A Southern Feminist Approach to the Criminology of Mobility

Abstract

While much of the mobility of displaced populations is within the Global South, the scholarship around the criminology of mobility is largely United States/Eurocentric. This article proposes a Southern feminist ethico-political lens from which we can view or engage with the criminology of mobility. The article first highlights the epistemological bordering processes and its implications in academic knowledge production. It then discusses the multifaceted processes of state bordering and the ways in which they produce difference and othering. The article further explores the role of transversal and situated intersectional feminist politics to undo them. It offers epistemological and methodological possibilities by engaging with concepts of reflexivity and accountability, vagueness and fuzziness, spatio‑temporality, embodiment and resistance. It argues that reconfiguring our understanding of these concepts in light of the research experiences within South Asia, a Global South context, will offer crucial ontological, epistemological and methodological insights for the criminology of mobility and lay the groundwork for a Southern feminist approach.