Contested Knowledges in and through Asylum Litigation

Migration, and particularly the question of asylum, has become one of the most pressing and polarizing issues of our time.

Scholars have highlighted how the high level of contestation and politicization in this area has increased the demand for a wide range of expert knowledge. At the same time, this situation has thrown expert knowledge into a terrain of conflict.

Consequently, the notion that expert knowledge provides a proper foundation for legal decision-making regarding asylum is under pressure.

ASYKNOW will develop new conceptual tools for understanding the role of expert knowledge in asylum governance by investigating the ways in which knowledge about asylum seekers and migration is constituted and contested through asylum litigation.

The project moves beyond traditional approaches to expert knowledge in migration scholarship, which has largely examined the content of decisions and adopted a one-directional approach to expert knowledge as an instrumental and/or symbolic tool of states’ domination.

Instead, a focus on asylum litigation allows us to examine 1) how knowledge claims attain meaning and authority through the relational dynamics between differently situated actors, 2) how legal thresholds and tactics evolve as they pertain to the use of expert knowledge, and 3) how types of knowledges and knowledge claims facilitate or challenge states’ ability to exercise power over bodies and spaces.

ASYKNOW brings together theoretical concepts, methodological approaches, and findings from geography, anthropology, law, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) – that have hitherto remained fairly separate with regard to the study of migration – into a novel and productive dialogue.

Methodologically, the project adopts an ambitious in-depth comparative research design that innovatively combines an ethnography of legal processes with legal archaeology. Empirically, the research will focus on litigation of asylum-related cases in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany.