Promise and Challenges of Fieldwork with the Forcibly Displaced

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Description

This workshop aims to facilitate a focused, empirically based learning experience about the challenges and the value added of fieldwork with forced migrants. This will cover several locations and scales, from transnational routes of (im)mobility, to the geographical and administrative borders they face on their way "north"; from the liminal spaces of waiting in which refugees get stuck, to their local contexts and trajectories of (re)settlement. Thanks to a rich and diverse panel of ethnographers, the training session will cover four main questions: i. Access to the "field", in legal, ethical, relational and emotional terms; ii. Appropriate ways to facilitate the emergence of participant voices, and possibly their active engagement, against a background of institutional fear and mistrust, and often of past suffering and violence; iii. Potential of ethnographic writing in conjugating analytical depth with narrative clarity and respect for people's circumstances, as opposed to unnecessarily judgmental, victimizing or "disembodied" accounts; iv. Acknowledgement of the role of rapport, positionality, and of the interplay between academic and political engagement. Each question will be discussed through field examples and translated into helpful recommendations for participants. In terms of learning objectives, the workshop will enhance participants' reflexive awareness about the methodological, relational and ethical challenges inherent in fieldwork. It will also make them attentive to the influence of the institutional, political and economic macro scenario - in essence, the border and deportation regime - in which individual ethnographic encounters are situated, and shaped. Last, the workshop will facilitate recognition of the intersection between distinct identities, demographics and aspirations that lies behind administrative categories such as asylum seeker or refugee. Each presenter will revisit, in a training perspective, their ethnographic experience in the US, on the Mexico-US border, or in Southern Europe.

Sub Unit

• Workshops / Policy and Research Workshop

Presenters

• Paolo Boccagni, University of Trento

• Jennifer Huynh, University of Notre Dame

• Chiara Galli, University of Chicago

• Daniel E. Martinez, University of Arizona

Session Organizer

• David Scott FitzGerald, University of California-San Diego