Subverting Racialized Mobility Regimes: Ethical Research with Migrant Youth in an Age of Securitization

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Reimagining Refugee and Migrant Education: Critical Methodologies, Agency, and Resistance Across Global Contexts

Proposal

This paper examines how educational researchers can design ethical, solidarity-based methodologies with minoritized migrant youth in contexts of racialized surveillance, using France as a case study. Migrant youth in France—many of postcolonial origin—navigate “mobility regimes” shaped by discriminatory policing, securitized school policies, and public hostility (Fassin, 2013). Such systems, grounded in colonial legacies (Beaman, 2017; Guénif-Souilamas, 2006), constrain movement, access to resources, and political legibility. In these contexts, conventional research ethics that equate legality with morality risk reinforcing state logics of exclusion (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018). This study argues for a situated ethics that prioritizes participants’ humanity over compliance with oppressive structures.

Drawing on a 16-month critical participatory digital storytelling project—Digital Storytelling for Justice (DST4J)—in two metropolitan Paris high schools (2018–2019), the research trained 25 newcomer youth in qualitative methods and invited them to document their lived geographies of welcome and exclusion. Activities included spatial mapping and “flânerie” walks to photograph and narrate spaces where they felt comfortable or unwelcome. These testimonies revealed routinized avoidance of certain school and public spaces due to harassment, ridicule, or discriminatory treatment, underscoring the racialized regulation of mobility.

To anticipate and mitigate risks, the project introduced a jeune chercheur (“youth researcher”) pass co-designed with educators and a media graphic designer. Featuring school and Ministry of Education logos, the pass intentionally appropriated state symbols to legitimize youth movement for research purposes—an act of détournement rather than formal authorization. While some participants used the pass to enter restricted school spaces, approach strangers for interviews, or traverse unfamiliar areas, others chose not to use it, highlighting diverse perceptions of its utility and safety. The pass functioned both as a tactical intervention in racialized mobility regimes and as a provocation for critical discussion about surveillance, authority, and spatial access.

The study’s findings point to the necessity of methodological creativity when researching in securitized environments. Ethical research in such contexts requires moving beyond harm reduction toward enabling participants to exercise agency, produce counter-narratives, and access spaces otherwise closed to them. The DST4J project demonstrates how small-scale, symbolic interventions—rooted in historical awareness, such as Walter Benjamin’s reflections on reproduction and authority—can open tactical possibilities for participant mobility and knowledge production, even if they cannot dismantle structural constraints.

For CIES audiences, this work offers a conceptual and practical framework for rethinking research ethics with migrant youth in illiberal contexts. It calls for methods that recognize and resist racialized governance, refuse uncritical compliance with legality, and experiment with solidaristic practices that expand both the physical and epistemic space available to participants. Such approaches not only document lived inequities but also model forms of resistance within the research process itself.

Author

• Roozbeh Shirazi, University of Minnesota