White privilege and the involution of deportation research

This afterword calls on white-privileged academics like myself to rethink and possibly stop researching deportation. We critically study deportation to drastically reform or even entirely abolish it. Our white privilege allows us access to resources and leads us to believe we (must) ‘have an impact’. Yet in practice the knowledge we produce is seldom innovative and rarely of value to illegalised people or policymakers. Asking a lot from interlocutors, we give little in return. Admittedly, the knowledge we produce mostly ends up serving us in advancing our own white privilege through class and status reproduction within the middle-class and racially segregated university system. Recognizing that conducting academic research is not always the best intervention, we should shun conservative funding schemes, stop publishing articles nobody reads, fight for research and teaching on deportation to be conducted away from the ‘white gaze’, and dedicate our skills to creative collaborations with activists fighting for change.