Re-Search on the Hyphen: (Re)writing the Fragmented Self within Contexts of Displacement

Abstract

In responding to the call for exploring and explicating aspects of the research process that remain unspoken about in most social science fields, this narrative asks deceptively simple questions: what does it mean to carry out research as an academic with a lived experience of displacement, loss and pain? What are the methodological choices available to me as a migrant scholar? What does it really mean to write (about) the displaced-turned-emplaced self from the margin—myself being a case in point—within contexts of loss and displacement? My aim is to present a personal narrative that is uniquely mine, a story that may work with or against what is thought to be the official story. I defend the use of fragments, theoretically and methodologically, to avoid the homogenisation of narratives and assumptions about how research is carried out, how knowledge(s) are produced and reproduced, and who has the power to produce them. Thus, building on established scholarship cutting across various fields and guided by postcolonial and postmodernist theories, I hope to unpack the tensions and possibilities inherent in thinking about borders and positionality in academia (when the researcher dwells at the margins), identity, its fragmentation, and its entanglement with questions of decoloniality, narrative and voice.