‘Migration’ and ‘migrants’ were, and most dominantly continue to be, studied and written by scholars who themselves are not migrantised. Now that more migrantised scholars are entering migration studies as writing migrants, some of the hidden, naturalised structural traits that shape this academic apparatus become growingly visible. The main argument in Jashari’s contribution is that the field of migration studies, the practices constituting it, and consequently the forms of knowledge it produces, are fundamentally structured and hierarchised by a racialising, nationalising, and classicising boundary—one that runs between researchers and researched. Reflecting on her experience of entering academia as a PhD-student, the author traces how such racialising, nationalising, and classicising distinctions are inherent to the production of knowledge and ‘scientificity’ in migration studies. Analysing hegemonic discursive practices involved in ‘doing migration studies’ the author employs text- and genre-analysis, auto-/ethnographic and creative writing, thus making use of her standpoint, providing a de-centred perspective informed by feminist, postcolonial and critical race studies. The contribution provides crucial information about the embodied nature of self-/governance processes at play in the functioning of the academic apparatus, as it produces the different subjectivities necessary to ‘do migration studies’.