Reflexivity and theorizing: conceptualizing the police role in migration control

Abstract

In this chapter I reflect upon doing practice-based research on migration police in Norway and look at how this positionality might generate new analytical insights. The methodology of the project was designed to gain proximity to police practices and occupational cultures’ norms, values and professional ethos. The empirical findings reveal various challenges that the police working with migration control experience. In the chapter I discuss how these tensions affected the theorizing of the data. Analyzing different antagonisms and dynamics as objects to study rather than objects of assessment provided sensitizing concepts which helped to orient my interests by guiding the data collection and the writing process. In the last section I discuss how to deal with experiences of discomfort and competing moral and political agendas by looking into the moving and navigating between different research sites and concepts. The chapter concludes that analyzing proximity relations between the researcher and researched provides pivotal sensitizing concepts not only for gaining necessary distance but also to go beyond a top down and thesis driven analysis. Taking the actors’ situation seriously by doing practice-based research also strengthens the practice field’s reception for criticism.