Epistemic Trust and Migration Studies

How do we know what we know about migration? This open access book offers epistemic trust as a lens to demystify how migration scholars produce knowledge on migration. Bringing together contributions from scholars working across disciplinary and epistemic boundaries, the volume asks what enables us to trust an interview, a survey, dataset, archive, or other sources as legitimate knowledge and how such knowledge comes to be recognised as credible by others. It understands epistemic trust not as an inherent property of knowledge but as a relational process that unfolds between research participants, researchers, and audiences. The volume also foregrounds the materiality of knowledge production, examining how intellectual interests, research practices, and scholarly outputs are shaped as much by the institutional and material conditions in which knowledge is produced as by ethical and political commitments. The chapters in this volume emerged from two workshops in Berlin and Osnabrück in Germany, bringing a diverse range of migration scholars into sustained conversation about how they deal with the question of trust in knowledge production. The arguments in this book will be of interest not only to scholars of migration, but to anyone concerned with how interdisciplinary fields of knowledge are constituted and how academics can engage across epistemic boundaries.