Knowledge production on migration has, and continues to be, authored by people-on-the-move themselves. Those who cross borders and navigate the precarious internal spaces forged by state/colonial violence pen their own routes, strategies, accounts and critiques: whether written, digital or oral. Testimony, video, music, mapping, housing and other digital/material resources form a complex web of exchange about transit and mobility which people draw on to navigate borders. These interlocking practises expressions and resources, often referred to as a mobile commons (Trimiklinioti, Parsanoglou, Tsianos 2015), are a material and epistemological resistance to the border. Yet claims laid by academia (as well as media and NGOs) have regularly created a sanitised buffer of abstraction in order to make cross-border mobilities legible or palatable to a supposed wider audience. Knowledge then is often presented as statistics, death tolls, aggregated experiences and expert views, rather than the thick, and fluid inter-subjective movement of people who are authoring their own cannon on mobility. The abstraction/extraction of much research leverages power within the border complex to speak for others. This contribution opens up the question of: How can research minor itself (King 2016) to the struggle of people experiencing the violence and racism of borders in their everyday lives? What role does activist-scholarship have in engaging with the mobile commons and embedded knowledge of the border which does not confine itself to peer reviewed text?

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