Rethinking knowledge production on Portuguese migrations by bridging arts and academia: The festival “A arte de ser migrante”

Abstract

For a long time, knowledge production in Europe has relied on epistemologies that marginalise the body. In particular, non-visual senses have been overlooked. Building on a scholarship that foregrounds sensoriality and emotions in migration studies, this paper argues that attending to sensory experience fosters reflexivity and enables renewed understandings of the macro, meso and micro-processes shaping identity and belonging. Authored by a sociologist and a geographer with shared interests in Portuguese intra-European mobilities and creative methods, in collaboration with a photographer, the paper analyses a four-day cultural event they organised in Lisbon in 2025 that gathered artists, scholars and media professionals. The festival “A Arte de Ser Migrante” sought to step outside conventional academic formats and to pay tribute to Portuguese migrants and descendants while interrogating public narratives about Portuguese migrations. Through debates, film screenings, exhibitions, workshops, and sensorial activities involving sound, sight, touch, taste, and movement, the event assembled a heterogeneous audience and invited participants to engage with migration as a multisensory and emotionally textured experience. Drawing on this empirical site, the paper develops three contributions: (a) a reflection on the visibility and invisibility of Portuguese migrations; (b) an examination of participatory cultural events as sites of collaborative and transdisciplinary knowledge production; and (c) an exploration of sensorial and sensitive approaches as tools for revealing blind spots of Portuguese migration research. We conclude by conceptualising the festival as both an act of resistance and a starting point for an ongoing epistemic “craft” that generates new collaborations and opens up new avenues of knowledge in the long term.