Reconstructing geographies of margins: Unbounded spaces in an immobile world

Abstract

In this paper I call for unbounding Paasi's ontological position, while urging for a research agenda that shifts from Deconstructing Regional Identity to Reconstructing geographies of margins. Reconstructing geographies of margins is an agenda for building situated knowledges from experiences of movement historically produced as ‘out of place’ and ‘out of time’ to undo fixity in spatio‐temporal categories of the state but also of social‐scientific analysis. I argue that thinking and sensing from the plural epistemological and ontological positions emerging from such movement (out of one's place and time assigned by oppressive structures of domination) is essential to emancipate the categories of the migrant/refugee/other from scientific and historical ways of knowing that produced it in the first place. This agenda cannot be fixed but must be continuously aimed, as an ongoing perpetual process of unbounding research agendas of mobility, borders and migration from settling into rigid onto‐epistemic positions.