The stories behind stories: Reflections on the role of voice in research with unaccompanied refugee youth

Abstract

In the summer of 2015, when I started to conduct research with unaccompanied refugee youth in Switzerland, I was struck by the scarce guidance the refugee and migration literature offered in terms of the ethical and practical challenges of working with this highly vulnerable group of young people (Rousseau, 1993; Vervliet et al., 2015). Despite the increased public and academic attention that refugee children had received in the years and months leading up to my research, I had to piece together my research design from various methodological approaches and fields of research. Several years and another European “refugee crisis” later, this situation has improved only marginally. Unaccompanied child refugees have entered research agendas with great force, leading to important new insights on the social, cultural, legal and political factors impacting their everyday lives. Yet despite these innovations, the question of how scholars approach research with refugee minors is still rarely debated (Chase et al., 2020). In what follows, I will reflect on the challenges I encountered in my collaboration with young people who had arrived in Switzerland without parents or other adult guardians in the wake of the great refugee movements to Europe in 2015 (Lems, 2022). Drawing on my research experience, I want to caution against the uncritical use of ideas of voice and agency that have become a prominent feature in scholarly collaborations with unaccompanied refugee youth. While democratic and dialogical principles have a crucial role to play in research with marginalized youth, it is important never to lose sight of the ways the unequal distribution of power and possibility in an increasingly politicized European asylum landscape impacts young refugees' ability to make themselves heard. One crucial methodological challenge in research with unaccompanied refugee youth is therefore not just to make their voices heard, but to gain an awareness for the stories behind stories. It involves an empirical move that shifts the focus from the products of collaborative research – the stories – to the social processes enabling or disabling the act of telling. Doing so will allow scholars to gain a deeper understanding, not just of the experiences that can be shared in the form of a story, but also of the experiences that refuse narrative closure. While having one's voice heard and recognized by others can be empowering, not every story has this positive potential. For unaccompanied refugee youth, who find themselves thrown into new and often hostile social environments, the task of putting their ruptured lives into a story can be deeply unsettling. I started my research with a keen interest in developing methodological tools that would enable me to shed light on the young people's own perspectives and experiences. This interest in an “experience-near” (Wikan, 1991) prism was informed by debates on child-centred approaches in youth and childhood studies that recognize young people as important social actors who need to be engaged in research directly rather than as mere participants/informants (James, 2007; Franks, 2011; see Achilli, this issue). It was also informed by debates in anthropology and beyond that have called for a deeper engagement with refugees' voices. One key methodological concern of the last decades of refugee research has been to uncover refugees' own perspectives and stories (Eastmond, 2007; Malkki, 1996). By making their voices and individual stories heard, scholars attempt to move beyond popular media narratives that tend to portray displaced people as anonymous, voiceless and ahistorical masses (Malkki, 1996) or “floods” of bodies (Anderson, 2017). Guided by these thoughts, I was interested in deploying storytelling as tool to making the young people's voices heard. When discussing the possibility of conducting ethnographic research in a home for unaccompanied minors with the youth protection organization responsible for their care and well-being, I was referred to a social pedagogue who shared my interest in participatory storytelling approaches. He invited me to become involved in a radio project he had initiated for the unaccompanied minors living in the care facility. I was introduced to the eight young people from Eritrea, Somalia and Guinea who formed the heart of the radio group, with the idea of assisting them in the production of radio stories. Mirroring my own expectations, the social pedagogue had initiated the project with the idea that the young people would use the radio stories as a tool for reflecting on the reality of being an unaccompanied minor in Switzerland – an outcome he believed to not just be educative to the young refugees themselves but also to the Swiss audience listening to their stories. Yet, as I started to work with the radio group, I quickly came to realize that the role of voice was far more complex than I had anticipated (Lems, 2020 ). Many youths struggled to formulate coherent stories about their experiences of displacement, while others plainly refused to tell yet another “boring refugee story”, as they put it. In their daily lives, the young people had to constantly formulate stories of themselves as “deserving” members of Swiss society – be it in the asylum hearings, their interactions with teachers and legal guardians, or everyday encounters in the public arena. They envisaged our gatherings as a space where they could escape these expectations. Instead of producing radio pieces, the youth therefore gradually turned the radio project into a social hangout space. At first, this development threw me off guard. Yet, as I got to know the young people better and started to gain insight into their daily lives and preoccupations, I became more attentive to the politics of storytelling (Jackson, 2002). The classical ethnographic tool of participant observation enabled me to gain crucial insights not just into the stories that could be told, but also into the silences and story fragments that refused narrative ordering. An expectation emanating from the voice paradigm in refugee research is that approaches based on refugees' stories are able to enhance or promote our research participants' sense of agency. However, the young people I worked with did not experience the storytelling project as a cathartic tool for empowerment. Instead, they saw the imperative to make their voices heard as yet another expectation burdened upon them amidst an everyday that was already heavily monitored. Deploying storytelling as a research tool based on the assumption that stories possess an agentive potential therefore risks overlooking other, less straight-forward stories. It risks silencing the experiences of refugee youth whose capability to act upon the world has been diminished to the point that they cannot and will not tell their stories. It excludes young people like the 17-year-old Thierno from Guinea, whose self-confidence had been diminished by years of waiting for a decision on his asylum case and repeated experiences of racism in the everyday. Rather than embodying the “can do” attitude that propels the telling of empowering stories, his attempts to tell a story were marked by an overriding sense of “I cannot” (Lems, 2022). In the current political climate, in which parties gain political currency by spreading moral panics about youth asylum seekers, and refugees are time and again reminded of the disposability of their lives, I believe that scholars need to pay serious attention to the ways acts of political and social violence manage to seep into young people's lives, impacting on their ability to formulate their experiences in terms of a story. I do not intent to argue that refugees are devoid of agency. Many of the stories I encountered throughout fieldwork proved the opposite: They showed the great amount of social skill and creativity the young people needed to navigate difficult and at times even dangerous situations. Yet, I believe that there is an urgent need to develop research tools that do not only allow us to capture the agentive forces driving youth migration, but also the exclusionary dynamics that cut down on their possibilities for action. Creating the time and space for intimate and at times fragmented stories to occur is of vital importance when attempting to understand young people's experiences of displacement. As erratic and fragmented as these story snippets might be, they should not be ignored or written off as inconclusive. They reveal something essential about the ways young people who do not possess the social, emotional or political capital to turn their experiences into a coherent storyline, make sense of the tumultuous world they find themselves thrown into. Researchers deploying collaborative storytelling methodologies in research with unaccompanied refugee youth should therefore not expect the outcome of their approaches to be transformative, empowering or cathartic. Rather, we need to look deeper and try to uncover the stories behind stories. Open access publishing facilitated by Australian National University, as part of the Wiley - Australian National University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians. The opinions expressed in this Commentary/Book Review [select one] are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors, Editorial Board, International Organization for Migration nor John Wiley & Sons. The peer review history for this article is available at https://publons.com/publon/10.1111/imig.13124. Author elects to not share data. Due to the use of personal and biographical data and the duty to protect my research participants' privacy rights, research data can not be shared.