Sheltering Extraction: The Politics of Knowledges’ Transitions in the Context of Shelter Organisations in Mexico and the Netherlands

Abstract

Casa para Todes and Iedereen Welkom are two non-profit, non-governmental shelter organisations at two border cities in Mexico and the Netherlands that work, based on volunteering schemes, to assist people often addressed as ‘migrants’, ‘refugees’, and ‘asylum seekers’. This chapter situates both shelters as spaces characterised by the transit and transition of people, their knowledges and experiences. Here, knowledge differs from ‘knowledges’; the first being those formalised by the shelter and/or processed academically, the second those which have not yet been formalised and/or processed as such. It discusses the implications regarding the naturalisation of the shelter as a space for doing fieldwork and the processes through which the knowledges and experiences of people being sheltered are differentiated and transformed for academic purposes. (Auto)ethnographic insights originated at both settings are used to examine and question the issue of ‘extraction’ in sheltering and migration research. Thus, the way in which people’s knowledges and experiences are amplified and channelled through the production of academic knowledge and how volunteering as an entry point for ethnographic research serves this purpose, are problematised. Reflections point to the imbrication of sheltering practices with the ‘Northern’ migration apparatus of academic knowledge production, in which the shelter as a space for doing migration research is given by longstanding colonially-shaped relations. A final suggestion is given to researchers interested in studying sheltering practices to design their research in a way in which social transformation is served by doing research.