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This paper grapples with a number of intersecting predicaments to frame a necropolitical question of who is allowed to inhabit and survive the locations of research, writing and the academy? Drawing on Lorde’s thinking about “historical amnesia” as an example of the mutually constitutive relationship between content and method, the purpose of this paper is to argue that putting a hypervigilant anti-racist remembering to work tells us that there is nothing contemporary about questions of: “why isn’t my professor black? And, why is my curriculum white?”.

The intersection of diverse theoretical frameworks demonstrate a transgression of disciplinary borders. This paper includes the use of conceptual frameworks such as the impossibility of hospitality, historical amnesia, habitation and location. The design of this piece also has detailed critical deconstructive discourse analysis of extracts from a published co-written chapter.

An ethic of research methodology must inhabit the aporia of the mutually constitutive relationship between method and content. Location is an intervention and method rather than a place to go or position.

There is a need to inhabit the tension of implicated necropower relations in research and writing practices.

Practical implications include rethinking methodology and applications of black feminist theory to ethical issues of research and writing with specific reference to co-writing.

There are social implications in regards to community engagement and political activism with refugees and asylum seekers.

This paper presents an examination of tension as methodology rather than methodology to resolve tensions based on deconstruction of issue of co-writing.

Contemporary governmentality combines biopolitical and necropolitical logics to establish social, political and physical borders that classify and stratify populations using symbolic and material marks as, for example, nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, social class and/or disability. The social sciences have been prolific in the analysis of alterities and, in turn, implicated in the epistemologies and knowledge practices that underpin and sustain the multiplication of frontiers that define essential differences between populations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a strategy that analyze and subvert the logic of bordering inherent in the bio/necropolitical gaze. In different ways, this paper examines operations of delimitation and differentiation that contribute to monolithic definitions of subject and subjectivity.

The authors question border construction processes in terms of their static, homogenizing and exclusionary effects.

Instead of hierarchical stratification of populations, the papers in this special issue explore the possibilities of relationship and the conditions of such relationships. Who do we relate to? On which terms and conditions? With what purpose? In which ethical and political manner?

A critical understanding of the asymmetry in research practices makes visible how the researcher is legitimized to produce a representation of those researched, an interpretation of their words and actions without feedback or contribution to the specific context where the research has been carried out. Deconstructive and relational perspectives are put forward as critical strands that can set the basis of different approaches to research and social practice.