Through my personal intellectual journey

1. Situating myself
2. Sexing migration/ Cartographies of Hospitality
3. The concept of home
4. Who feels at home in the academia
5. My shifting positionality as a feminist diasporic researcher
and its effect on the produced knowledge
6. Racializing Knowledge production: Empirically,
Methodologically, and Conceptually

Fataneh Farahani, Professor in Ethnology

Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies
The academic product is shaped by intellectual reading and understanding as well as
the personal history of the researcher.

As a immigrant female scholar of Iranian descent, I can barely find a moment

emotionally or intellectually in the process of conducting my research—while
interviewing, collecting material, reading, writing, presenting, teaching —that has
not in one way or another resonated with my personal background.

Therefore, unpacking the tangled threads of intersecting power relations of sexism,

racism, class-based hierarchy, and heteronormative value systems in different
diasporic contexts has simultaneously been my motivation and inspiration.

Thus, my study, using Avtar Brah’s words, “writes the intersecting power relations as
much as it is written by them”(2002).
I came to theory because I was
hurting – the pain within me was
so intense that I could not go
on living. I came to theory
desperate, wanting to
comprehend – to gasp what was
happening around and within me.
I saw in theory a location of
healing. (hooks, 2005: 36)
Experience as a away to know and can inform
how we know what we know.
Experience / Suddenly, the flour becomes most
important even thought it alone will not do.

Avoiding the “authority” of experience” but

rather from the passion of experience and
remembrance.

Experiencing, it is a privileged location, even as

it is not the only or even always the most
important location from which one can know.
But personal experiences can also keep us from reaching
the mountaintop/ because the weight of it is too heavy.

• Using politicize movement/ activism for self-

recovery/ self-actualized

• Too heavy to carry

• Employing our experiences/positions as a

“space for theorising” (hooks 1989) and our
theorising as a “location of healing” (hooks:
2005)
 Beyond the insider-outsider divide in migration research, Carling, Bivand Erdal, Ezzati 2013
• Name
Markers of insider/ • Gender
• Race/ ethnicity
outsider status • Age group
• Class
• Urban/ rural experiences
• Appearance/ Clothing style
• Religious (none)belonging / appearance
• Ethnic minority/ urban Rural
• Occupation and title
• Physical appearance
• Experiences: parenthood, discrimination, residency, tragedy politic
• Language skills
• Language used/ socio political- cultural satus
• Cultural competence
• Migration experiences, length of residency in diaspora
(un)shared socio-historical grounds and experiences
o Manifests clearly intersectional
production of stereotypes The danger of a singel story
o It emphasizes how we are different
rather than how we are similar
o It robs people of dignity
o It makes our recognition of our
equal humanity difficult
o Using stories to dispossess and to
harm, brake the dignity of people
The different versions of the single
story of the so-called third world is
not only limited is also limiting.
(10.11.10)

https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_dang
er_of_a_single_story?language=sv
What is feminist research?
What is anti-racist research?
What is a postcolonial reserach?
What is an intersectional research?
and…

Emperically
Methdologically
Conceptually
Sexing Migration Studies
Understanding the migratory experiences through the lens of
gender and sexuality.

Analysing how and in what ways gender and sexuality are

constitutive to migratory process and the other way around.
What constitute the (un)desirable (hetero)sexual feminine/ masculine subjects
and how these (trans)form due to the migration?

Analysing how and in what ways gender and sexuality form the migratory
process and the other way around.

How different diasporic space construct different types of femininities and

masculinities?

How look, length, income, education, class, wealth, ethnicity, political/

intellectual affiliation, being a (non) honourable subject, migration, among other
factors add/reduce one’s masculine/ feminine capital.
Sexuality as a signifier for (lack of) civilization

Orientalist and Occidentalist discourses have historically employed sexuality as

the most prominent signifier for (re)presenting otherness.

Sexuality as a signifier of civilization

Homing desire/ A desire for a home

• Questions such as “where is home?”, “where do

you feel at home?” which I asked interviewee
subjects in hindsight and through the analytical
reflections deepened to “When does a location
become home”?

• Later along the way, I came to differentiate

between ‘feeling at home’ and proclaiming a place
as home.

• I could in addition differentiate between “a

homing desire” and “a desire for home”.
 Who feels at home?
Additionally, people can (grow to) feel estranged,
or feel disoriented in those places they use(d) to
call home.

The result of this is not that one necessarily feels

‘homeless’ but, to use Homi Bahbha’s expression,
feel “unhomed”.

To be “unhomed” is not to be homeless, it is rather,

a condition that is highly interlinked with different
power relations in a range of transhistorical sites.

Therefore, the unhomed negotiator and

transgressor subjects mediate constantly within a
minefield of intersecting and shifting power
relations.
Diaspora and Diasporic Space

• Dispersal from an original ‘center’ to at least two ‘peripheral’ places

• Maintenance of a collective memory or myth about an original homeland

• feeling excluded, unaccepted, marginalized and alienated in the receiving country

• Considering the ancestral home as a place of eventual return

• Commitment to the maintenance or restoration of the original home

• The community’s ethno-communal consciousness and solidarity are defined by a continuing

relationship with the original homeland
Avtar Brah
By questioning the discourses of ‘fixed
origins,’ she explains how ‘the same’
geographical place may stand for diverse
histories and meanings. Therefore,
different experiences due to gender, class,
ethnicity, and sexuality, amongst other
factors, not only render ‘home’ as the
source of safety or terror but also
simultaneously a place of safety and
terror.
The ‘same’ geographical place may stand
for diverse histories and meanings.
Thus, different experiences due to gender,
ethnicity, class, and sexuality, amongst
other factors, not only render ‘home’ as the
source of safety or terror but also
Simultaneously a place of safety and terror.
Brah discusses how, depending on “who travels, how and under what
circumstances”, the mythic diasporic desire for a return to home can
be much weaker for some groups in the same diasporic community
such as women, homosexuals, and political activists (among others).
Diasporic Space
 Being at home at academy or…
Who feels ‘at home’ within the academy in general and within different
gender studies communities in particular (such as seminars, conferences,
pages of feminist journals, chartrooms, corridors, social gatherings)?

Who feels (un)comfortable in those settings?

Whose bodies’ comfort zones (or discomfort zones) are prolonged?

Whose bodies, interests, knowledge are (un)recognized in those

settings?

Whose interests shape the contents of the on-going verbal and written
conversations within the field of gender studies?
Said: Orientalist knowledge production

Discrediting academic work, political views and writing of

minoritized groups
Considering them as only ‘experiential’

Constructing a disembodied theorist as the legitimate academic

subject

He not only never felt quite right but also never felt at
ease, always expecting to be interrupted or corrected
• By drawing upon her experiences, Lorde explains how black scholars are either used for free
consultations or are invited to comment on the only existing panels dedicated to black (or)
lesbian feminist at different conferences, or are listed on “black women’s reading list”.

• This situation, not only marginalizes black women’s knowledge and expertise but also
enables white men and women to instrumentally use their ignorance and lack of knowledge
to reinstate their privileged positions.
Racializing academia
Questions of who is a knower and what is considered as knowledge and what is not
knowledge are tenuous in race based epistemologies (see Almeida, 2015).

Who is a knower/
Who is expert on what/ home and what is considered as knowledge
Serveing information

Epistemic habit
Epistemic consequences of ignorance
Epistemic entitlement
Gendering/ Racializing academia
Empirically, methodologically & conceptually

o Instrumentalized inclusion/ Tokenism

o Whiteness of institution remains untouched (Ahmed 2012)
o The impact of regulatory compulsory eurocentrism (Hall 1996)
o What epistemic habit is uphold through our writing (Stoler 2010)
o The politics of citation
o One-dimensional view of power complicate or invalidate experiences of
racism (and sexism)
o Leads to the potential (de)valuation of certain knowledge producers and
knowledge
o A constant (un)articulated demand on being thankful
o Accent ceiling (Collins & Low 2010), (dis)qualifying (un)desired racialised
accent
One-dimensional view of power complicate or
invalidate experiences of racism (and sexism)

bullskit (2015)
claimed FF’s text being pretend knowledge and
pretend homelessness

Suggesting FF to "study her own brown eyes

instead of engaging in critical white studies’’.

Criticizing feminist and anti-racist knowledge

production and question the presence of FF

A constant (un)articulated demand on being

thankful
Guided by the following themes:

• The construction of academic knowing subjects

• Distribution of academic assignments and duties
• patterns and norms regarding choice of course literature
• The politics of citation

• Empirically, methodologically, and conceptually

o Race as an crucial component for contextualizing
the practices of ‘not knowing’

o Why and how various forms vanishing, delay,

neglecting has been used at various points in
history

o Ignorance not only as an absence of awareness but

as a vital aspect of knowledge production
(epistemic effect of ignorance)

o ‘willful ignorance’ (Alcoff 2007: 39) sense of

entitlement

o These books analyze not only the epistemic effect

of ignorance but also how this effect supports and
maintain racism
Troubling conditions of diasporic epistemic vulnerabilities: A Scholarly minefield

• When there is room only for single story(ies)

Failure to recognize the intersectionalities of oppression
Among the gender blind reacialized male postcolonial scholars
and white postcolonial scholars
• Epistemic ignorance (don’t know anything about Iran, burning
the veil, bra burning)
• Why there is so much conflict among you Immigrants/ Iranian
• A heterogenous community/ complex current and past political
history
• Judgmental eyes of the community/ not embarrassed by your
Swedish
• Beyond situetdness debates
• How is your knowledge perceived?
Who are you talking to/ writing for?
• What can you write about?
• Who can write about what?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7UU6FQoU_g&t=268
 Cartographies of Hospitality

Conditionality of hospitality

The relation between hospitality and hostility

Being thankful
Who is host/ who is guest
Drawing upon philosophical ideas Derrida underlines the
conditionality of hospitality

Hospitality & hostility…how a hospitable host turns to an inhospitable/

hostile one

Postcolonial scholars have examined hospitality within the context of

colonial power relations and systemic hostility towards refugees and
asylum seekers (Ahmed, 2000; Rosello, 2001).

a decolonising approach offers insight into how refugees’

(im)mobilities on the one hand, and the hospitality practices of the
hosts on the other, are intimately intertwined with genealogies of
global colonial relations
Disregarding the colonial genealogy of migration and
isolating connected histories has resulted in an ongoing
loss of historical memory that ignores the causes of the
forced displacement of people (Bhambra)
The concept of a ‘refugee crisis’ not only constitutes
migration as a foreign and external problem arriving in
Europe from the outside, but also displaces the
responsibility of the Global North as causing the
contemporary situation of ‘crisis’.
In locating current forced migration in continuing colonial
genealogies, a decolonising approach challenges the
willful amnesia that blocks comprehensive understanding
of the enduring, intersecting global dilemmas of
inequalities and (im)mobilities.
The social values attached to hospitality are also highly
gendered (Hamington, 2010) – as well as associated with
race, age and class. As such, feminists have been cautious
about approaching hospitality as theory, discourse and
practice.
A decolonising approach to relations between migrants
and hosts calls for attention to gendered relations of care.
Women have historically been seen as having a greater
responsibility for hospitality. Moreover, the construction
of women (and children) as more deserving refugees
compared with men, who are imagined as ‘false
refugees’ or ‘economic migrants’ (Freedman, 2015: 2),
tends to signify the gendered characteristic of
deservingness of displaced subjects.
Fifty shades of hospitality
White hospitality: has a rhetoric of inclusion and
generosity and results in the displacement of
responsibility for the government’s hostility, or declares
this hostility as responsible and necessary (Kelly 2006)

The white hospitality lacks the histories and narratives

that explain why people migrate and/ or how an din
what ways that have contributed to Western societies.

How can you have hospitality alongside hostility?

Can hospitality be reduced to the numbers of a
migration intake?
Does hospitality end with entry?
White hospitality (Elaine Kelly 2006)
is overlaid by a rhetoric of generosity ------>
Reproduces the goodness of whiteness

Lacks the narratives that explain why people migrate ------>

Displacement of responsibility

Governmental hostility is presented as responsible and necessary

Ignoring south-to-south migration and displacement

Disregarding migration’s contribution Western societies.

Guests must be ‘assimilable’ and respectful of ‘the rules of the house’

Contextualised experience:
An analytical source

The academic product is shaped by intellectual reading and the personal history

We cannot find a moment emotionally/ intellectually in different process of conducting

research that has not resonate with our personal background.

My studies writes the intersecting power relations as much as it is written by them

(Brah 2002)
Avoiding to offer experience an exclusive privilege of definition

Might strengthen a standpoint epistemological approach

(those who have 'experience' have access to truth regardless of their positions)
What is feminist research?
What is anti-racist research?
What is a postcolonial reserach?
What is an intersectional research?
and…

Emperically
Methdologically
Conceptually