Doing Research with an Accent. Engagement and Decolonizing

Accent as verb means: to speak forcefully; to emphasize; to accentuate. An accented research or writing is an intellectual response to the precariousness of working, thinking, and creating, researchers with migrant background or racialized researchers face at European universities. To research with an accent is a response and a reaction to the condition of coloniality that still structures the processes of knowledge production. Accent means also breaking, and thereby rendering gaps and cracks. The unfittingness and non‐belongingness of the accented scholar turns her into a gap in the whole. In this talk I argue how accented research can reveal cracks and shortcomings in the dominant narrative within the field of migration studies.

Shahram Khosravi is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. His research interests include anthropology of Iran, forced displacement, border studies, and time.  Khosravi is the author of several books such as : Young and Defiant in Tehran (2008); The Illegal Traveler: an auto-ethnography of borders, (2010); Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran, (2017); After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives, Palgrave (2017, edited volume) and Waiting. A project in Conversation (2021, edited volume).  He has been an active writer in the international press. He is a co-founder of Critical Border Studies, a network for scholars, artists and activists to interact.

You are welcome to join the seminar on zoom by emailing Åse Magnusson.