| Summary/Abstract |
This paper adopts an ontological perspective toward asylum interviews. The suggested take refers to the incompatibility of different knowledge systems and experienced worlds between asylum seekers and asylum officers. With such a focus, we sketch the parallel functioning of knowledge-claims anchored in two radically different ontological principles. Our analysis starts with the body as a site and source of knowledge through which we critically examine the limits of knowledge sought after in asylum politics. The ontological gap reflects the divide between meaning and significance, self and other, which this paper seeks to mediate through feminist methodologies and ethnographic insight. We suggest that asylum seekers do fill the ontological gap, but not in ways anticipated by governmental practices; their bodies and stories adopt alternative ways of identification and taking action. Thus, the gap is an opening for conceiving different knowledges and knowledge practices within asylum politics and international relations.
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