Rethinking agency: towards a collaborative approach on political agency of people on the move in the Mediterranean

Abstract

Situated at the intersection of the autonomy of migration approach and critical citizenship studies, the working paper proposes a research approach and paradigm change within Mediterranean migration scholarship that integrates people on the move as active agents influencing knowledge production. Illustrating the suggested approach, the working paper uses the case example of political agency and acts of citizenship of people on the move in Libya. To examine how communicative acts of citizenship enable people on the move to express political agency, the proposal suggests a qualitative, collaborative, and explorative research design using photo-elicitation and photo voice methodologies. While people on the move are mostly constructed as voiceless victims in dominant humanitarian discourse and as security threats in dominant media and policy discourse, the research aims to amplify the voices of people on the move themselves within a post-colonial and reflective research paradigm. By shifting the focus to subject-centred understanding of the situation of people on the move in Libya, the working paper proposes a conceptualization that will be able to challenge dominant discourses that construct people on the move as inferior ‘Other’ and suggest new conceptual frameworks to conduct research on mobility.