ASYKNOW has made significant achievements in its first 24 months towards advancing new understandings of the role of expert knowledge in asylum governance by investigating asylum-related litigation in different political and legal contexts.
The four case countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany) have developed distinctly different asylum appeal procedures. The first key activity carried out by team members was therefore to map and compare the legal and procedural framework in the four case countries to build shared ground knowledge as preparation for the ethnographic fieldwork.
The second major step was the execution of ethnographic fieldwork in the four case countries. The main part of this task has been carried out during the first reporting period, but will extend into the second period. The field research has so far involved in total 270 interviews/field conversations with a range of actors (e.g. lawyers, judges, experts, asylum seekers, support groups) and observation of 65 court hearings (total 385 hours) in all case countries.
Team members will also study selected cases using legal archaeology. This task began during the first reporting period and extends into the second period. In this first period, the focus has been on refining the methodology and identifying relevant lines of inquiry in each case country and for comparative purposes. We have refined two main approaches the project adopts to study the co-production of law and expert knowledge over time. In the first approach, we trace the interaction between different types of evidence as a specific case moves through the asylum adjudication process. In the second approach, we trace the trajectory of specific knowledge technologies (e.g. age-testing, biometrics, Country of Origin information) across a cluster of cases over time. The team has identified and accessed the first set of case files, with more to be identified in the second period.
The final task of the project will be to synthesize results from the first two research tasks to develop a richer theoretical understanding of the ways in which knowledge about asylum seekers and migration is constituted and contested in and through legal processes. The main part of this task is planned to take place in the second reporting period. However, the theory frame evolves in parallel with empirical research in the sense that it both informs and is informed by it. The research team has therefore met regularly to collectively identify interesting lines of enquiry, and patterns of variation and contingency emerging in the different research tasks.
