The MORE coordinator, Prof. Olga Jubany, and Dr. Alèxia Rué, from the UB, presented a communication at the Spanish Association of Anthropology Congress (ASAEE) in Tenerife, Spain on the 04 of September 2025, with a focus on the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting research with police officers in migration studies.
Drawing on findings and reflections from MORE’s WP4 research in Spain, they shared insights from fieldwork with state and non-state agents enforcing return and readmissions policies. The presentation highlighted the importance of ethnographic research with the enforcers of migration governance policies, as the mechanisms by which policy becomes reality continue to be underresearched.
Ethnography, the communication argued, offers a necessary lens to gain in-depth understanding of how migration policy materialises. It is through this lens that ethnography can unveil results that provide a more nuanced explanation of the workings of policy to common legalistic and technocratic approaches to law enforcement.
To illustrate this, the communication shared some of MORE’s ethnographic results in Spain, revealing how police officers perceived deportation linked to administrative irregularity as a punitive instrument outside the judicial process rather than as a sanction for irregular entry.
