Solidarity in Migration Research and the Politics of Knowledge Production

• In Event: From Surveillance to Solidarity: Teaching Amid the Immigration Crisis (Co-sponsored by Race, Gender, and Class Section)

Abstract

This article critically examines how solidarity functions within migration and refugee research, arguing that it has become an ethical shorthand that often obscures rather than transforms power relations. While solidarity is frequently invoked to signal collaboration, inclusion, and community engagement, its meaning remains ambiguous. Rather than clarifying responsibility, it can operate performatively—projecting moral legitimacy while leaving intact asymmetries in decision-making, authorship, and recognition.
The article argues that solidarity simultaneously operates as a moral claim, a political practice, and a research method, and that these dimensions are often conflated. In many institutional contexts, solidarity flows hierarchically—from researchers, institutions, or states toward migrants and refugees—reproducing paternalistic logics even when framed as partnership or allyship. Academic infrastructures, including funding mechanisms, publication systems, and professional incentives, further complicate solidarity by rewarding extractive efficiency. Ethical language can therefore coexist with structural inequalities, stabilizing institutions rather than challenging them.
Drawing on scholarship in humanitarian studies, critical refugee studies, decolonial theory, and feminist thought, the article situates solidarity within longer histories of governance, extraction, and epistemic hierarchy. It argues that solidarity is not inherently emancipatory; it can legitimize authority as readily as it can contest it.
Methodologically, the article is grounded in a reflexive roundtable among three scholars engaged in migration-related research. Through dialogical analysis, it traces how solidarity is negotiated in practice, highlighting recurring tensions around authority, risk, and recognition. Solidarity becomes transformative when it redistributes decision-making power, shares risk, and resists the conversion of relational labor into institutional capital. It becomes stabilizing when it merely signals ethical commitment without altering underlying structures.
Ultimately, the article reframes solidarity not as a moral guarantee but as a contradictory social relation that must be analytically interrogated and made accountable within knowledge production and pedagogy.

Author

• Ahmed Hamila, University of Montreal