Keynote Speaker : From Empathy to Socio-Analysis: Reflections on the Posture of an Engaged Researcher alongside Undocumented Migrants

Vertongen, Youri
(2025) Common research day MIGLOBA - GERME - CESSMIR: migration studies and societal impact — Location: Universiteit van Antwerpen (24.October.2025)

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When I first became interested in the struggles of undocumented migrants, I was not yet a researcher. I was a student, driven by indignation and empathy — a revolt against migratory injustice, but also a curiosity to understand how socially and politically weak actors, often invisible, managed to make themselves heard in public space. During those first moments of engagement — the occupations of undocumented people within Belgian universities in 2008–2009 — the connection was forged that would later become central to my research: the relationship between engagement, knowledge, and recognition. Over time, this proximity led me to ask how one can do research with people rather than on them. This shift required letting go of the comfort of distance, accepting to be affected and displaced by the field itself, and recognizing that knowledge is also produced within social movements — through discussions, disagreements, and lived experience. This posture of reflexive engagement guided my PhD, defended in 2022, on the ethical and strategic articulations between undocumented collectives and citizen supporters. Yet behind this analysis lay a more intimate question for me: How can we produce rigorous knowledge without betraying those with whom it is co-constructed? Today, returning to these questions in this keynote, I wish to go further — not to revisit my fieldwork, but to explore what such experiences do to research itself: to our ways of thinking, writing, and being publicly present. And also how these experiences, blending research and activism, contribute to what I call militant memory — a living, transmitted memory that research can either prolong or let fade. I argue that the struggles of undocumented people — in Belgium and beyond — are not only moments of contestation but laboratories of political memory. They accumulate experiences, knowledge, and traces, yet they are marked by cycles of forgetting and renewal. Each generation of activists seems to rediscover, often in isolation, the same challenges, debates, and hopes. Within this interplay of memory and amnesia, the researcher becomes both witness and participant in the transmission of activist knowledge. This talk will unfold in three movements: 1. A return to the posture of engagement, forged through empathy and proximity; 2. A socio-analysis of that position, to reflect on what it reveals about science and commitment; 3. And finally, an opening reflection on memory and transmission — asking how knowledge born in struggle can be preserved, circulated, and recognized. In short: how can research go beyond documenting struggles, and instead sustain their living memory — one that is critical, collective, and turned toward the future?
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Vertongen, Y. (2025). Keynote Speaker : From Empathy to Socio-Analysis: Reflections on the Posture of an Engaged Researcher alongside Undocumented Migrants. Common research day MIGLOBA - GERME - CESSMIR: migration studies and societal impact, Universiteit van Antwerpen.