Postmigratory autoethnography: a complicit aesthetic exploration of migrant home-making

The postmigration perspective calls for a thorough recalibration of how we study migration and the effects of migration, by which we turn our researcher gaze from the migrant Other to the socio-political and socio-symbolic negotiations unfolding in a society already complicit in the dynamics of migration (Petersen & Schramm 2016). This paper takes the postmigration argument of complicity a step further and acknowledges the migration researcher as an implicated subject in the phenomenon under study (Narvselius 2021). Instead of compensating for the researcher complicity, this paper proposes to utilize researcher complicity as way of fostering a collaborative and participatory postmigratory methodology (Myong 2018; cf. Padovan-Özdemir 2020). Accordingly, the paper conceptualizes the methodological notion of postmigratory autoethnography as a layered account (Ellis, Adams & Bochner 2011:278-9) and displays the authors’ two attempts of doing and writing postmigratory autoethnographies based on two aesthetic workshop series with artist facilitators and migrant participants in Denmark and Sweden, respectively. Ultimately, the paper discusses the implications and experiences of involving oneself as a migrant researcher in an aesthetic exploration of migrant home-making in two welfare state contexts of divergent and heated integration politics – and converses the research contribution of complicity.