Introduction

Even if the use of statistics and data analytics has been widely criticised in the past decades, in the light of the rise of identity politics and globalisation (Davies, 2017), when it comes to migration, data still play a crucial role in policymaking, humanitarian intervention and public discourse. Indicators are used by governments, international organisations and security agencies to monitor and control movements, arrivals, border crossings and violations, asylum-seeker requests and transfers.² According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), ‘data are the lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability’ (UN Data Revolution Group, 2014). Not only are data fundamental to design policy, but they are also critical in humanitarian work. In particular, the allocation of resources for reception and assistance would be impossible without data.

After the so called ‘European refugee crisis’,³ data on arrivals and asylum requests have also heavily fed media narratives and the Internet⁴ – to either raise compassion or exacerbate xenophobia (Wodak, 2015). According to Fawaz et al. (2018), migration flows are currently portrayed in two opposite ways: refugees and migrants are either ‘depicted as mere victims of external pressures that have forcefully displaced them and exposed them to the violence of host communities’ or as invaders who threaten ‘the livelihood, coherence, work, health and way of life’ of host communities (Fawaz et al., 2018, p. 4). Similarly, Triandafyllidou (2018, p. 215) argues that there are common yet contrasting interpretative frames that are shared across countries:

In both cases, data are used to reinforce the notion of crisis and chaos, often relying on univocal and sensationalist interpretations without building a contextualised and nuanced understanding of the migration phenomenon. In particular, numbers are manipulated to either magnify or minimise a situation. They feed expert discourses, and politicians are eager to quote statistics and quantify social phenomena (Cheesman, 2017; Fotopoulos and Kaimaklioti, 2016). According to Anderson (2017, p. 1529),

From humanitarian calls for action to warnings of impending collapse, Europe widely considers itself to be in crisis, at a political breaking point that justifies extreme measures. As Anderson (2017) puts it, politicians, policymakers and all those involved in the migration industry share a common interest in responding to the ‘crisis’ through enforcement. Data on arrivals and border crossings have created the need for and justified the hardening of border policy; even though such measures did not result in better and safer migration management. On the contrary, it has been argued that higher investments on securitisation and deterrence coincided with an increase in fatalities at the border (Léonard, 2010; Neal, 2009; Perkowski, 2012; Squire et al., 2017; Steinhilper and Gruijters, 2017).⁵

It is often difficult to disentangle the causal relationship between discourses and measures. According to Krzyżanowski (2013, 2018), since 2014 responses in policy and political actions have entailed various subsequent ‘discursive shifts’ (Fairclough, 1992) and policy changes, leading to policies and actions becoming legitimised by political and mediated discourses, as in the case of the refugee quota. For years, European countries have operated a redistributive system according to which refugees and asylum seekers are allocated to European Union (EU) member states based on agreed quotas. During the peak of arrivals in the spring and fall of 2015, however, the system stopped working. There was clearly a shift from seeking to manage and to channel the flows through quotas, to the construction of the refugee flows as a crisis that called for more drastic measures (Triandafyllidou, 2018), such as increase of border refusals and removals to reduce public anxiety. These policy developments were in an interactive relationship with developing media, political discourses and civil society mobilisations around the refugee crisis.

During 2017–18, numbers of arrivals have slowly and steadily decreased, which has been interpreted as a decrease in migration flows, subsequent to policy changes. It has been further used to celebrate a successful policy and to placate xenophobic sentiments. However, many argue that the arrival drop is not generated by a decrease in flows, but rather results from the closure of the route and the diversion of the flows. If this is the case, then the problem has not been mitigated but simply moved elsewhere. Such an example of the complex entanglement between data, media discourse and policy measures sheds light on how data are produced by a certain discursive practice that creates the need for those data to exist in the first place.

Interpretations of the Foucauldian social theory on discursive practice and its relation to power suggest that data – admin data, censuses, statistics and ‘evidence’ in general – operate as technical devices to sustain dominant structures of power. In order to expose such structures of power, there is a need to question what data are collected, by whom and for whom, who decides what data to collect and for what purpose, how and what data are shared, disclosed and aggregated. Critical insights into data collection methods might help to understand and contain the divisive narratives that frame the current influx of refugees into Europe (Haynes et al., 2006; Triandafyllidou, 2018) on the one hand, and make sure that data support better migration research and policy on the other. For this purpose, what follows is a closer look into the relationship between discourses and power followed by a review of publicly available existing data on migration. Reflections stem from a two-year data project called Refugee Spaces,⁶ an open digital platform conceived to stimulate debate on the ways in which European countries have represented and responded to recent migratory waves.

Data and discursive practice

In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), Foucault develops his notion of discourses as ‘systems of thought composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak’ (cited in Lessa, 2006, p. 285). According to such a definition, discourses create a ‘regime of truths’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 101) that legitimise some knowledges as true and normalise the norms that sediment power and the truth it produces. Furthermore, discourses are pervasive, implicit in ‘the ideas and statements that allow us to make sense of and see things’ (Schirato et al., 2012, pp. xix–xx). As a result, ‘social reality is produced and made real through discourses’ (Phillips and Hardy, 2002, p. 3). Ultimately, discourses legitimise a certain way of making sense of the world and those who inhabit it (Mole, 2007). We argue that data are also part of that system of thoughts that forms a discursive practice and that data support a certain way of making sense of the world. As a consequence, data produce new knowledge not because they are universally truthful – on the contrary, their truth is always a construction with a purpose – but for the simple reason that they exist as part of a discursive practice.

Any discourse within a given context constructs a regime of truths as well as carrying power relations. Indeed, discourse is strongly related to power; it is both an effect and instrument of power in a project of constructing subjects that can be disciplined and populations that can be regulated. By contributing to the circular creation of knowledge and power, data also produce the subjectification of those who are contained in it (as happens for instance with the categorisation of the ‘asylum seeker’ or the ‘refugee’ as normalised subjects). To understand how data ‘construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak’ (Lessa, 2006, p. 285), it is useful to remember that data are a representation of the world, not the world itself. It is possible to modify data and their narrative, constructing a perception that will be rationalised and consumed. However, perception is a cultural construct. As Bacchi and Bonham (2014, p. 178) put it, Foucault’s focus is on the ‘things said’, not in terms of their content but in relation to the operation of a whole package of relationships.

According to Foucault (1971, p. 8), ‘in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures’. Discourses are part of the organised practices (mentalities, rationalities and techniques) through which subjects are governed, leading us to the idea of governmentality: ‘The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 108). Fimyar (2008, p. 5) summarises thus:

Governmentality refers to how power is exercised in Western societies (Foucault, 1991, pp. 102–4), where the sovereign power of the ruler merges with ‘police’ to secure a state’s internal stability coincident with redefining ‘population’ as an object of governmental techniques. Such a process of governmentalisation of the state (Foucault, 1991, p. 91) is ‘an invention and assembly of a whole array of technologies that bring together the calculations and strategies of the constitutional, juridical, fiscal and organizational powers of the state in an attempt to manage the economic life, social habits and health of the population’ (N. Rose, 1999, p. 18).

In a liberal state the welfare of the population is perceived as the ends of the government. Security of the economic and social development of the population is its fundamental concern and the basis of state prosperity. To achieve this, the population is framed into apparatuses of security (including police). Lives (and bodies) become objects of systematic administration and data and statistics become a means towards this. Mapping has historically been a key strategy of governmentality (Harley, 1988). The same can be said for statistics, censuses, data on population trends, flows, etc., which extend and reinforce the legal statutes, territorial imperatives and values stemming from the exercise of political power over a certain territory. Data on population and migration conform to Bentham’s concept of a panopticon, in which the one views the many.

This way of thinking gave rise to the concept of ‘biopower’ (power over life) and ‘biopolitics’ (exercise of this power by the government) (Foucault, 2008). Biopolitics is characterised by administrative intervention aimed at optimising the life of the population. In other words, state and government extend their terrain of interest towards all life processes: how humans live, procreate, become ill, maintain health and die. Biopolitics is concerned with the family, with housing, living and working conditions and with patterns of migration.

Migration is an essential biopolitical concern. In order to ensure the most effective management of lives, biopolitics divides the population into subgroups (e.g. refugees, criminals, migrants, the employed) that either contribute to the collective prosperity of the population or constrain it. Those that constrain it are to be tightly regulated. Of course, such practices lead to discrimination, exclusion and racism, whereby race (or other ‘Othering’ processes) appears as a defence mechanism of the life and welfare of the population against internal and external threats.

While it was not directly part of Foucault’s oeuvre (Fassin, 2001, 2011, 2016), his impact on migration debates today is confirmed by a fast-growing body of work. Relevant for this chapter are the debates concerning the surveillance and discipline of international mobility and labour migration (Geiger and Pécoud, 2013; Rudnyckyj, 2004; Salter, 2013) and migration and governmentality (Bigo, 2002, 2008; Darling, 2011; Gill, 2009; Hess and Kasparek, 2010; Huysmans, 2000; Hyndman, 2012; Jeandesboz, 2011; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Nyers, 2006; Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Salter, 2013; Squire, 2011; Walters, 2012).

The Refugee Spaces platform

If discourses are situated within relations of power, they do not stem from a single point of reference. The systems of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that surround them – including data – can also be used to disrupt and subvert a certain regime of truths and the norms that construct subjects. Power and resistance are interlinked. Subjects can make use of discourses in subversive manners, creating new meanings. Counter-narratives and counter-archives that resist mainstream narratives illustrate such resistive practices (Garelli et al., 2018). Examples that have produced critical data to oppose fearmongering narratives have acted as essential sources of knowledge production in humanitarian campaigns and academic research and include the well-known Forensic Oceanography project (Heller et al., 2011), WatchTheMed (WTM, n.d.) and the Migrants’ Files (Journalism++, 2013).

In a similar vein, the Refugee Spaces platform compares data on demographic trends and the cost of migration across different geographical contexts and standpoints, to give a more nuanced reading of current narratives of chaos and crisis. To demystify the representation of an invasion and the burden of protection, the platform compares relative and absolute data on arrivals of refugees and asylum seekers to Europe and the Middle East. The resulting map shows how, over the period 2010–15, Italy has seen an increase in its refugee population of around 122 per cent against an increase of around 32,200 per cent in Turkey (Refugee Spaces, 2018). Another map shows how while governments and media discourses have portrayed the recent wave of arrivals to Europe as an onslaught, the Continent currently hosts only 6 per cent of the displaced population globally, with all European countries hosting few people compared to the top-hosting countries in the world.

In order to question the media-constructed idea of migration as a burden to sovereign states and hosting communities, the Refugee Spaces platform further compares public spending for refugee reception and social integration with the cost for relocation, detention and securitisation in each state. The map shows that in Italy alone, the ratio between reception and securitisation is 1:2 (Lunaria, 2013). Another map compares the amount of resources allocated to humanitarian response with the investments in security and military operations at sea; while the first is decreasing, the latter keeps growing steadily. From 20 million euros in 2006, Frontex’s annual budget reached 90 million euros in 2010 and 143 million in 2015. Today, it is 300 million euros (AEDH, 2017; Frontex, 2018; Perkowski, 2012).

Data collection and analysis: methodological and ethical challenges

Aside from the production of a set of maps and visualisation aimed at questioning the media-constructed idea of a ‘refugee crisis’, the Refugee Spaces platform has exposed the numerous challenges associated with treating secondary data on migration, particularly admin data, statistics and censuses. During the implementation of the project, we reviewed numerous data sets collected, aggregated and shared by institutional and governmental sources in Italy, France, Germany and Greece. Such examination enabled the development of critical insights on the fragile nature of data collection methods and their resolution, consistency and reliability within countries and across Europe.

First, the majority of available data on migration flows – concerning arrivals, border crossing, asylum requests and transfers – are collected by large organisations (e.g. Eurostat, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), national governments and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)), because collection and analysis are time-consuming and onerous and only centralised nation states or supranational bodies can afford to undertake it across large populations in a standardised fashion. However, with such limited alternatives in production and sources, the demand for data and their subsequent interpretation risks being univocal, easing the path for unilateral pre-set narratives. In this context, grassroots organisations and academic research could potentially offer the possibility of having a more pluralistic system of data collection. Charities, activist groups and researchers have been able to collect accurate and diverse data in smaller sample pools, including a closer estimation of population, age and gender, educational background, aspirations and experiences of violence in the host countries.⁷ Nevertheless, their knowledge often remains hidden, unavailable and disconnected from policy, media narrative and national statistics. Academic research in particular tends to exclude non-academics and those in civil society without access to policymakers from accessing data – possibly to avoid their work being sensationalised (Düvell et al., 2010; Singleton, 2015). This therefore makes national government statistics the most accessible data because they are listed in public records.

Second, national statistics are the product of a centralised administrative system, whose units may not be sufficiently representative of the localised variation in the data. Nuances are hardly captured, often compromising the accuracy of a reported trend and/or leading to misinterpretation. Furthermore, research stemming from these data might reproduce the same categories and the same inaccuracies as those originally found in the administrative source. Notable gaps (i.e. information not represented or captured by centralised data collections) can be linked to a range of criteria including a specific crossing/settlement status, the provision of fake identification documents, the involvement of people-traffickers and smuggling cartels and the multiple counting of the same asylum seeker while crossing more than one European border. Fear of being registered by border control officers in a country that may not constitute the migrant’s chosen destination has also led to certain data to be inaccurate.

It is widely acknowledged that the privileged status of a nation can contribute to inherent biases of migration statistics and can attempt to simplify what is a complex phenomenon. Under the need for standard uniformity, national aggregates and statistics impose systems of classification and definition (i.e. refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, etc.) that make it possible to discern how far a given classification extends across a certain phenomenon. The resulting ‘categorical fetishism’ (Apostolova, 2015) annihilates identities and ultimately undermines the ability ‘to capture adequately the complex relationship between political, social and economic drivers of migration or their shifting significance for individuals over time and space’ (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018, p. 48). Individuals disappear within statistical data, while their stories are represented as homogeneous, undiversified and decontextualised. By being presented as ‘an undifferentiated mass’ (Fawaz et al., 2018), refugees and migrants are consequently misrepresented to lack either agency or the skills of the ‘settled citizenry’ and to unreasonably demand Western assistance (Behrman, 2014, pp. 249, 268). Numerical aggregates and averages not only reflect an abstract centralised representation of migrants that is far from reality, and dehumanise the particular needs of individuals, they also create a distorted image and perception of migration ultimately influencing a climate of hostility.

However, reducing the complexity of migration into simple figures offers governments and organisations the opportunity to circumvent the need to acquire contextual detailed insights about migrants’ challenges, journeys and aspired destinations. This blindness to local variability and subjectivity is precisely what can make statistics less beneficial, leaving the understanding of the reasons behind migration being grossly overlooked. As research by the MEDMIG project (Crawley et al., 2016) shows, it is precisely the lack of understanding of lived experiences that is ultimately compromising the ability of migration policies to respond effectively to the increased movement of people.

Third, our research has also shown that data are rarely equally available across countries.⁸ In the absence of what Bonnor (2006, p. 149) defines as ‘European public access culture’, we struggled to access consistent data and information across Italy, France, Greece and Germany. France proved to have the most systematic and high-resolution compilation of information regarding location and regional governance of the centres for reception, accommodation or detention of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, enabling us to identify and map around 700 centres within the national borders. In the case of Italy, we mapped just under 300 centres out of nearly 4,000, as the information regarding other centres is either not collected or not disclosed.⁹ However, data on number of refugees per centre is collected in a more systematic fashion in Italy compared to France. In Germany around 100 centres were mapped; information available proved difficult to compile as migration management is highly decentralised. Each of the 16 federal states has different measures and diverging policies on how to collect and publish data on reception and detention centres (Mouzourakis and Taylor, 2016). Thus, across the country there is no comparable information available on reception and detention arrangements.

Similarly, we found that different sources within the same country were inconsistent. For example, in relation to the same variable, the figures published by the Eurostat agency on the number of arrivals or refusals of entry per year for a given country sometimes differed from those provided by the Interior Ministry of that country, or those gathered by a local non-governmental organisation (NGO).¹⁰ This could be attributed to the fact that data cover different time periods or are collected at different locations. For instance, data on arrivals are collected at the border, while data on asylum requests and number of refugees are collected at the border and in the reception or detention centres. Tazzioli (2015), Sigona (2015) and Rozakou (2017), among others, have made a considerable effort to show how such fragmentation leads to miscalculations and double counting, for instance, in the case of data on sea arrivals. Besides the inherent fragmentation of data sources, the heterogeneity of the systems of classification and the different time and spaces of collection, these type of data sets are also in constant flux and such oscillations are not easy to capture.

Similar inconsistencies were found on data showcasing the declared and actual capacity of centres. If there is an uncalibrated variability, these indicators could potentially misestimate requirements for budget allocations and provision of adequate living conditions in host locations. For France, official audits suggest there is no consistency between declared and actual capacities (Cours des comptes, 2015, 2016). Similar problems have been identified in Greece and Italy, while for Germany data on the capacity of centres is localised and far from traceable, let alone verifiable (Kalkmann, 2017; Katz et al., 2016; Mouzourakis and Taylor, 2016).

Fourth, not all data were equally disclosed. If asylum requests are the most comprehensively collected and shared, governments do not give access nor disclose comprehensive updated data on the location of shelters, reception, accommodation and detention centres in Europe. This can be ascribed to several factors, including the lack of data collection systems, the inability to cope with the fast pace of changes, as well as with ethical or security reasons. Our research suggested that the only comprehensive data sets are on the category of ‘asylum seekers’ for which there exist actual numbers, costs and locations. This information is available at different administrative levels per country. In France it is collected at regional level,¹¹ while in Italy it is collected at national level, and data are categorised according to centre typology (Ministero dell’Interno, 2015). Such inconsistency has rendered comparability across European countries extremely challenging.

A final and important point is related to the rationale of data sharing among different institutions, such as border agencies and governmental agencies. Data on arrivals of migrants and refugees constitute a telling example of this. Data on arrivals released by government and media are based on Frontex’s data sets on border crossings. Clearly, arrivals and border crossings do not have the same significance and value. Arrivals are one-time data, while border crossings can be multiple as the same person might attempt a crossing on more than one border or more times on the same border. As a consequence, numbers of arrivals communicated by governments and media are not ‘actual’ arrivals; on the contrary they are estimates, often inflated compared to actual numbers (Sigona, 2015).

Such an example sheds light on several aspects and challenges related to data collection methods. In particular, it questions the collection modus operandi of national governments and border agencies. In light of their alleged authority, we – researchers, policymakers and the public – tend to overtrust large-scale data collection bodies, with little consideration for where their interest is positioned. This in turn risks leading to the reproduction of uncritical discourses. In the case of the inflated data on arrivals explained above, this is conducive to the perpetuation of the myth of a ‘foreign invasion’, eliciting reactionary discourses and practices against hospitality and inclusion and encouraging feelings of mistrust and hate.

Data representation

The above interrogation into methods of data collection and interpretation, as well as the rationale according to which we built the Refugee Spaces platform, are underpinned by a simple reflection stemming from Foucault’s interpretative frames: data collection and analysis are not as free of judgement, intention and purpose as commonly perceived. Being the product of a discursive practice and nourishing that same discursive practice (Boehnert, 2016) data are never neutral or objective. They are always subject to interpretation and deliberation, be it in the form of selecting what data to collect and disclose or not, or in the form of graphic representation and symbolic annotation of visual arguments (Bertin, 1967; Bresciani and Eppler, 2015). They can lead to multiple narratives that largely depend on why and by whom data have been produced and interpreted. Not only can the same set of data be combined in multiple ways to produce different narratives, it can also be understood differently according to the reader’s or user’s system of values.

Considered from a critical standpoint, the production and interpretation of data – whether quantitative or qualitative in nature¹² – are always dependent upon the positionality and subjectivity of the collector agent. Feminist theory has long advocated for an understanding of data-based research and knowledge as always constructed from a specific subject position (Bordo, 1987; Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1986, 1991; McDowell, 1992, 2016; G. Rose, 1997). More recently, D’Ignazio and Klein (2016, p. 1) have tested feminist research principles to data visualisation to develop ‘alternative visualisation practices that better emphasize the design decisions associated with data’. Principles are aimed at dismantling binaries and categorisations (such as gender, class, ethnicity), as well as challenging claims of objectivity by recognising the data collectors’ positionality and questioning the actors that have generated a particular data set. Similarly, Data for Democracy (2016) – which operates within the community of data scientists and technologists who work towards improving data standards – has put in place an ethical framework that is precisely based on the acknowledgement of positionality throughout all aspects of data work.

Yet, this is still to be recognised by the majority of data producers and end-users, whether researchers, media or policymakers. Few scholars recognise that the assumption of objectivity and neutrality of data is misleading (Adams, 2018; Cloke et al., 2004; Düvell et al., 2010) and that the production of knowledge is always inherently biased or ‘ethico-political’ as Fuchs puts it (2017, pp. 44–5). Data are still presented as being objective in media and policy discourse in order to reflect a certain regime of truth and to invest political agendas and public discourse with ideals of ‘evidence’. Only by challenging ideas of evidence and neutrality and embedding within the data collection process a reflection around the subjectivity of data – a ‘reflective practice’ – can we actually aspire to produce counter-narratives on migration and ultimately better data for better policy.

Conclusion

Following a review of the spiralling discourse on migration and refugees since 2015, this chapter has attempted to highlight how the alleged scientificity and objectivity of data increasingly contribute to obscuring the political and ethical subjectivity of media narratives and governmental practices by using statistical evidence for which methods of collection and aggregation are questionable in their origin and validity.

As evidenced by the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17, as well as by the UN data revolution initiative (UN Data Revolution Group, n.d.), the call for better use and presentation of data on migration is growing. The chapter puts forward a series of critical observations about the reliability of institutional and administrative data and their resolution, consistency, collection methods and accuracy. This criticism, coupled with theoretical understanding of discursive practices in politics, reveals implications entailed in the use of data as governmental technology. Can policy be improved by means of scientific inquiry? Better data collection methods will help, but it is not the only requirement for ethically driven data-informed policy.

A growing number of researchers, activists and politicians warn that misleading data-driven reports and websites about the magnitude of migration flows into Europe are creating unjustified fears about refugees, as well as undermining efforts to manage humanitarian problems faced by those fleeing war zones (Butler, 2017). More websites and projects are focusing on migrant testimony (Italian Coalition for Civil Liberties (CILD), n.d.; Killing, 2017; Politzer and Kassie, 2016; Sossi, n.d.; Wang, 2017; Welander, 2015) to oppose abstract and generalised views of migrants and refugees. However, their number remains small and stories are represented from a single point of view – that of those who see them arriving. Most data portals remain largely inaccessible to either refugee or resident populations who are the ‘subjects’ of migration data collection efforts, rather than active agents.

On the other hand, little consideration is given to the implications of conducting research and producing data on refugees and migrants. This chapter has emphasised issues of data availability and the lack of access to data. Nevertheless, it is also important to note that open access and sharing of data can create equally large ethical concerns, especially in the context of migration and refugees. For instance, UNHCR (2015) makes data access widely available to the public and to refugees; however, it cannot control the way third parties treat its data sets and mitigate risks of potentially indiscriminate and harmful usage.

Data-related malpractice might transform individuals into targets and perpetuate social marginalisation, discrimination and violence in both their country of origin and their host country (Bedford, 2017; Cheesman, 2017; Cloke et al., 2004; D’Ignazio and Klein, 2016; McDowell, 2016; Novack, 2015; Ruhil, 2018; UNDGC, 2017; UNOCHA, 2014; Vujakovic, 2002). Even more problematic is the sharing of spatial data, especially when it involves the disclosure of specific locations. For instance, making public and sharing spatial data on the location of refugee shelters or camps can be and has been used to target individuals (e.g. see Spiegel, 2015, on abuses tracked in Germany).

In this sense, still too little emphasis is put on the necessary critical standpoint from which to review the presentation and interpretation of spatial data (Tufte, 1990, 1997) and their social consequences. This has been a central concern during the preparation of the cartographic material for the Refugee Spaces project. The exact location and address of the centres for reception and detention has been blurred in order to avoid the possibility of transforming them on to a target. Research aiming to empower users and producers of data can end up being detrimental and disempowering, for instance when it reproduces power structures or when it perpetuates the ‘known’ instead of letting the ‘unknown’ emerge. Linda McDowell (1992, 2016) highlights the kinds of challenges encountered in qualitative data collection when working with refugees, including that of adequately capturing the complex temporalities and gender dynamics that are part of the refugee experience.

It is clear that a great deal of change still needs to happen. We need to stop looking at migrants and start looking with them, attending to their individual experiences, motivations and risks, encouraging public participation in, and engagement around, questions of data collection and interpretation, while testing more solid ethical frameworks for improving data standards well beyond existing rigid protection policies and acknowledging issues of positionality in all stages of data work, from collection to sharing.

Note on the term ‘refugee crisis’

We acknowledge that the term ‘refugee crisis’ is widely contested among scholars, humanitarian and civil society actors (Koselleck and Richter, 2006; Krzyżanowski, 2016; Roitman, 2013), both because it is inexact – the recent flows concern migrants and asylum seekers not refugees (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018) – and because it is a stigmatising and alarmist notion. However, it allows us to refer to a series of events in a concise way. We embrace the view that this is a multiple crisis (Boano and Gyftopoulou, 2016; Roitman, 2013). It is a crisis in terms of the increased volume and different pace of refugee and migrant flows, in terms of receiving countries’ asylum reception policies and with regard to European politics and policies, as it brings to the fore the divergent views of different member states.

Nonetheless, it is a term that also triggers a dramatic rise in suspicion and asylum panic (for a critical discussion on policy responses, see Triandafyllidou, 2018). Ultimately, this is a crisis of the notion of Europe itself. As the nomos of Europe lies in the mutualisation and legitimisation of its borders and territories, which is enacted through the ‘open border’ scheme of the Schengen area, the waves of migrants fleeing into Europe push this system of control towards collapse. They are unknowingly but steadily dismantling the biopolitical system that constitutes one of the pillars of Europe and consequently threatening the European construction – or rather, pushing its deconstruction. The ways in which this is happening are multiple, from the political/territorial impacts of mass migration, to the representation of these processes through discourses, narratives and media analysis (Astolfo and Marten, 2016, p. 7). However, the notion of crisis is neither negative nor positive, but represents a breaking point and a turnaround (from the Greek Krino).

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