Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

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Doing migration studies with an accent

Shahram Khosravi

To cite this article: Shahram Khosravi (2024) Doing migration studies with an accent, Journal of
Ethnic and Migration Studies, 50:9, 2346-2358, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2024.2307787
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JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES
2024, VOL. 50, NO. 9, 2346–2358
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2307787

Doing migration studies with an accent

Shahram Khosravi
Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
I use accent as a metaphor and a conceptual tool to Accent as refusal; epistemic
epistemologically reflect over the field of migration studies. injustice; migration studies;
Accented thinking is a response and a reaction to the condition race
of coloniality that structures the processes of knowledge
production. In this article I aim to explore the potentiality of
accented thinking in the formation of knowledge within the field
of migration studies. I approach accent both as a way of knowing
and a form of struggle. The combination leads to an epistemic
refusal. I use accent as refusal not only as a tool to scrutinize how
epistemic injustices arise and what forces maintain them, but also
as a tool to find out what forces are available to create
alternative ways of knowing. I argue that accented thinking can
stimulate the emergence of new perspectives and approaches. It
takes us beyond notions which have restricted the possibility of
any alternative order.

The question about accent did not emerge to me by way of theory. Instead, the other way
around: theory emerged through accent. Rather than thinking through abstract and sys-
tematic theoretical patterns, accent imposed itself on me as an intellectual tool to engage
with the immanent contradictions I have faced in migration studies. Accented thinking
emerged from the position of being both the subject and the object of the field, of being
both the researcher and the researched. This essay is built on a dialectical process
between being linguistically accented and using accent in a non-linguistic way. I use
accent as a metaphor and a conceptual tool to epistemologically reflect over the field
of migration studies. This essay aims to explore the potentiality of accented thinking
in the formation of knowledge within the field of migration studies. I approach accent
both as a way of knowing and a form of struggle. The combination leads to an epistemic
refusal. It refuses and also takes up refusal in generative ways (see Simpson 2014) to open
up alternative ways of knowing.
Accent as refusal is an intervention in line with the decolonial critique of center–per-
iphery characteristic of Western knowledge production. It is crucial to provincialize
(Chakrabarty 2000) the northernness (Mignolo 2002) as the epistemological center of
migration studies, and as Santos (2012, 52) puts it, to turn absent epistemologies into

CONTACT Shahram Khosravi shahram.khosravi@socant.su.se

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
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or with their consent.
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2347

present ones. Accent as refusal unsettles what we think we know (McKittrick 2021).
Accent is the refusal of academic reproduction of descriptive migrant objecthood. It is
the refusal of a knowledge that excludes migrant intellectual life.

Accent as a crack
In linguistics, accent is the way people speak. It is a manner of pronunciation often
linked to region or ethnicity. Generally, accent is related to racial, ethnic, or
migrant minorities. To nationalist imaginations, accent is a deviancy, an indicator of
unfitness coming into the main body of nation. In this regard, accent signifies a
lack: a lack of qualification hampering inclusion as an equal member of the society
or community. In some languages, the word accent means breaking (e.g. brytning in
Swedish). This approach renders accent as a ‘broken language.’ In the Macmillan Dic-
tionary, a synonym for broken English is ‘Black English,’ i.e. English spoken by Black
people. Accent is used for what John Baugh (2003) calls ‘linguistic profiling,’ which is
often a racial profiling.
For my purpose in this essay, accent is neither the absence of language proficiency nor
a signifier of a lack. Rather, it is quite the opposite. As a verb, accent means to speak for-
cefully, to emphasize, and to accentuate. For me, accentedness is an intellectual response
to the precariousness of working and thinking that racially marginalized researchers face
at European universities. It is a reaction and a response to what Miranda Fricker (2007)
identified as ‘epistemic injustice.’ An accented knower faces epistemic injustice, i.e. when
her knowledge is systematically perceived as less credible, and therefore her capacity as a
knower is devalued.
In his seminal work An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy (2001) uses accent as an
analytical tool to explore the interstitial processes of the creation and production of
films by displaced filmmakers. Similar to how Naficy uses accented style as an aesthetic
response to the experience of exile and diaspora, accented thinking here is a way of
knowing that is rooted in the lived experiences of the racial marginalization of academics.
In this essay, I do not use accent in terms of a linguistic meaning, but rather I use accent
as a position. The term position means the place occupied by a person, however, the ety-
mology of the term shows that it also means a statement of belief. Accented thinking is
both personal and political because intimate experiences of being accented are interwo-
ven with public discourses about the accented. It means that accent does not come from
an ethnicity or geographic location, but rather from a specific experience: from being a
crack in the wall (see Rangan et al. 2023).
As previously mentioned, two inherent aspects of accent are to emphasize and to
break. Accent disrupts mainstream language. To accent means to break and to smash
what is rendered as whole, homogenous, and harmonized. It signifies deviation from
the norm and highlights conflicts, contradictions, and disagreements. Accent reveals
gaps and cracks in the otherwise imagined intact theories, conversations, and thinking.
Accent disturbs.
Accented thinking belongs to the intellectual tradition which is characterized as ‘out of
place’ by Edward Said (1999), ‘unhousedness’ by James Baldwin (in Naughton 2010), ‘of
borderland’ by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), and ‘ungeographic’ by Katherine McKittrick
(2021). The condition of being out of place or of borderland is not an existential
2348 S. KHOSRAVI

condition, but rather, as the abovementioned accented scholars show, is an intellectual

and political engagement with the present. This engagement inevitably is political, as
breaking the whole and repudiating the dominant standards and norms makes accented
thinking inherently political. The gap or the spaces in between are spaces of political sub-
jectivities and spaces where critical thinking emerges from. Edward Said (1994) identifies
the gap, where the exiled and homeless intellectuals are, as a site of critical and opposi-
tional engagement. For Said, exilic consciousness and ‘outsiderhood’ are crucial in
shaping the intellectual’s critical gaze. Similarly, Cuban American scholar José Esteban
Muñoz (1999) saw potentialities for creating alternative spaces and politics in what he
conceptualized as ‘disidentification.’ In his work on racial and queer politics, he saw dis-
identification as a subversive act of transgression, creation, and radical imaginary. The
potentialities of disidentification for the accented lie in her struggle to deintegrate and
to undiscipline. Becoming undisciplined is to move out of our ‘Western assigned
places’ (Wynter 2006) and languages and to call into question the structures of knowl-
edge production.
Accented figures embody the gap and gain their narrative power from the spaces in
between. This is where and when accentedness materializes, first through breaking and
disrupting the mainstream and dominant norms of speech, and then by emphasizing
the contradictions and disagreements through disidentification and deintegration. This
turns accentedness into a way of thinking that is subversive and transgressive. Accent
breaks up and opens out to provide moments of possibilities and potentialities for dis-
closing gaps and contradictions. In her book on indigeneity and knowledge production,
Audra Simpson writes why and how ‘ethnographic refusal’ is necessary for the decoloniz-
ing epistemology. It negates, and at the same time, generates. As she put it, refusal is
simply refusing the colonial gaze and the possibilities that the refusal offers: subject for-
mation, politics, and resurgent histories (2014, 106–107). Accent refuses belonging, to be
property of the dominant narrative, and thereby accented thinking undermines what is
proper (Vahabzadeh 2015, 56). In proper White ears, accented narrative is improper
and is heard merely as noise.

White ears
Several years ago, I gave a lecture on migration in Stockholm. After finishing my one-hour
long talk in Swedish, I asked the participants about their thoughts on Swedishness. Sud-
denly, I was mentioned as an example of a non-Swede. I asked why they did not see me
as a Swede. Many participants agreed with a middle-aged woman who said, ‘Because you
don’t speak Swedish.’ I had just given a one-hour talk in Swedish, and yet, my speech
did not qualify as their language. What were those words in their ears? If not Swedish,
then it was just noise to them. The privileged White ears willfully mishear (De Souza 2018).
Unlike Emmanuel Levinas, who believed that ‘speech cuts across vision,’ meaning that
the face is always recognized through language, a Fanonian approach shows that the
opposite applies in the context of race – vision cuts across speech (see Anderson
2017). For Frantz Fanon, spoken words always are grounded historically and culturally,
hence racialized. Speech is not fixed and coherent but always dialectically in relation to
the epidermal racial scheme. Bodies frame speech and affect how that speech is perceived.
If the other’s face is unseen, then her words are also unheard.
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2349

It took 90 years for Zora Neale Hurston’s last book Barracoon, The Story of the Last
‘Black Cargo’ (2018) to get published. An African American anthropologist and writer,
she wrote the story of Kossola, the only survivor of the last slave ship to the United
States. The manuscript was rejected by publishers unless Hurston would agree to unac-
cent the narrator and translate it into a ‘proper’ English. Hurston insisted on keeping the
accented style, and the book did not get published until 2018. Just as my speech in the
lecture was not heard as speech, Kossola’s language was not understood as a language,
and thereby contained no knowledge. When one’s speech is heard merely as noise, the
spoken words are thereby discredited and illegitimated.
When, in White ears, accent is turned into noise, subject into object, knowledge into
experience (data, statistics, ethnographic descriptions), there exists an active and consist-
ent marginalization in knowledge production. The same power position which identifies
one voice as speech and another one as noise decides what is elevated to knowledge or
reduced to an experience. Based on colonial division, theory and concepts are produced
in the Global North, while the Global South is reduced to empirical data. The non-Euro-
pean is redefined as a subject incapable of theorizing and reduced to being a field and an
experience to be ‘diagnosed’ (cf. Spivak 1999, 255) by European scholars and experts. In
order to present European knowledge as the only knowledge, the knowledge produced by
non-White scholars must be invisiblized or presented as non-knowledge, but merely
experiences. Aldon Morris (2015) argues how W. E. B. Du Bois’s works on urban segre-
gation have been ignored so that the White sociologists of The Chicago School would be
recognized as the pioneers in urban sociology. Moreover, citation politic among White
male scholars has been a tool of exclusion and invisiblizing of non-White scholars
(Ahmed 2017). These are examples of the practical consequences of epistemic injustice
that push the accented scholar into a ‘disadvantage condition,’ i.e. socioeconomic
inequalities and unequal access to communicative structures in the field (Fricker 2007).
The epistemic injustice can be seen also in courses on migration when students with a
migrant background are encouraged to ‘enrich’ the course with their experiences. Para-
doxically, at the same time, they are expected to and eventually assessed in learning their
own lived experiences through the theories of White scholars. They must translate and
frame their knowledge with concepts and theories created by non-migrant scholars in
order to be understandable for White academia. They are viewed as incapable of theoriz-
ing and are reduced to being a subject with lived experiences only. This oppressive peda-
gogy is perhaps what Paulo Freire (2000 [1968]) identified as ‘banking,’ in which
education has become an act of depositing knowledge approved by White academia
into students. It is why the answer to the question Can the Subaltern Speak? posed in
Spivak’s essay (1993) is ‘No!.’ The subaltern’s voice is dissimulated. The subaltern
speaks, but she is heard only when she speaks what the White ear wishes to hear. In
other words, the colonizer is capable of hearing only himself, and when he does not
hear himself, the subaltern’s voice is noise and not speech.

How does it feel to be a problem?

Migration studies has become a sort of ‘identity discipline’ that scrutinizes, measures,
documents, and categorizes people as singular objects labelled migrants, who are under-
stood and represented through absences and pain. The migrant-subject is a product of
2350 S. KHOSRAVI

academic knowledge production, official reports, statistics, political discourse, and public
debates. The migrant body is positioned as a container full of data to be extracted: its fer-
tility, sexuality, health, or strength (labor force). The migrant as the singular object of the
discipline of migration studies is petrified as an outsider asking for an entry permit (to be
integrated, to belong). The singular object of the discipline of migration studies is pre-
eminently racially constructed. Seldom is the object of migration studies a White
person from the Global North; his and her perpetual outsiderness is academically lucra-
tive. Accordingly a whole industry (myself included) of migration studies has emerged in
the past three decades.
Migration studies have been criticized for its general approach that regards migration
as a problem (Anderson 2019; Cabot 2019; Rajaram 2022; Scheel and Tazzioli 2022; see
also Schinkel and Van Reekum 2023, this issue). This approach is grounded on the
method of externalization, exceptionalization, and pathologization. This method exter-
nalizes the question, meaning that rather than scrutinizing ‘the problem’ of migration
as a consequence of the immanent contradictions within the nation-state system, it
views migration as the cause of the contradiction, i.e. a problem from outside. This
approach externalizes social forces, processes, and actors that do not fit in the state-
centric narratives. Conventional migration studies further exceptionalize the issue of
migration through overexposing the research question by articulating it in terms of
lacks (of legality, skill, cultural capital, etc.), defects (irregularities, segregated), and
absences. Migrants in the field of migration studies are often construed as anomalies
through exceptionalizing. This is how some sections of migration studies have produced
a kind of migrant-subject who should be screened, simplified, categorized, documented,
and eventually diagnosed. For a recent but growing critique of migration studies see
Dahinden (2016), Amelina (2021), Scheel and Tazzioli (2022), Samaddar (2020),
Rajaram (2022), Mayblin and Turner (2021), see also the introduction of this special
issue (Amelung, Scheel, and van Reekum 2024).
Problematization of the migrant-subject within academia emerges from political prac-
tices in the broader society. It is not coincident that the explosion of migration studies in
the past three decades takes place parallel to the intensifying of bordering practices, such
as the militarization of border control, the emergence of camps, the emergence of ‘hostile
environments’ in Europe, and the expansion of deportation regimes. State practices of
externalization, exceptionalization, and pathologization are related to how the
migrant-subject has become categorized as a problem also in the field of migration
studies. When migration is presented as a problem, the research approach becomes
pathological. The focus is not on who migrants are but rather the opposite – who they
are not. The vocabulary used in migration studies is full of terms signifying lack and
absence: un-documented, un-skilled, paper-less, state-less, document-less, asylum
seeker, or non-citizen. The prefix of un – and the suffix of -less used for marginalized cat-
egories (including homeless and jobless people) signifies a lack of a something, a lack of
qualification. Similarly, the research approach focuses on absences, such as the absence of
integration capabilities. The migrant-subject emerges visible only through negation. The
figure of the migrant is measured (by quantitative methods) and described (by qualitative
methods) through the ‘sociology of absences’ (Santos 2018). Migrants are empirically
institutionalized and discursively constituted through absences. Sociological description
in terms of absences reproduces the already existing system of knowledge that posits
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2351

migrant life as absent. When migrant intellectual life is invisiblized in migration studies,
the way of being a knowing subject is stolen from the migrant. It is similar to Hlaban-
gane’s critique of the methodologies upon which the Eurocentric epistemologies are con-
structed, ‘As a colonial imposition, method foments the erasure of the colonized as
political subjects with a will to chart the contours of their own existence’ (Hlabangane
2018, 676).

Against description I
The professor presented his several years long quantitative research in diagrams and tables
about migrants with ‘Muslim names’ and their access to the Swedish labor market. After his
presentation, in which he did not mention the terms ‘race’ or even ‘discrimination’ at all, I
asked how come those terms were absent. He said, ‘We don’t know if the less access to labor
market for those with Muslim names has to do with racial or ethnic discrimination. The fact
that the employers do not hire migrants with Muslim names can have explanations other
than racism. We did not ask that question, and if I say something it will be a speculation
and I do not want to do it.’

The professor’s ‘impossibility of speculation’ despite all the evidence in his diagrams is in
contrast to ‘speculating the impossible’, which is an attempt to understand history when
all you have are the archives that are constructed against you (see Saidiya Hartman 2019).
The professor in this example externalizes the question by avoiding the issues of race and
racial relations. The problem lies with the migrants and their names, rather than the
racially biased structures of the labor market. The research illustrates what migrants
already know. This kind of research naturalizes and depoliticizes differences and
thereby confirms the existing differential access to resources. The description of differ-
ences, through externalization and exceptionalization, reproduces mechanisms that
confirm and reinforce what they claim to dismantle.

Against description II
At the campus café, I met the senior professor who just had received a huge grant to conduct
research on anti-Black racism in Sweden. Seeing Black Skin, White Masks in my hand, he
asked ‘who is Fanon?’

What knowledge on anti-Black racism would be produced without Fanon? Without

including what and how Black people know. What does research on anti-Black racism
do without any interest in Black intellectuals? It would be production of a knowledge
that does not and cannot adapt to Black life. The description of differences fortifies
differences.

Accent as the right to opacity

A contradiction within migration studies is the concept of integration. Like the political
one, the academic discourse around integration results in sustaining the bordering prac-
tices in the form of the idea that there are some people who are outside the society and
should be transformed into translatable and knowable people in order to be included.
The integration discourse exists through reproducing the migrant figure as one who is
perpetually an outsider and should be integrated through transformation.
2352 S. KHOSRAVI

Academia, like the society at large, requires integration, and this demands de-
accentization, i.e. the need to make oneself translated and understandable for the
majority society. However, when the relationship between the accented and the unac-
cented is unequal, ‘understanding’ strengthens the inherited inequalities in society (cf.
Coetzee 2013, xi). For Carli Coetzee, accentedness in the context of South Africa is a
form of pedagogical activism against apartheid and its legacies. She argues that in an
unjust society, being ‘understood’ is not to the advantage of the marginalized groups. If
migration is rendered as an external problem, then it should be translated, in order to
be transparent and understandable. Here to understand is not meant in the sense of
sympathizing, but rather in the sense of grasping, getting hold of. To understand
means to comprehend, a verb that is synonymous with verbs such as to apprehend.
To dominate. To describe.
The Martinican cultural theorist Édouard Glissant (1997) has identified this
demand of understanding as being part of the colonial project for transparent uni-
versality. For him, the ideal of transparency is a Western project, rooted in moder-
nity, to reduce, categorize, and hierarchize, in order to understand and
comprehend the other. Against the colonizer’s demand for knowability, Glissant
claims opacity as the right to resist. The right to opacity is the right to refuse
being understood on the colonizer’s terms, to not stand under. Accent as refusal is
practicing the right to opacity.
As Coetzee writes in the context of the apartheid and its afterlife in South Africa,
accent ‘allows for more resistant and transformative positions; positions insistent on pre-
cisely not translating oneself in someone else’s terms’ (2013, xii). Gloria Anzaldúa, a
queer Chicana feminist writer who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish, says that she
had internalized the belief that she spoke poor Spanish, or in her own words, a
bastard language. In her masterpiece Borderlands/La Frontera, The New Mestiza
(1987), she refused to translate some passages in the book and to alter her Chicano
language for English speaking readers. This is a refusal of the assumption that the
burden of making oneself understandable falls on those who are accented. Resisting
translation and being misunderstood can be powerful tools to bring about transform-
ation (Coetzee 2013, xi). An accented approach commands us to show sensibilities
towards the right to opacity, i.e. that not everything should be seen, observed, understood,
explained, and documented. It is a resistance to being consumed and accommodating in
the language of the dominant power (see Simpson 2014; Tuck and Yang 2014). Like
opacity, accent is the weapon of marginalized people.
Accent is resistance against subjugation, i.e. refusing to be something for the indus-
try of migration studies. The positionality of accent is in its subversive potentiality to
challenge the normative and hegemonic narrative about migration. The refusal is a
subversive practice to liberate oneself from being a subject constructed by the
power/knowledge. Accent is generative because at the same time it refuses belonging,
it actively promotes participation. Refusal itself is an act of participation. Unlike the
concept of belonging, which has connotations of possession (‘to be the property of’
someone else) and also connotations of a desire to be accepted and tolerated, the
will to participate accentedly means refusal of being property, of being proper. Not
surprisingly, accented scholars’ interventions in White academia are rarely regarded
as proper. Accent disturbs.
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2353

Accent as epistemic disobedience

Nigerian scholar and writer, Chinua Achebe (1965, 29–30) once wrote:
So my answer to the question, Can an African ever learn English well enough to be able to
use it effectively in creative writing? is certainly yes. If on the other hand you ask, Can he
ever learn to use it like a native speaker? I should say, I hope not.

If reclaiming accent means disidentification, it also means refusing integration and

belonging. Maintaining one’s accent and refusing to speak as a colonizer are ways to
emphasize modes of thinking and practices that otherwise would be lost by the
demand of integration and deaccentization.
For twenty years, I worked hard to integrate myself into European academia and era-
dicate, both literally and figuratively, my accent. In the past five years, I have struggled to
de-integrate myself and gain back my accent. This has entailed deintegration from the
normative and hegemonic discourse in migration studies, and anthropology in
general. It took me twenty years to understand that the method I am trained in and
use is the same method which has been used against me: first as a member of the Indi-
genous people of Bakhtiari in Iran, then as an undocumented person, as an asylum
seeker, and finally as a racialized citizen in Europe. The only method and methodology
I mastered was hostile towards me and people like me. Among those who struggle for
decolonizing methodologies, this is a shared experience. To gain back my/our accent
has been a refusal to produce knowledge in the same way knowledge has been produced
against me/us. This is an act of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2010) and an act of
delinking myself/ourselves from an epistemology that denies my/our intellectual life
and sometimes even our humanity. We need a different research method as well as
writing genre that are separate from the mainstream ones, which marginalize, invisiblize,
and otherize us. We need a different tool: as Audre Lorde (1984, 112) said, ‘The master’s
tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ Epistemic disobedience starts with
unlearning and undisciplining. Christina Sharpe (2016) also calls to undiscipline, other-
wise we ‘reinscribe our own annihilation, reinforcing and reproducing what Sylvia
Wynter has called our narratively condemned status’ (2016, 13).
My process of unlearning and undisciplining began with identifying all thinkers who
had been invisiblized in the curriculums. The list becomes names of racialized – mainly
feminists – people who have lived and worked in the borderlands, multiple borders.
Their writings are accented. They speak forcefully, and they disturb the dominant narra-
tive. Black and Indigenous scholars have shown the way. Their language is ‘bastard’
(Anzaldúa 1987). They include haunting (Avery Gordon 2008) and speculative fabula-
tion (Saidiya Hartman 2019) as methods, or rather, as counter-methods. Their theorizing
is rooted in street politics (Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2022).
Through a ‘disobedient relationality’ (McKittrick 2021, 45) that stretches across space
and time, I relate my accented thinking to Black and Indigenous ways of knowing.
Accented relationality. The accented genre, thus, is preeminently decolonizing,
offering an epistemological space for practices, experiences, and performances to resist
the colonizing Whiteness within academia and beyond (Mohammed 2022; see also
Chawla and Atay 2018). For me/us, methodological refusal, as a radical form of embo-
died knowledge, is an act of epistemic disobedience.
2354 S. KHOSRAVI

As a response to the conventional approach, accented thinking shifts the focus; it sees
from below and makes visible the concealed conflicts and disagreements. Accented
thinking is a way to deal with the crisis of representation, rather than representation
of crises. Accented thinking aims to build new relations to theories and concepts that
are not articulated in the mainstream processes of knowledge production about
migration. Accented thinking is part of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos identifies as
the epistemologies of the South. The aim of the epistemologies of the South is
to identify and valorize that which often does not even appear as knowledge in the light
of the dominant epistemologies, that which emerges instead as part of the struggles of
-resistance against oppression and against the knowledge that legitimates such oppression.
(2018, 2)

Against description III

The photo of a dead Black man floating in the Mediterranean Sea was shown on the screen at
a huge international conference. White professors talked about the border violence. The
only question that came to my mind to ask was, ‘Have you asked his mother for permission
to show her dead son’s photo here?’

Accent as refusal engenders ethical concerns, inviting one to self-interrogation (and not
self-reflexivity): Why am I doing migration studies? For whom do I produce knowledge
on migration? What is the point of migration studies? How can I as a scholar in
migration studies avoid the risk of complicity with the state, meaning how do I know
that my work does not reinforce bordering practices? How can I write about migrants
so it cannot be used against them? How can I write in a way that is scholastically
honest and politically responsible? How can we do migration studies without externaliz-
ing the question? Or exceptionalizing? How do we study differences and avoid confi-
rming differences through description?

Against description IV
A Ph.D. thesis focused on the question of the hygiene of homeless migrants was presented.
My question was why hygiene and not, for example, the question of access to food among
homeless migrants, become the topic for the thesis? The answer, through the discussion and
the thesis itself, showed that the ‘poor hygiene’ of migrant bodies had become a research
question because it was sensed (smelled and seen) by the majority society. Migrants’
‘poor hygiene’ became a visiblized concern in public debates, not only by journalists and
politicians, but also by health experts. But at the same time, inadequate diets and poor nutri-
tion due to lack of access to food among homeless migrants did not emerge as academic
questions worth researching.

The thesis tells us what homeless migrants already know, but at the same time, it excludes
what migrants are interested to know. By not including migrants’ concerns and real pro-
blems within a larger context, the thesis remains a description of difference (hygienic
bodies vs. unhygienic bodies) and a confirmation of racial hierarchy, even if the intention
was the opposite.
Accent as refusal asks questions, encounters, and relates. It is a critical inquiry into the
questions of how and why migration has become problematized for academia and the
society at large. How has the path to the current understanding of migration been
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2355

determined? What forms of governing practices are enabled when migration is con-
structed as a problem? How do disciplines determine which questions should appear
as research problems and which should not appear?
Accented thinking does not do migration studies through observation, but through
encountering. Unlike observation, which is distanced extraction, encountering engages
with the world of migrants. Accent as refusal acknowledges and engages with migrants’
ways of knowing. Observation reinforces differences through describing migrant object-
hood, whereas encountering targets the immanent contradictions within the system that
constructs the differences. Accent as refusal aims to encounter the colonial observation
and to unsettle what we think we know. It aims to acknowledge and incorporate
migrants’ ways of knowing. Accented relationality opens up for learning and collabor-
ation with other ways of knowing.
To become undisciplined means also recognizing and including knowledges that are
produced outside academia. Part of the process of getting back my accent has been
returning to what I had learned from other spaces, geographies, persons, and languages
other than academia. Inspired by Indigenous and Black methodologies, I started to seek
the perspectives of my mother and grandmother, as part of the indigenous people of the
Zagros mountains in Iran. I also started to include what I learned from fellow inmates
(undocumented migrants and smugglers) in a border prison between Iran and Pakistan.
Furthermore, I see my years as a taxi driver in Stockholm to be formative in how I the-
orize urban bordering practices today.

Final remarks
Reclaiming accent is a response to the epistemic injustice in migration studies. My aim
has been to use accent, both as a concept and a practice, to epistemologically reflect over
the colonial legacies of knowledge production in migration studies. I have used accent as
refusal not only as a tool to scrutinize how epistemic injustices arise and what forces
maintain them, but also as a tool to find out what forces are available to create alternative
ways of knowing.
Accent, for me, is a particular subject position which is constructed through encoun-
tering specific intellectual concerns and material conditions. Accent is not about identity,
but rather, struggle. However, accented intervention is not about the diversification of
migration studies. If power inequalities in the structure of knowledge production
remain unchanged, diversity itself does not automatically bring about change. Diversity
is not liberation. Without justice, diversity accomplishes nothing, as Angela Davis puts it
(in Mariner 2020). Accent as refusal is not about promoting diversity, but about decolo-
nization. It does not aim to add another racially marginalized voice, but rather, it aims to
challenge the way we know what we know about migration.
Accent as refusal exposes the epistemological limits of migration studies and also
stimulates the emergence of new perspectives and approaches. Accordingly, accent as
refusal calls for going beyond notions which have restricted the possibility of any alterna-
tive order, such as integration or belonging. To get accented is an invitation to transgress
the borders of imagination, in order to find other ways of thinking about migration.
What I mean with the phrase gaining back one’s accent is to suggest a process of self-
making through disobedience: refusal of migrant objecthood; refusal of methodologies
2356 S. KHOSRAVI

which are against us; refusal of making oneself understandable in/for White ears.
Reclaiming accent has been emancipatory from the imposed self-images, from
White-centered canons, from disciplines (pedagogical and punitive). Accent is
about making one conscious of her subject-position – not in terms of identity
(what the nation-state centric approach claims about accent), but in terms of struggle.
In her book on indigeneity and knowledge production, Audra Simpson (2014, 106)
writes how ‘ethnographic refusal’ both refuses the domination and at the same
time offers potentialities for subject formation. Of course, this is very much a Fano-
nian idea, that anti-colonial resistance gives rise to a new consciousness (Fanon
2004 [1961]).
I presented an earlier version of this essay at several different European Universities.
Reactions from White scholars have generally been negative. In the dominated migration
studies, my accented intervention was regarded improper. During Q&As, I was called
‘impolite’ and ‘snobbish.’ Once, a professor said, ‘You work in Europe; what did you
expect?’ The annoyance, together with the regard that accent as refusal is impolite
(absence of politeness) and improper (absence of properness), both confirm the argu-
ments presented in this essay.
However, after all the talks, I was approached by young Black and migrant scholars
who said they recognized and could connect with my accented thinking. One young
woman put it this way: ‘Maybe accent would help me stay in the White academia
where I cannot breathe any longer.’ To be an accented scholar in migration studies
means to live through an othering and sometimes antagonist science. The numbers,
charts, labels, categories, arrows on the maps, and photos in Power Point presentations
are, to paraphrase Zora Neale Hurston (2012 [1928]), the ‘sharp white background’ that
we, the migrants and non-White, are thrown against.
The space of accent as refusal is the contact zone, a space of accented relationality
where different accents (struggles) relate to each other and open up new ways to talk
about knowledge production. While accent means refusal of belonging and inte-
gration, it generates relation. Accent is relation. The accumulation of accents triggers
an accented collective. It is, as Édouard Glissant famously put it, ‘the moment when
one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same
time’ (in Diawara 2011). This relationality and connectivity tie isolated and individual
struggles together and bring about accumulated and collective struggles. Accented
thinking is never about single struggles, but historical and common ones. Perhaps
refusing integration in one’s discipline, while at the same time participating accent-
edly, would create a space for accented scholars in migration studies to breathe
together.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Stefan Helgesson, Carli Coetzee, Prem Kumar Rajaram, Stephan Scheel,
Rogier van Reekum and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on early drafts.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2357

ORCID
Shahram Khosravi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7675-4130

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