Navigating the “Refugee Ecosystem” in Research at Home

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, we reflect upon our varied relationships—as friends, advocates, mentors, and researchers—with refugee resettlement agencies and volunteers in Columbia, South Carolina. We describe the organizational networks that support refugee resettlement in our city as a “refugee ecosystem”—a term that captures the overlapping relationships of interdependency, symbiosis, and sometimes competition among refugee activists, advocates, and service providers. Drawing upon feminist approaches to research, we challenge the idea of the refugee ecosystem as a bounded field that we can enter or leave at will. We reflect on situations (including our efforts to place student volunteers with agencies, and our current participant-observation project on cosponsorship) that have presented practical and ethical challenges because of our relationships with our interlocutors. These situations require us to think about how to balance the feminist goal of diminishing the hierarchical relationships that underpin academic fieldwork with the need, at times, to bring more clarity to one’s role as a researcher.