Refugee Research Research Articles

Refugees re-making community: on the performativity of participatory video.

This paper illustrates the performative nature of participatory video (PV), drawing on JL Austin’s well-known work on speech acts, utterances, and performative sentences, as well as Butler’s reworking and application of the notion of performativity. During recent research I used PV as a method. Sub-Saharan African refugee research participants who had not known each other before the PV project negotiated issues to be filmed and made a short film together, creating a small community where none existed before, who are taking steps to organize collective action. The emergence of this new community in and through the making of the film during the fieldwork illustrates the performativity of PV, what is accomplished in and through its making. This performativity works not only through people who take part in creating a video, distributing the video, and watching the video, but also may have effects on people who have never seen the given video, as they are in a landscape and embedded in social relations affected by people who took part in it or saw it. PV is thus both a way of gathering data to learn about the world, and it also is involved in changing it, bringing forth new relationships and new ways of being.

'I Must Be from Somewhere. I'm Not from the Moon': Navigating the Politics of Labelling for Stateless Palestinian Refugees from Syria

This article explores the relationship between statelessness and refugeeness over time and space. It does so by drawing on how Palestinian refugees from Syria in Sweden navigate the various stateless and refugee labels imposed upon them before, during and after their flight from Syria to Sweden. Standpoint theory was deployed as the basis for understanding how this group of stateless refugees related to these labels. While the research found that, even though the labelling process was largely non-participatory, both as a manifestation for epistemic agency and a vehicle for epistemic justice in statelessness and refugee research, standpoint theory has offered an indispensable lens through which we have accessed the multiple strategies that the interviewees adopted to accept, reject, resist or negotiate their re/de-labelling throughout their journey.

The Cautious Politics of “Humanizing” Refugee Research

In this intervention, I reflect on what it may mean to ‘humanize’ refugee research. The assumption often made is that ‘humanizing’ can arise through a concern with the particularity of the individual, through drawing from ‘the mass’ the narrative of the singular and employing this as a means to identify, , and potentially understand others. Yet such a move risks a reliance on creating relations of empathy and compassion that elide political responses to dehumanization and often relies on a assumption of what constitutes the category of “the human,” an assumption that has been critically challenged by post-colonial writing.

Ethical Considerations for Humanizing Refugee Research Trajectories

This paper argues that ethical responsibilities in refugee studies have focused on fieldwork, yet ethics ought to be applied to the research problematic—the aims, questions, and concepts—as potentially implicated in the production of harm. Using an example from Tanzania, I argue that policy has largely shaped the language, categories investigated, and interpretive frames of refugee research, and this article advocates greater attention to historical and contemporary processes underpinning humanitarian principles and practices, and how they might contribute to exclusion and ontological anxieties among refugees in the Global South. By expanding our conceptualization of ethical responsibilities, researchers can better explore the suitability, and the implications for the refugee communities, of the approach that they have adopted and whether they contribute or challenge the and dehumanization of people seeking refuge.

What Does a Humane Infrastructure for Research Look Like?

In this intervention I make two main suggestions to humanize refugee research. First, the tendency to select “research hotspots” as field sites—where researchers tend to approach the same interviewees and spaces—should not only be called out and avoided, but battled against. Second, I suggest that refugee research should collaborate directly with other studies of social, political, and economic phenomena in an effort to not make displacement the sine qua non condition for doing research but, instead, only one of the many conditions a human being can inhabit within receiving societies. Pursuing this aim will be easier when studies on forced migration do not become compartmentalized and develop in isolation from other disciplines and research groups.

Humanizing Refugee Research in a Turbulent World

This essay adopts a critical perspective of the idea of humanizing refugee research. It argues that much social scientific research is intrinsically dehumanizing, as it simplifies and reduces human experience to categories and models that are amenable to analysis. Attempts to humanize research may productively challenge and unsettle powerful and dominant hegemonic structures that frame policy and research on forced migration. However, it may replace them with new research frameworks, now imbued authority as representing more authentic or real-life experiences. Rather than claiming the moral high ground of humanizing research, the more limited, and perhaps more honest, ambition should be to recognize the inevitable dehumanization embedded in refugee research and seek to dehumanize differently.

Carving Out Space for Equitable Collaborative Research in Protracted Displacement

AbstractResearch collaborations between global north and south have a long history in studies of forced migration, and discussions of power relations in such research relationships have existed for a long time. We are two researchers working across the global south–north divide, and this article reflects on our attempt to navigate the research industry amid the ‘Syrian refugee research complex’. We discuss our attempt to carve out a space for more equitable research collaborations across the north–south divide and between partners. We unpack the existing power dynamics and the systems attached to them, e.g. institutional constraints, funding regulations, budget restrictions, and residues of post-colonial power dynamics. We then reflect on how these dynamics help to maintain the north’s hegemony in the research and knowledge production cycle. We argue that collaborative research can gain from a reflective practice that focuses on the relational aspects involved in research. This can be achieved through a ‘friendship approach’ rather than ‘tick-the-box guidelines’.

The immediate, the exceptional and the historical: Eritrean migration and research since the 1960s

ABSTRACT This article discusses the historical development and dialectical interconnections between migration from Eritrea and knowledge construction since the 1960s by academics, migrants and the refugee regime. We explore how knowledge about Eritrea is grounded in dynamics of immediacy: the direct experience of persecution and refuge; fieldwork on the ground; and the urgency of responding to refugee claims and crises. Refugee narratives must also demonstrate exceptionality: how does one’s experience reflect individual persecution as well as “objective” country conditions? And yet, refugee narratives and experiences are historically contingent and thick, with the dynamics of persecution often rooted less in the immediate and exceptional, and more in the collective, sedimented past. By illuminating the relationships among the immediate, the exceptional and the historical in refugee migration and research, we show how substantive scholarship can be circumscribed and shaped by political conditions on the ground and by humanitarian imperatives.

Walls, Cracks and Change: The Challenges and Opportunities of Critically Engaged Research Within Current Academic and Refugee Research Structures

Many consider academic research an important means to address societal inequality of marginalized groups, such as refugees. However, transformative research arguably requires critically engaged practices that consider and transform dominant exclusive structures permeating both society and knowledge production. This paper discusses challenges and opportunities of such research practices, especially given power and (neoliberal) politics around knowledge production within Dutch academic and refugee research structures. Based on 14 researchers’ narratives, the results reveal how critically engaged refugee research is challenged by its marginalized position, academic pressures and culture as well as the recently emerged ‘refugee research business’. However, the paper also uncovers various ways in which researchers manoeuvre within challenging and facilitating structures by operating outside or in the margins of academic structures, making use of facilitating spaces and strategically employing dominant discourses. Finally, researchers arguably transform academic structures by challenging dominant research paradigms and transforming the institution of academics itself.

Mental Health and Wellbeing Impacts of Societal Attitudes Towards Forcibly Displaced Young People

Background: In less time than it takes to read this sentence, someone somewhere in the world will be forcibly displaced. With exponential increases in displacement likely to continue, research into the resettlement experiences and mental health of forcibly displaced people is essential. There is an abundance of research pertaining to the mental health and wellbeing of refugee populations and research that investigates societal attitudes towards refugees. However, there is a little research on the direct impacts of societal attitudes on the mental health and wellbeing of those from a refugee-like background, particularly young people.
 Method: This scoping review seeks to systematically explore the academic and grey literature around both positive and negative societal attitudes in host countries, and the subsequent positive and negative impacts on young people from a refugee-like background. The search strategy consists of synonyms for the four basic constructs (youth, displaced people, mental health, attitudes). Six scholarly databases and grey literature will be searched. To be included in the Review, papers must study the affective component of attitudes in host countries, as well as reporting on the mental health impacts on young people from a refugee-like background. Findings will be thematically analysed using NVivo and presented in the full Scoping Review.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Working Conditions, Employment, Career Development and Well-Being of Refugee Researchers

The ongoing ‘refugee crisis’ of the past years has led to the migration of refugee researchers (RRs) to European countries. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, RRs often had to work from home and/or to continue their social, cultural and economic integration process under new conditions. An online survey carried out to explore the impact of the pandemic on the refugee researchers showed that RRs found it difficult to adapt their everyday working life to the ‘home’ setting. The majority have had neither a suitable work environment at home nor the appropriate technology. Although they stated that they are rather pleased with the measures taken by the public authorities, they expressed concern about their vulnerability due to their precarious contracts and the bureaucratic asylum procedures, as the pandemic has had a negative impact on these major issues. The majority of RRs working in academia seem not to have been affected at all as far as their income is concerned, while the majority of those employed in other sectors became unemployed during the pandemic (58%). Recommendations are provided to the public authorities and policy makers to assist RRs to mitigate the consequences of the pandemic on their life.

Refugees and Covid-19: Beyond Health Risks to Insecurity.

The Covid‐19 pandemic severely threatens refugees: Most refugees live in developing countries with poor health care systems, the lockdowns left many refugees without income, border closures prevented forced migrants from their right to seek asylum and anti‐refugee sentiment as well as insecurity in refugee settlements increased. Building on past refugee research and reports on refugee‐related challenges during the Covid‐19 crisis, we explain how bad sanitation, inadequate accommodation, additional restrictions of movement and employment and language barriers increase grievances among refugees and tensions between refugees and host populations. Particularly in large and overcrowded settlements these issues can lead to violent conflict, as we demonstrate with a case study of the Moria refugee camp in Greece. Yet, the impact of Covid‐19 on refugees generally lacks politicization, and many governments are reluctant or unable to provide adequate housing and sanitation to refugees. We present policy recommendations for improving refugee protection amidst Covid‐19, including not only the prevention of further spread of the virus but also that of insecurity.

Refugee research in the shadow of fear.

What does it mean to conduct community-based and praxis-oriented research at a time when those whose lives you study and with whom you work are the subjects of increasing levels of xenophobia, marginalization, and demonization? How does one conceive of research ethics, of the relationship between the roles of scholars, teachers, and citizens in light of such dynamics? In what ways can scholarship help to intervene in the world around us, in particular to improve the perception and amplify the voices of marginalized groups and individuals? This paper considers these issues in the context of research ethics and the growing field of community geography. I draw in particular on an example from a multi-year study of refugee resettlement in non-traditional destinations across the US. When the study began, refugee policies and settlement patterns were little known to the general public in the US. Since then, refugees and migration more broadly have become increasingly prominent and controversial worldwide. In this paper I explore some of the challenges regarding collaborations between university researchers and community partners, highlighting the tensions exposed through the use of the visualization technique known as Photovoice, meant to provide alternative perspectives on ideas for urban change amongst participants. I also consider some ideas for steps to address these challenges, including the building of networks and training for researchers and formalized partnership processes for community groups.

Power, Participation, and ‘peer researchers’: Addressing Gaps in Refugee Research Ethics Guidance

Abstract Driven by efforts to recognize the agency of refugees and thus the importance of their participation in research about their lives, refugees are increasingly being engaged to work as collaborators and assistants during research in refugee camps and settlements. Yet whilst academic research attends to the ethics of research with refugees, existing guidance fails to recognize or attempt to mitigate the specific ways in which refugees working as research assistants may be impacted by taking on this role. This is a particularly important issue for consideration in research within camps and settlements, where refugee researchers are embedded within complex relations of power that include communities, governance structures, and humanitarian agencies. Drawing on our experiences of carrying out research in Nakivale settlement in Uganda in 2017, we show some of the challenges that refugee researchers experience and reflect on the practical implications for efforts to undertake more ethical research.

Career Adaptability Process in Refugee Resettlement: The Case of Venezuelans in Colombia

In this study, we test the theoretical model of career adaptability of refugees’ successful resettlement proposed by Campion (2018). The theoretical model is grounded on career construction and social network theory. We tested the model in a sample of 87 Venezuelans living and working in Colombia. We combined quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The quantitative results provided partial support for Campion’s model. However, an alternative model tested suggest that career adaptability has a direct relationship with subjective resettlement (i.e., life satisfaction and psychological health). In addition, cultural identification played a buffering effect on the harmful effects of discrimination on subjective resettlement. Qualitative results from eight in-deep interviews, helped to analyzed in a deeper way the process that may underlay refugee resettlement, specially the role of social networks, which are important for the migrants, but are not key for a successful work resettlement. Our study contributes to previous refugee research by testing a novel model of work resettlement focusing in a group of refugees that move from a home developing country to a host country that also is an emerging economy.

Examining Best Practices in Fostering Refugees’ Careers and Labor Market Integration

Displaced by violence, war, and persecution, millions of refugees seek shelter abroad. Host country agencies and researchers in turn wonder how best to integrate these people into society and the workplace, given the financial and psychological benefits of work for refugees and host country societies alike. When trying to obtain employment, refugees often face barriers to their professional advancement, find themselves disadvantaged when searching for work and end up unemployed, underemployed, or placed into temporary work; all of which jeopardize both their well-being and integration into society. Yet vocational research on refugees is still in its infancy. Scholars lack in- depth insights into this diverse yet distinctive migrant group and into the roles, responsibilities, and actions of different actors involved in the process of managing refugees’ vocational integration. This symposium addresses this complexity and responds to calls to (1) further study refugees’ vocational integration and (2) integrate multilevel perspectives to examine the factors that affect refugees’ vocational integration management. Incorporating insights from six countries, we contribute conceptually and practically to refugees’ career development and labor market integration across contexts and governmental systems. First, we extend career research by exploring refugees’ agency and career-related activities, the means to enhance their job search, and the potential of and cross-cultural variations in refugee entrepreneurship. Second, we further diversity and HRM research by unraveling how a diverse group of actors can support refugees’ vocational integration and how adopted programs can facilitate refugees’ job search. Lastly, we further knowledge on how to conduct ethical refugee research. Refugees’ Self-Regulation in Job Search and Vocational Integration: Learning Independent Action Presenter: Katja Wehrle; Justus-Liebig U. Giessen Presenter: Ute-Christine Klehe; Justus-Liebig U. Giessen Presenter: Mari Kira; U. of Michigan Presenter: Jan Alexander Häusser; Justus-Liebig U. Giessen The Political Arena of Refugee Inclusion at Work Presenter: Lena Knappert; VU Amsterdam Presenter: Angela Kornau; Helmut Schmidt U. Presenter: Martina Maletzky; U. of Passau Presenter: Renate Ortlieb; U. of Graz Presenter: Hans Van Dijk; Tilburg U. How Do State Programs Facilitate Labor Market Integration of Refugees? Presenter: Renate Ortlieb; U. of Graz Presenter: Petra Eggenhofer-Rehart; U. of Graz, Austria Presenter: Sandra Leitner; The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies Presenter: Roland Hosner; German Center for Integration and Migration Research Presenter: Michael Landesmann; The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies Refugees’ Readiness for Entrepreneurship: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Presenter: Martin M. Baluku; Makerere U. school of Psychology Presenter: Florence Nansubuga; Makerere U. school of Psychology Presenter: Kathleen Otto; Philipps-U. Marburg Developing Privacy Technology to Responsibly Collect Smartphone Data Among Refugees Presenter: Lisa E. Baranik; U. at Albany, State U. of New York Presenter: Liyue Fan; U. of North Carolina, Charlotte Presenter: Rachel Williamson Smith; Louisiana State U.

Assessing excellence in community-based research: Lessons from research with Syrian refugee newcomers

In this article, we critically reflect on three Syrian refugee research projects that were conducted simultaneously in Ontario, Canada, in order to: (1) strengthen the community system of support for refugee newcomers; (2) address social isolation of Syrian parents and seniors; and (3) promote wellbeing of Syrian youth. Our purpose in this article is to demonstrate a tangible way of assessing research projects which claim to be community-based, and in so doing gain a deeper understanding of how research can be a means of contributing to refugee newcomer resilience. Our assessment of the three studies was done through the reflective lens of the Community Based Research Excellence Tool (CBRET). CBRET is a reflective tool designed to assess the quality and impact of community-based research projects, considering the six domains of community-driven, participation, rigour, knowledge mobilisation, community mobilisation and societal impact. Our assessment produced four main lessons. The first two lessons point to the benefit of holistic emphasis on the six categories covered in the CBRET tool, and to adaptability in determining corresponding indicators when using CBRET. The last two lessons suggest that research can be pursued in such a way that reinforces the rescue story and promotes the safety of people who arrive as refugees. Our lessons suggest that both the findings and the process of research can be interventions towards social change. The diversity of the three case examples also demonstrates that these lessons can be applied to projects which focus on both individual-level and community-level outcomes.

An empirical–analytical approach to the study of recent refugee migrants in Germany

Given the recent surge in interest in refugee research, this editorial discusses whether the study of refugees’ migration and integration requires entirely new theoretical and methodological approaches. We make the case that refugee migration is a special type of migration and that refugee integration is subject to similar laws and regularities as the integration of all kinds of immigrants. Therefore, it should be studied using conventional theoretical and analytical approaches to empirical-analytical migration and integration research. Obviously, special conditions of refugee migration apply, such as specific patterns of refugees’ selectivity, health and resource endowment, settlement conditions, and reception or integration services. However, such peculiarities do not represent distinct mechanisms; they are simply background conditions for more general mechanisms. Contributions to this Special Issue, which all rely on new high-quality data from Germany, best highlight the universality of general mechanisms of immigrant integration, on the one hand, and the relevance of refugee migrants’ specific characteristics and conditions, on the other hand.

Arts-based methods in refugee research – Creating sanctuary Caroline Lenette

Arts-based methods in refugee research – Creating sanctuary <i>Caroline Lenette</i>

Questionnaire Design and Translation for Refugee Populations: Lessons Learned from the REHEAL Study

AbstractSurveying the refugee population poses particular challenges: what measurement and culture effects need to be taken into account? Are some of the constructs related to refugees unique or can constructs used in other surveys be adapted? Due to considerable variation in educational background, in trauma history or in perception of ethnicity or gender roles in refugee populations, one needs to raise the question whether a one-size-fits-all approach is suitable when designing a questionnaire for refugee populations. Drawing upon the experience of the REHEAL study conducted in 2016 during the early phase of refugees' settlement in Greek refugee camps, the article addresses the particular challenges when designing and translating a questionnaire for multinational, multicultural and potentially traumatized refugee populations, residing in refugee accommodation settings. A post hoc scrutiny of the Arabic and Farsi versions of the REHEAL questionnaire forms the basis of this article in order to empirically inform best practices in designing and translating questionnaires for special populations. The authors set the stage by summarizing key aspects of concept and measurement equivalence in cross-cultural research, and then by expanding on the fact that cross-cultural differences in response styles or response sets can affect comparability. Translation and adaptation challenges are examined and illustrated by examples. This article serves to empirically document the benefit and pitfalls of appropriate measurements for use in refugee research.