In this talk, Professor Schinkel seeks to contribute to ongoing ways of rethinking what ‘migration’ is, and how ‘migration studies’ is implicated in it. The context of his topic is EU-ropean registration, problematization and management of migration. he first seeks to show that ‘migration’ becomes an object of concern (i.e., an object of science but also an object of government) only as an effect of accounting, of the registration of comings and goings within the reference space of the international system of nation-states, amidst which colonial divides are reproduced in part through the registration and visualization of ‘migration’. Next, he considers that such registration and visualization, as a quite literal form of accounting, constitutes a form of ‘double bookkeeping’. To record or register ‘migration’ is to make a record of what the nation would be if the people called or coded as ‘migrants’ did not exist, and it is to simultaneously record what the nation is – and what it costs the nation – now that these ‘migrants’ are here. In other words, to say ‘these are migrants’ is another way of saying: ‘these people, who are here, might not have been here’. Finally, he puts forward a perspective in which migration appears as a modality of debt. If registering migration becomes an inventory of people who might not have been here, and if there is a shadow bookkeeping of what being together in the nation might have been if these migrants had not been here, then ‘migration’ becomes a form of debt. ‘Migration’ becomes the outstanding debt of those whose presence on European soil is tolerated precisely because they might not have been there. Professor Schinkel hopes this will provide fruitful ways to consider the coloniality of knowledge production in migration studies, and what its decolonization might mean in practice rather than in theory.

Willem Schinkel is Professor of Social Theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is the author of, amongst others, Imagined Societies. A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe (Cambridge University press, 2017).

Please register for this event at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/centre-seminar-migration-as-debt-tickets-427392591747