Currently within academia, especially in more progressive circles, there is constant rhetoric around the importance of decolonising academia and the need for reflexivity to interrogate how research may be complicit within oppressive structures. Too often it seems that this complicity is recognised but amongst the pressures of funding applications, publishing expectations and capitalist life, enacting on these issues is forgotten.    Drawing on personal experience as a practitioner and researcher within migrant justice organisations across Europe and in the UK, this paper stresses the importance of discomfort in a process where activists recognise when their organisations are reinforcing racialised hierarchies. This framework of productive discomfort is then related to the research development process. Utilising affect theory, this paper argues that discomfort in a research context is an embodied moment when reflexivity transforms from an academic tick boxing exercise to something visceral and real. The impact of these moments of discomfort are then reflected on, with discussion of the changes made in methodology and type of research conducted as a result of this discomfort. This discomfort allows for an appreciation of the ways in which research is too often embedded within ongoing structures of colonial capitalism.  

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