@itsafckingsnickersbar Hi! Thank you for the opportunity for me to rant about one of my favourite thins to rant about, lol. So, the thing about passports and citizenship is that it (i) determines who can study what, how, where, and when – and who cannot do specific things. For example: a lot of South Asian scholars without global north passports cannot do archival research on South Asian histories because a lot of archives are located (colonialism, ahem) in the UK.
(ii) So then when scholarship by South Asian scholars is evaluated through peer review by global north scholars, this is always pointed out as a lack or gap – when there are very real structural reasons why global south scholars can’t use particular sources (archives) and can’t use particular methods (historical).
(iii) If you don’t have a global north passport, then you spend a lot of time, energy, money on visa applications, including going to consulates or having to be in your country of origin to apply for specific visas. That’s time, energy, money that you can’t spend on research or teaching.
(iv) Citizenship rules govern which fellowships different scholars (including graduate students) are eligible for or not, and how many hours of you can work as, for example, a teaching assistant or research assistant.
(v) If you’re on a visa then you have a very specific time in that particular country which means that, for example, if you’re an anthropologist, you can’t do as extensive ethnographic work as scholars with global north passports.
(vi) If a scholar with an American passport wants to study a phenomenon in Pakistan, there is no structural issues of access – but if a scholar with a Pakistani passport wants to study a phenomenon in the France or Spain, that choice might not be possible. So your entire project of research might be determined by what passport you hold.
(vii) Global north universities very rarely offer visa sponsorship for global south scholars, and very rarely offer enough funding (like honoraria) to cover international flights. So if conferences aren’t hosted online or in a country global south scholars can visit, then they are effectively shut out of transnational scholarly dialogue and presentation.
(viii) Historically, the global south has been where global north scholars go to do their fieldwork (anthropology wouldn’t exist as a discipline without colonialism) (there are wonderful anti colonial anthropologists but that’s precisely because they know the histories of their discipline) or use as a case study (yes, I mean you, political science) instead of a place where not only do fellow scholars exist but as a place that you can theorize from. For example: theorizing the enduring legacies of the cold war from South Korea and Pakistan and Argentina, instead of centering the continental settler US. So, in terms of the ethics of knowledge production, I think we need to understand who/where/what becomes an object of study – & passports are part of the structures (including empires) that make these frameworks and relations of study possible and perpetuated (the geopolitics of knowledge, as it were).
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