TY - CONF

T1 - Knowledge, loyalty and the dividual corporate researcher body

AU - Møhl, Perle

AU - Simonsen, Anja

PY - 2017/8/15

Y1 - 2017/8/15

N2 - It could be assumed that in order to analyze a complex and highly contentious assemblage such as a border world where a multitude of different actors, technological practices, epistemes, and political, commercial and individual interests are at play, nothing would be more obvious than a collaborative project that illuminates that field from several contrasting perspectives by having different researchers position themselves within different constituents of the assemblage. And that is indeed the basic assumption of our collaborative project, that to understand, simply speaking, what goes on at the border, where some people try to filter movement and manage flows while others try to circumvent or breach such filters, and where biometric technologies are taken into use and altered for both purposes, we could operate through a simple division of knowledge labour. We are thus doing as a group what we could not as individual researchers: dividing ourselves and our partialities.In this constellation, one of us follows a group of Somali migrants on the move into and through Europe, crossing external and internal borders, while the other follows the daily work of a group of border control agents who maintain a checkpoint somewhere along the Schengen border. And we learn things about our interlocutors’ ruses and stratagems. For example about profiling socks. And about where to buy a “clean fake” passport. And we come to question the obviousness of sharing knowledge.In this paper we analyze the chains of loyalty in a collaborative project and the necessity of keeping knowledge to oneself in order not to breach both one’s own and one’s fellow researchers’ loyalties to the field and thus, by extension, to one another. It is, in sum, the end of some loyalties in order not to betray others, constructing a dividual corporate researcher body where positions can be upheld and where knowledge can be protected because not shared. As a result, our corporate researcher body becomes dividual, a body with organs that operate independently of each other.

AB - It could be assumed that in order to analyze a complex and highly contentious assemblage such as a border world where a multitude of different actors, technological practices, epistemes, and political, commercial and individual interests are at play, nothing would be more obvious than a collaborative project that illuminates that field from several contrasting perspectives by having different researchers position themselves within different constituents of the assemblage. And that is indeed the basic assumption of our collaborative project, that to understand, simply speaking, what goes on at the border, where some people try to filter movement and manage flows while others try to circumvent or breach such filters, and where biometric technologies are taken into use and altered for both purposes, we could operate through a simple division of knowledge labour. We are thus doing as a group what we could not as individual researchers: dividing ourselves and our partialities.In this constellation, one of us follows a group of Somali migrants on the move into and through Europe, crossing external and internal borders, while the other follows the daily work of a group of border control agents who maintain a checkpoint somewhere along the Schengen border. And we learn things about our interlocutors’ ruses and stratagems. For example about profiling socks. And about where to buy a “clean fake” passport. And we come to question the obviousness of sharing knowledge.In this paper we analyze the chains of loyalty in a collaborative project and the necessity of keeping knowledge to oneself in order not to breach both one’s own and one’s fellow researchers’ loyalties to the field and thus, by extension, to one another. It is, in sum, the end of some loyalties in order not to betray others, constructing a dividual corporate researcher body where positions can be upheld and where knowledge can be protected because not shared. As a result, our corporate researcher body becomes dividual, a body with organs that operate independently of each other.

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - feltarbejde

KW - deltagerobservation

KW - etik

KW - loyalitet

KW - samarbejde

KW - assemblage etnografi

M3 - Paper

T2 - Mega Seminar in Anthropology 2017: "The End"

Y2 - 16 August 2017 through 18 August 2017

ER -