I dialog. Intersektionella läsningar av hemhörighet, migration och kunskapsproduktion

Abstract

The dialogue-based article departs from our persistent research engagement with intersectional feminist approaches and questions related to racialisation, representation, locationality and positionality. We focus on the notion of home and homelessness, longing and belonging, migration and knowledge production. Some of the troubling questions we engage with are: How are the (im)possibility of feeling at home, migratory subject positions, and knowledge production conditioned by shifting socio-political contexts, culturally coded circumstances and the conceptualisation of difference? How do constantly shifting and intersected power hierarchies (re)shape the conceptualisation and (re)presentation of the certain types of knowledge and knowledge-makers through academic production, and through literary and visual means? These questions are discussed in dialogue between us, two Swedish gender researchers interested in cultural practices and cultural representations. The article unfolds through a dialogical method where, initially, our respective positions and research inputs, in relation to the article’s questions, are presented. The article continues to discuss the very same questions predominantly through different literary and visual examples. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies’ TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”, has an evolving and central role in our dialogue. By linking different examples to the existing intersecting institutionalised power relations, we show that the personal is institutional.