What Does a Humane Infrastructure for Research Look Like?

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• refugee research
• migration studies
• humanization
• ethics
• research hot spots
• interdisciplinary research