Decolonizing Interviews with Migrants and Rethinking the Agency of Migrant Interviewees

Decolonial approaches have pointed out that migration research has reproduced colonial power relations. It has done so by not only assuming the naturalness of sociological concepts such as “societies” but also by attributing a disruptive marginality to migrants who are perceived as disturbing these ostensibly stable, coherent social entities. On the methodological side, decolonial theory has criticized approaches to data collection that assume a direct link between data and reality. Moreover, decolonial interventions have pointed out the hidden hierarchies that are reproduced by research processes in which researchers exercise the authority to interpret the data collected and produce information on research participants.

This paper seeks ways to disrupt these asymmetrical power relations both in the research field on migration as a whole and the research processes on migrants in sociology. It does so by identifying empirical research on migrants as a crucial area for methodological interventions from a decolonial perspective. A majority of texts in the field understand interviews as providing an access to the experiences and subjective worlds of migrant interviewees, which are to be interpreted by the interviewer. This paper, on the other hand, asks whether interviews could be understood as productive sites through which interviewees intervene in their marginalization through choices that they make in the interview process. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted in 2022 with 29 highly qualified migrants from Turkey in Germany, it analyzes how interviewees render the interview into a platform through which they respond to the social pressures they have faced at home and they currently face in their host country. Thus, the paper situates the agency of interviewees at the center of the research process through a decolonial lens.