This dissertation, situated within pedagogy and educational research and informed by critical and philosophical studies of education, examines how lives shaped by migration and precarity may become hearable in academic inquiry when speech takes form amid displacement, institutional uncertainty, translation, memory, and fear, and when becoming audible may itself intensify exposure. Its empirical ground is a series of recorded research conversations with women whose lives have been shaped by migration to and within Sweden. The conversations were transcribed and translated by the researcher and revisited repeatedly as permissions, circumstances, and the ethical status of the material changed.

Migration is approached not as a completed movement from departure to arrival, but as a continuing event that reorganizes the conditions of speech, listening, memory, recognition, and writing. The dissertation traces how listening takes shape within encounters with migration authorities, health care, workplaces, and research. It shows that listening is not inherently responsive or ethical: speech may be solicited, documented, translated, and assessed while remaining unable to alter the conditions into which it enters. Listening may become verification, administrative suspension, classification, pathologization, or exposure. Audibility and response therefore do not necessarily coincide.

Methodologically, the inquiry develops from interview to encounter and from listening as a research skill to listening as a problem of inquiry. Consent is understood as temporal and relational rather than as a single act that permanently renders material available. Writing becomes part of method and analysis through repeated return, translation, quotation, juxtaposition, withholding, and conceptual composition. Cartography names this practice of following how problems move among voices, bodies, documents, institutions, silences, concepts, and changing permissions without gathering the women’s lives into a unified narrative.

Taken together, these movements offer an account of listening as a situated, material, institutional, political, and pedagogical practice. The dissertation develops an ethics of accompaniment grounded neither in identification nor complete understanding, but in decisions that remain answerable to what they enable, restrict, expose, or protect. Its concluding movement toward imperceptibility does not celebrate invisibility or diminish the necessity of political recognition. Rather, it marks the point at which recognizability can no longer serve as the final measure of presence. Recognition may remain necessary for rights, protection, and credibility, but it cannot exhaust the life for which it claims to speak.