Participant Observation in Migration Studies: An Overview and Some Emerging Issues

Abstract

Participant observation, as most researchers would probably agree, is essential to the study of international migration. However, human mobility is irreducible to the scope of a closed, territorially based and fully controllable ethnographic field, as it involves multiple physical, social and symbolic locations, whether simultaneously or over time. Moreover, contemporary migration processes are highly heterogeneous in terms of purposes, trajectories and durations. Methodologies that continue to work under assumptions of migration as a unidirectional, purposeful and intentional process from one state of fixity (in the place of origin) to another (in the destination) fail to capture much of its complexity. Based on our own empirical research and on an extended literature overview, we discuss the core methodological issues emerging in fieldwork on migrants’ life experience, whether “in proximity” or “over distance”. We explore the potential and desirability of participant observation to capture the increasing spatio-temporal complexity of present-day mobility. As we argue, the shift from the study of the “uprooted migrant” to that of transnational and fragmented networks involves more than a simple multiplication of fieldwork locations. Moreover, we expand on some aspects of participant observation which are no prerogative of migration studies, but are particularly critical for the success of the latter: the by now well-developed debate on multi-sited ethnography; the relationship between ethnographers and their counterparts (and the influence of their respective backgrounds); and the lures and pitfalls of online ethnography in social research on migration.