Sponsored by the Citizens, Nations and Migration (CNaM) Network, the GLIMER Project (JPI ERA Net / Horizon 2020), the department of Social Anthropology and the School of Social and Political Science, all at the University of Edinburgh.
This workshop invites academic researchers at all stages of their career as well as practitioners working with displaced populations in the Global North and South to reflect on and challenge prevailing approaches to research ethics. We particularly encourage postgraduate students and early-career researchers to participate. Across the academic-practitioner divide, we will ask the following questions: Is ‘do no harm’ enough when thinking about research with displaced people? What does this type of research do, i.e. how does it affect study participants and others, often in long-lasting and unpredictable ways? Is research with displaced people always an ethical endeavour? How do (1) research norms (2) their colonial and racialised histories and (3) their ongoing legacies for displaced people in the Global North and South shape study design and practice?
This is a one-day workshop; it takes place at the University of Edinburgh’s George Square campus on 2nd October 2019 from 9:30 to 16:45. The workshop is free, including a coffee break in the morning and a vegetarian lunch. Please let us know if you have any particular dietary requirements. To ensure productive discussions, the maximum number of participants is 30. To make the most of the workshop, we hope that participants will stay for the whole day.
The event will be partially guided by a small number of presentations by invited individuals who have pioneered creative and ethically sustainable approaches to engaging with refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and other mobile populations. Speaker and facilitator details can be found in the programme below.
The day will mainly involve discussion groups that draw on participants’ personal experiences with and aspirations for conducting research with displaced people in various geographic contexts and institutional settings. This workshop is an opportunity for collaborative learning that brings together diverse forms of knowledge and lived experiences from academia, humanitarian and civil society action.
If you want to reserve a place, please email Dr Ann Wagner at awagner3@ed.ac.uk.
The workshop will be followed by an evening keynote by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Professor in Migration and Refugee Studies at UCL, on ‘Refugee-refugee Relationality, Solidarity and Care in/as Research’. The keynote will take place in Appleton Tower Lecture Theatre 5, 6-8pm. Prof Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is one of the UK’s leading scholars in Forced Migration Studies; her two most recent projects Refugee Hosts and Southern Responses to Displacement have been instrumental in addressing the Northern-bias in Migration Studies, by changing the ways in which we think about refugees and local populations in the Global South: not as ‘aid recipients’, but as first responders and contributors to global debates around home-making, power and solidarity.
Please register separately for Prof Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s keynote at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/refugee-refugee-relationality-solidarity-and-care-inas-research-tickets-72933661545.