation of the shelter as a research site. When the societal engagements of each researcher are brought to the collective practice of academia, the reality turns into a nasty cocktail of othering, political relevance, ‘good intentions’, academic careers, voyeurism, exoticism, and, indeed, knowledges extraction. If extraction is always present in research involving people being sheltered and sheltering practices and organisations, it seems the only way to avoid it is leaving academia.

At the same time, it is precisely through my research practice at these shelters that I have become aware of the naturalisation of the shelter as a fieldwork site and the extraction implicit in it. Moreover, I have witnessed and participated in dynamics where shelters not only produce zones of not-being but zones of being, where people organise to resist and counter the oppressions coming from such migration regimes and architectures. In this light, we could re-value the reluctance of many migranticised people to give yet another interview or engage in yet another research dynamic that leave not many things besides fatigue (e.g. Wajsberg, 2020). It is not just a ‘no’ to a possibly kind researcher with ‘good intentions’. It is a ‘no’ that has a wider connotation of resisting the different forms of extraction that Leanne Simpson and others denounce that articulate with longer and deeper anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist struggles.

I approach shelters as spaces of ambiguities. Shelters are places for care and protection as well as control and discipline. Shelters are mines for extraction, but also places of creation and sharing. In that sense, shelters as zones of not-being and of being produce moments in between, interstices, where people looking for shelter also take and people looking to research-while-sheltering avoid taking and even sometimes give. In that sense, Marc’s perspective regarding the limitations of researchers to bring transformative change helped me in reflecting on the problematic side of attempting to bring transformations into people’s lives by the means of research practice. His acknowledgment about his limitations helped me detect my own limitations and assumptions on how my research was indeed different to more extractive designs. Such a self-reflexive process influenced my further engagements in the improvement of the protocol for researchers at Casa para Todes, and in the practice of a more critical guidance for students at the university’s departments where I work. In perspective, these efforts certainly add up to moments in which mutual aid and conviviality were not determined by the institutional side of the shelters but by the need to counter the effects of migration regimes. Altogether, they open possibilities to pass from extraction in dynamics of doing fieldwork to dynamics that aim for undoing or redoing fieldwork (see for instance Bejarano et al., 2019). This final reflection is therefore a stubborn reminder of the work in progress that not only aims to critically and self-reflectively analyse how doing fieldwork transforms people into ‘migrants’, but also aims at changing the research practice itself. Undoing fieldwork then could imply understanding and valuing research as a process instead of only focusing on the fixation of its outcome – process aimed at being part and parcel of social transformation.