Experiencing transnationalism at home:open borders and the everyday narratives of non-migrants

The normative migration rights literature has engaged with the situated experience of migration to a very limited extent, with particularly little attention paid to non-migrants living in receiving localities. This article argues that exploring the non-elite narratives of non-migrants provides valuable insights for normative theorising about migration rights. The discussion is illustrated with a description of research undertaken within rural migration-receiving communities in England, which shows how the narratives of non-migrants shape the experience of migration at a micro-level. This article discusses the implications of this research for normative theory in order to demonstrate the value of this methodological approach

Critical methods in international relations: the politics of techniques, devices and acts

Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in IR and social sciences more generally. This article explores the role of methods in International Relations and argues that methods can be part of a critical project if reconceptualised away from neutral techniques of organising empirical material and research design. It proposes a two-pronged reconceptualisation of critical methods as devices which enact worlds and acts which disrupt particular worlds. Developing this conceptualisation allows us to foreground questions of knowledge and politics as stakes of method and methodology rather than exclusively of ontology, epistemology or theory. It also allows us to move away from the dominance of scientificity (and its weaker versions of systematicity and rigour) to understand methods as less pure, less formal, messier and more experimental, carrying substantive political visions