From Impact to Abolition: For an Unruly Migration Studies

If I can summarise, the fascists are winning: whither migration studies?Melanie Griffiths' plenary lecture reminds us that being a researcher in the field of migration, asylum, borders and carceral geographies carries specific responsibilities and ethical commitments.Her talk crystallises two areas that the research and intellectual community of migration, border and refugee studies needs to grapple with: first, our relationship to policy-making, activism and the impact agenda; second, our relationship to the political economy of knowledge production in migration studies.First, Griffiths points to the pressures of the impact agenda, which adds institutional pressure to our own personal and/or collective desires to address injustice.If we accept and internalise a flawed concept of research impact, in which we researchers go out into the world, extract data, produce 'outputs' and then produce demonstrable change (preferably a change in policy) caused by these outputs, then we are also accepting a theory of change that contradicts the kind of geography and social science many of us do: we embrace messiness, complexity, non-human agency, contingency.Many of us also co-produce and collaborate with communities, so we do not 'own' our research-or act on its insights alone.Participatory and community-based research can create change through the research process itself, a model that predates and yet falls out of national policy-focussed understandings of impact.For those of us engaged in research in which policy veers more and more towards intentional and explicit harm, the legal authorisation of deadly violence and the systematic violation of human rights, engaging