Rachel: Welcome to Between Borders! We are a collective of researchers exploring the challenges around precarious migration and researching it. We reflect on how people working - or doing research - in this area can better support people who are moving or have moved across borders.

I’m Rachel Benchekroun. In today’s episode, we’ll be asking: How can we do migration research ethically between borders and social injustice?

I’ll be talking with Amandas Ong, Sabina Barone, Franca Roeschert and Hend Aly. In this episode, we aim to have an honest conversation about our experiences with various methodologies in migration research and some of the challenges we encountered. We hope our open reflections will be helpful for anyone working with people who have migrated across borders, whether as a researcher or in another capacity. Amandas, can you tell us a bit about your research, and your methodology?

Amandas: I would be delighted to! I am a doctoral researcher at UCL Anthropology, and over the course of 18 months, I carried out research with women seeking asylum who were living across Birmingham, London and Wolverhampton, to better understand how desire and dreaming shape their lived experiences of the UK in a hostile and volatile immigration landscape. During my fieldwork from July 2023 to the end of 2024, the Safety of Rwanda Act and Illegal Migration Act were passed, making it legal for the UK government to deport people seeking asylum to Rwanda. My ethnographic approach involved deep hanging out, creative writing and informal conversations, with my participants setting the tone, pace and type of activity at every step of the way, which I’m happy to talk about later on in this podcast.

Rachel: Thanks Amandas! Sabina, how about you?

Sabina: Hi, Rachel, hi everyone. My doctoral research examined the ‘voluntary’ return programme managed by the International Organization for Migration from Morocco towards West Africa. I focused on the experiences of its users or beneficiaries, who are West African young men, women and families. I also observed the everyday operations of the scheme and the interactions among different institutional actors involved in it. Voluntary return programmes are highly controversial, as it is disputed to what extent returning is truly voluntary and whether those schemes effectively help people in vulnerable conditions and promote development. I wanted to be outside Europe, as much migration research remains focused on it. I spent almost 20 months in Morocco, mainly based at a migrants’ shelter in a zone near the Moroccan borders with Algeria and Spain. I practised an ethnographic or immersive methodology, including participant observations, informal interviews, deep hanging out, group discussions, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. I also volunteered at the migrants’ shelter and ended up tracking online the trajectories of my participants post-return for a further 19 months.

Rachel: Thanks Sabina. And Franca, how did you carry out your research?

Franca: Hi all - it’s really great to be on the podcast again! In my PhD research, I am interested in how people with precarious immigration status who have settled in London experience the city and how they are involved in campaigning for their rights. In terms of methods, I conducted long-term participant observation in two groups that organise for migrant rights. I also used walking interviews and emotional maps - I will speak more about these creative methods and their limitations later on.

Rachel: Thanks Franca. And Hend, you’ll be starting your fieldwork in September, is that right?

Hend: Yes, that’s true, exciting time coming up! I will be moving to Madrid end of September and my field research will take place in two neighbourhoods: one in Madrid called Lavapies and one in Brussels called Molenbeek, and what I am planning to do is to explore how the residents of two neighbourhoods experience and navigate their legal statuses and inequalities they produce through assigning varying entitlements. So I will focus on three spheres of everyday life: where your legal status affects your work conditions but also how it affects claiming rights and even has an impact on the most mundane activities like going shopping or commuting to work. So I will also do ethnographic fieldwork - I will use some walking interviews but I will also use participatory photography. And I’m hoping that the participants will be involved in co-designing these methods, and determining the pace of the walk, where we are going to go, and also what to photograph and how to interpret these photos.

Rachel: Thanks Hend - that does sound exciting! We're all committed to doing research that contributes to social justice. But what are the challenges in practice? Sabina.

Sabina: Well indeed there are so many challenges, but I think that the main ones are linked to the world we live in - a world that is marked by racism, economic divides, socio-legal and gender-based inequalities - and so the risk is of reproducing them in our research. In particular, I see three main challenges or risks associated with reproducing inequalities in research, and I believe they may also be relevant to migration practice. I call them the primacy given to policy assumptions; the dehumanisation affecting people on the move; and the use of academic or expert knowledge without contextualizing.

Rachel: That sounds really interesting. Can you tell us a bit more about these challenges, or risks?

Sabina: I think the first risk arises when research validates policy definitions and assumptions, overlooking the complexity of migration reality. If we delegitimise the experiences of people on the move when they do not align with policy expectations, it becomes easy to hold them responsible for the failure of migration policies. In the case of my research on voluntary return schemes, the design of the programme is loaded with assumptions about migration and mobility choices that respond more to what states would like migration to be, rather than to how it functions and what people aspire to. On the contrary, I wanted to understand how people viewed and used the return scheme, or refused to use it. Their criticisms and demands help explain why the scheme did not work as planned.

Another challenge has to do with the everyday experiences of violence, dehumanisation and racialisation that people on the move go through. In my research context, being so close to two borders where harsh migration control was underway, I could not approach potential participants without considering their safety, their potential traumas, and also their basic needs. Indeed, research ethics is centred on ‘do not harm’, and designing safeguarding criteria and procedures, which I did. I also relied on local organisations to offer basic assistance in fields I could not provide on my own, for example health assistance, medicines, shelter, food. However, no matter how good the safeguarding or the assistance can be, during the research, I often felt powerless, witnessing the profound effects of violence and inequalities on the lives of my participants and kept asking myself how to offer more support proactively.

Rachel: Yes, that must have been difficult for you as a researcher. And can you tell us about the third challenge that you identified?

Sabina: Yes, the third challenge is related to the hierarchies surrounding academic or expert knowledge and productive research. How we formulate questions, when and how we pose them, in what language and tone, through what means… a standardised survey rather than an open-ended interview... All this can intimidate, create distance, or confusion, and be unsuitable for some contexts. Despite all the so-called ‘expert knowledge’ one may have, it is necessary to listen first and understand how to translate one’s research questions, or social programme objectives for that matter, in ways that are meaningful to participants. Again, the emphasis on controlling data, via audio-recording, standardised questionnaires, can be traumatic for people who have experienced invasive migration controls or mistrust administrative practices. People do not open up and speak their minds if they feel uncomfortable. So, in my case, I decided not to audio-record interviews for this reason. Unfortunately, there is no perfect solution to these challenges, and we must continually reevaluate and adjust our research practice.

Rachel: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing these reflections, Sabina. Franca, what challenges have you encountered in doing research?

Franca: These points that Sabina raised there are really important and really interesting. While we want our research to contribute to social justice, in practice, it can be really very tricky to do so. As those who have done research in academia will know, the institutional processes we have to follow as academic researchers are often rigid and require linear timeframes, like for example making a decision early on on what methods we want to use. Yet the lives of people with precarious immigration status are unpredictable - they are subjected to decisions made by others, and that includes being moved to a different house or changes to one’s immigration status. What that means is that even though we seek to centre the people we do research with, and make their knowledge visible and we want to be responsive to their needs, this can really be at odds with what the university or other institutions expect from us.

Rachel: Yes, I can relate to that too. And Hend, you’re planning your fieldwork - what challenges are you experiencing or anticipating?

Hend: Yeah, as Franca mentioned, there are a lot of barriers, a lot of institutional barriers, and one of them could be visas for researchers. So some of the researchers are themselves migrants, and they face a lot of limitations. Planning my own ethnographic research in Europe as a non-European national student made me experience how non-European nationals and residents are excluded from such research. I consider myself privileged, as I enjoy significant mobility rights. Still, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Europe remains complex, acquiring a visa is difficult, expensive, and takes a long time, it also requires a lot of documents and involves endorsement of a broad range of institutions. So borders and visa regulations make it nearly impossible for students from institutions based for instance in Africa or the Middle East to conduct ethnographic research in Europe. In contrast, European students enjoy greater mobility and freedoms to conduct research in other regions. So these disparities just highlight the importance of decolonising research, and raising a lot of questions about who’s allowed to conduct research, on whom, addressing what issues and using what frameworks.

Rachel: Thanks, Hend, yes these are really important questions. So creative or arts-based research methods seem to be increasingly popular as a way of addressing some of the challenges of conducting research in the context of migration. So what are those methods? And how are you using them? Coming back to you, Hend?

Hend: There are various methods and as you mentioned they are gaining a lot of attention in migration research. These could be photography, drawing, story telling, filming, and emotional maps. Some of us used some of these methods. Using such methods provides the researchers with tools to engage research participants as experts of their everyday lives, and contributors to the research playing a more substantial role than just being informants who are expected to answer questions to inform the research. So this is especially important during a time of growing hostile discourse and policies against migration. These methods prioritise people’s perspectives on their own experiences, and we really need that during such times. It is very important to challenge dominant narratives of migration. Such methods also pay special attention to listening, building trust, allowing convivial and humane relations to emerge during research, and exchange to happen between the researcher and the participants. In my research, I will be using participatory photography, as I mentioned earlier. The participants will be invited to take photos, they will decide what to photograph to reflect on their own everyday lives in their neighbourhood. They will also take part in co-interpreting what they have photographed. I am hoping that through doing that would give the space for the participants to reflect on their experience and produce material which can potentially be used for local causes.

Rachel: Thank you, Hend! Amandas, can you tell us how you were using arts-based methods in your research?

Amandas: Yes, absolutely! One of my field sites was a creative writing course for women survivors of trafficking, and many of them were also seeking asylum. I was invited to teach the course as a volunteer, because I knew the organiser from some years back in my capacity as a journalist, covering issues on social justice and women’s rights. And so in my view, the course was a good way to get to know women whom I was hoping to work with for my project, while also offering them something concrete in return. Over two months, on a weekly basis, we wrote poetry together, short stories, and even short film scripts. And one thing I was adamant about, thinking about the creative approach, was that the women didn’t feel like the classes were aimed at getting them to write about their trauma or their traumatic experiences. I say this as somebody who totally appreciates the importance of narrative therapy, and there is absolutely a space for that, but this wasn’t something that I felt confident about providing without relevant professional experience, and more importantly, I also wanted the emphasis to be on creating a space of freedom and respite, where the women could write about things that they enjoyed and laugh a lot in the process, which is I think something that we don’t think about very much as researchers, discounting the importance of joy. So people seeking asylum are regularly forced to recount harrowing experiences in a way that reduces their trauma to a singular narrative that suits the state’s narrow definition of what a refugee is supposed to look like. And what I really wanted to do here, whilst also pursuing my own research objectives, was to move far away from that idea of storytelling as much as possible, and to encourage women to think of stories as something they had the power to craft, rather than be weaponised against them. And so this course actually ended up being one of my most favourite parts of fieldwork. We laughed a lot together, and the women wrote such beautiful things. So for example one of them wrote about a fictional island that she had discovered, and she populated it with her ideal society where communities lived together and where trees hummed in the moonlight. There was another woman who wrote surrealistic stories involving a superhero based on herself, who helped people solve petty crimes. And the organiser got feedback from them that the course was a way for them to express some of their innermost desires – which actually is one of the aspects of my research anyway – and that for a few of them, it was a form of escapism from their everyday lives, which they might find depressing because of a combination of factors depending on individual circumstances. So as Franca has already said, many of them face multiple issues such as destitution, they might be estranged from their community because of the way the Home Office disperses them randomly and without notice, they might live in substandard accommodation, or they might simply be grappling with poor mental health from the experiences that they had endured prior to and on the way to the UK.

Another thing that I also wanted to draw attention to whilst talking about creative methods is that I have noticed that institutions often elevate the use of buzzwords like “co-production” or “collaboration” as a key or encouraged component of research. And creative methods like the course that I just talked about are often discussed as if they’re a form of co-production because it does involve working together in the same space as participants, but I think true co-production, in particular, would require a commitment to equity in a way that as researchers we are realistically unable to provide all of the time: so for example realistically we aren’t parting with our possessions, our material wealth, we are not really sharing half of what we have with our participants. More importantly, the thesis has to be written by us alone; we don’t write it with the people that we work with. I think that being careless with the use of the words “co-production” and “collaboration” can end up being self-serving instead when we are not thoughtful about it. That being said, we can still harness creative methods ethically – in my case I felt that it was an opportunity to offer the women an activity that they enjoyed, and I was constantly tweaking the content of the classes based on what they said they liked. So above all, working creatively and ethically means listening and paying attention to what our participants want, rather than just going with institutional assumptions of what collaboration looks like.

Rachel: You’ve given us a lot to think about there, yeah some very important questions. Franca, how have you been using creative methods in your research?

Franca: Yeah I totally agree with some points that Amandas has made here. Creative methods have been praised for being able to shift power dynamics, represent diverse types of knowledge and for making participants’ lived experiences visible. But I think it’s important not to see creative methods as the magic potion to challenges in doing research ethically. Using creative methods can present challenges in itself. So they can fail to meet participants' physical and psychological needs. They can still exclude certain types of knowledge, or undermine the principle of co-creation. Interestingly, these are the exact issues that we have criticised traditional qualitative and quantitative methods for. I used a few different methods that are deemed creative in my research. In my PhD in particular, I used walking interviews and emotional maps. For the emotional maps, I asked participants to draw a map of the places they go to in London, but as I did one-to-one interviews, this created a dynamic in which participants completed the task in front of me, which was kind of hierarchical, so it was almost like I was a teacher and they were a student, and in that sense it made the research less co-creative. And many methods also rely on specific skills and abilities - so one of my participants had a visual impairment, others had mobility restrictions, which meant that one method or the other didn’t work out for them. Another participant mentioned that she didn’t have much opportunity to draw as a child, which meant that she felt less confident doing it now. And even though I knew most participants before the research, I didn’t have all of this information beforehand when I needed to decide on my methods for the ethics application. So the process we need to go through makes it very difficult to be able to meet the needs of people we do research with, or adequately represent their knowledge. But being flexible, as I mentioned before, is not always easy within institutional processes like ethics applications. So I think it poses the question of what we, as migration researchers within institutions, can do to make our research more just, and the need to reflect honestly about our limitations. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use creative methods - in fact I am still a big fan of creative methods! But it’s about building flexibility and multiple methods into our research design as much as we can, and also to push where we can to change institutional practices that limit us, so that we can be more responsive to participants’ needs.

Hend: Yeah, it is amazing how much creative methods can support our research on migration, but as Franca mentioned we need to be aware of their limitations. Creativity is not an aim in itself and it is not a magic stick which will make our research ethical or convivial or participatory. In that sense, I see convivial and participatory research as an ongoing endeavour, we keep on working hard to achieve as much of it as possible and it’s not at the end of the day an outcome in itself. This also means that as researchers we need to be reflective, have the ethical courage to recognise the flaws, mistakes or failures and be open about them. This will help us, as Ben Gidley, a migration scholar, interestingly points out, to “fail better” at conducting more convivial and participatory research next time.

Rachel: Thanks Hend. Immersive or ethnographic methodologies, that promote prolonged sharing of participants’ everyday lives during the research, can be another way to address ethical and social justice challenges in research. So Amandas, what is your experience with these approaches, and the role of time in research?

Amandas: Yes, I think for so many researchers, time is an omnipresent issue for us, because one of the biggest challenges of fieldwork that maybe isn’t talked about enough is that you always wish you have more time to foster relationships with the people that you’re working with, so that they feel comfortable with you, they are fully acquainted with you and your research, and most importantly so that these relationships don’t feel extractive or transactional, which is really important to all of us I think. And I believe that all of that can happen even if the most well-intentioned researcher plunges straight into the process of getting consent forms signed and interviews done and basically all of the stuff that we are expected to do as researchers. But at the same time, time and money are inextricably linked. Most of us have limited funding for our projects, so we can’t afford to spend vast amounts of time in the field. Doing fieldwork becomes a tricky balancing act between meeting deadlines and institutional expectations such as finishing a PhD in four years, and ensuring that the people we do research with don’t feel as if they’re being rushed or pressured into working with us. So I’ll share maybe a little bit more about my experience of fieldwork. The first four months of my fieldwork were just focused on building rapport, and I definitely had to overcome anxiety that I wasn’t progressing with enough ethnographic insight. And now that I look back, I now realise that it was vital to trust the process of getting to know people and for them to get to know me, too. Also, often I forgot that ethnography was unfolding around me all the time even if I felt that I was a bit slow-going in developing genuinely deep, trusting relationships, and I just needed to pay more attention to the nuances of everything happening within my field site. I was volunteering in various grassroots organisations around the UK, so I met most of the women I work with in the context of offering some sort of service or practical help, whether it was accessing college classes, scholarships for people seeking asylum, or filling in paperwork that the Home Office was asking for. I think it’s also important that I mention that unfortunately, the majority of the women I work with suffer from severe and complex trauma, some of it no doubt still untold. Time then becomes an even more important factor in my work, because of its heightened palpability in their lives, contrasted against the lack of control over how time passes. Several of them have actually explicitly told me that they felt forced by the Home Office or other institutions into telling their stories prematurely when they were mentally unprepared, in a way that was invasive and humiliating. In addition, they have also alluded to this sense of being on borrowed time, or in limbo, whilst they wait for months or even years for a decision on their asylum applications. So you can really see how time also weighs a lot on my participants. So taking that into consideration, one aspect of my methodology that was really crucial was that after the first four months, when I had approached the women I thought I would be likely to work with for the rest of my project, I let them set the pace of how we worked together, and also the activities that we did together. For example, one woman I work with is very curious about museums, so most of our deep hanging out takes place in museums. Another one loves looking at flowers, so we go to public parks a lot, whenever she’s free. I have actually found that when most of our conversations take place in a setting and at a time that they’re comfortable with and they feel like they don’t only have two hours over the course of an interview to clinically retell a story, they’re actually more likely to share their experiences which then become extremely valuable for ethnography. And by their accounts, spending time together with me for fieldwork has felt fun and safe, and I’m really glad that it is that way.

Rachel: Thanks so much for sharing that, Amandas. I think it’s really interesting how you’ve been led by your participants in thinking about where to spend time with them, so that it’s spaces where they feel comfortable. Sabina, how about you, can you tell us more about your experience of doing ethnographic research?

Sabina: Yes, with pleasure. So in my case, I knew from the beginning that the subject of my research needed a lot of time, familiarity and mutual trust. The decision to return is a painful and intimate choice. It requires abandoning aspirations to a better life elsewhere, and negotiating the return with the relatives and friends who supported one’s migration. Therefore, it can be a lengthy decision-making process, plagued by second thoughts. Sure, one can limit or speed up the research by contacting only people who have already enrolled in a return scheme, but I wanted to understand how the decision emerged and evolved. Moreover, over time, I discovered that many people who enrolled in the return scheme subsequently dropped out. So, I needed to wait and accompany people’s changes of mind. Time and waiting were also critical to observe the return procedure, as it often got stuck due to bureaucratic or economic barriers, changes in funding of the implementing organisation, and complex relations with consulates. Therefore, being based at the migrants’ shelter for the most part of 20 months allowed me to build familiarity by sharing daily tasks, such as distributing food and accompanying people to hospitals, and it also gave me the continuity to follow people’s paperwork through different offices. Moreover, as Amandas also mentioned, time is also essential to heal. The shelter where I was based provided a safe and caring space for individuals recovering from illnesses, wounds and traumas, allowing them to stay for as long as needed. So, I could discuss with the staff if and when it could be safe to approach a potential participant, and it was up to each participant to set the pace. Waiting for their recovery was not only a way to safeguard them, but it also allowed me to witness their resilience and determination to overcome adversity. Moreover, the immersion in everyday life was an incredibly enriching experience. It was a journey of building mutual trust and respect, as well as cultural relevance. My research participants came from 17 different African countries, and they were all polyglots, so the linguistic environment was rich in translanguaging practices and code-switching. As I speak several languages and dialects, I enjoy navigating across idiomatic expressions and linguistic jokes, but it takes a lot of dedication and patience. In fact, relevant insights into my research questions sometimes came unprovoked while doing everyday banal things. Once, while sipping tea in a group, young men started joking about enrolling in the voluntary return programme, calling it ‘signing the deportation’, hence ironically they were expressing their criticism of it. On another occasion, while washing dishes, a random comment sparked a revealing conversation about why people should never return to their home country once they have left it. Over time, my volunteering provided unexpected insights into the research as well. I accompanied migrant men and women through various administrative procedures, including obtaining birth certificates for babies born in Morocco to parents without residence in the country, obtaining residence permits, and authenticating parental consent forms for children’s return. I then realised the entanglement of these procedures with the return process, especially in the case of undocumented women who wanted to return to their country with children who did not have a birth certificate. This opened a relevant subfield of my research. Overall, ethnography or immersive methodologies are necessary to explore complex social issues, especially those with a personal dimension and that are understudied, as they cannot be predicted or tested through standardised questions. Moreover, they give cultural pertinence to research and even allow for reorienting the focus or questions of the study, if necessary. However, they are highly demanding in terms of time, personal effort, and require navigating uncertainty and adaptation on the spot.

Rachel: Thanks Sabina. And Hend, how about you - you’ve been planning your ethnographic research - what have you been thinking about?

Hend: Yes so for me as well, developing an understanding of everyday life and immersing myself in local dynamics, and giving enough time to build trust and understand the local context better and volunteer in local organisations and participate in local causes, and so on, is very important, just to immerse myself.
But as Amandas and Sabina have mentioned, to immerse yourself you need time, which is a very precious resource when conducting research with all these institutional limitations including specific time to finish your studies to meet university or student visa requirements. So in that sense, planning beforehand is key, but also having spaces like this space we have now, in this podcast, which enables exchanging experiences between researchers, are very crucial, to learn from each other, to plan better, to ask basic and sometimes naive questions and complex questions, and share concerns. So for me personally it is very helpful to listen to Amandas’ experience with the first period of her field research, which is very essential to build trust, but in the meantime you make very slow progress in terms of ethnographic insights, which can be stressful. But it’s also helpful to be aware of it, that these things happen at an early stage, expect them and this will help you to manage them a bit better.

Rachel: Thank you Hend. So Franca, since we’re talking about research that’s engaged with social justice, I was wondering if there were some specific practices of solidarity or social justice that you carried out during your research?

Franca: I think for me, solidarity from a researcher’s perspective is about being reflective about the injustices in our research practices, but probably more importantly, it’s about identifying the little ‘gaps’ or ‘cracks’ where we can contribute towards change. That means looking for ways in which we can use our skills, our experience and our knowledge to contribute to social justice. I think it also means using our position in the system and our - even if it’s limited - access to funds, to support the people involved in our research. Sometimes it’s not possible to effect lasting change, but we should at least look for some form of momentary relief - so for example providing research participants with vouchers and travel money for their participation. I’ve been volunteering for the organisation where I conducted my research. And it won’t change the system that I volunteer in this organisation, but I find it important that while the people who participated in my research are holding meetings to organise their campaigns, my role in those meetings is to support their political activism by helping with the set-up and cleaning up, so that they can focus on their political campaigning work.

Rachel: Thanks, that’s really interesting. Sabina, how about you?

Sabina: Well, in my case, as I mentioned earlier, the research allowed me to gather relevant administrative information on how to obtain a residence permit in Morocco, birth certificates for babies born in Morocco to parents without authorised residence, or access consular identity documents. All this information was not easily accessible to my research participants and their friends and networks. So, I intentionally shared the information with them and with personnel from local organisations to support those who were trying to obtain any of those ‘papers’, as people like to say. I ended up following closely some specific procedures. After several months of paperwork, we achieved that five babies obtained their birth certificates, a young man from Guinea received his residence permit in Morocco, and a few other young men obtained their consular cards or passports from their consulates. Needless to say, these are drops in the ocean of injustice and exclusion, but any step or change must be celebrated, and I’m pleased that my research and presence contributed to achieving something so tangible, which made a difference in someone’s life. The bottom line is that researchers need to think laterally about the impact of their research, not only in terms of outputs, such as policy papers and academic publications, but also in the ‘here and now’ of the people we are working with.

Rachel: Thanks Sabina. And Amandas, how about you?

Amandas: Yes I definitely agree with Franca and Sabina, and I think it’s ideal to embed activism and care into the heart of what we do, that’s absolutely important. I found that in the course of my fieldwork, the lines between my roles as a caseworker and an advocate and as a researcher became very blurred, and very often it was the case that who I was as a caseworker completely eclipsed who I was as a researcher. So for example, when one of the women I taught creative writing to was very ill and she needed to be taken to the NHS for a day surgery, I went with her because I knew that she was really frightened and she felt totally alone and she had nobody reliable to accompany her. She also mentioned to me many times about her fear of speaking to doctors as she felt like she was unable to articulate the specifics of her medical trauma, and that she would feel better with someone she trusted by her side. Also recently whilst feeling slightly jaded about [?] a woman that I worked with texted me a photograph of herself and her son who had just arrived at an airport in the UK. She was overjoyed to be reunited with him after I had worked on her family reunion application for one and a half years, and so many organisations were involved, including the Red Cross. I just wanted to go back to what Franca said, and doing things like that for the people we work with, it may not change the system, and sometimes it can feel peripheral to our research. But as researchers I think we may have a grand view of what solidarity looks like, but ultimately it can be a gesture like showing up for someone when they need it, and when we’re able to. So I think that it is our responsibility as researchers, to try and be comfortable with ambiguity when attempting to work ethically and creatively with our participants. Whilst we may struggle with the borders of capitalism, we always keep in mind that we are doing research with people who also experience borders and barriers in a real and metaphysical sense in their lives, and we hope to transcend these borders with them where possible, even if this is ephemeral.

Rachel: Yeah, thanks Amandas, I think those are really important reflections. Moving on to our last question for today, and starting with you again Amandas, how might your work be useful then, in policy and practice?

Amandas: Well I think about this a lot, and I think many researchers do. I would very much like my work to be read outside of academic circles and to encourage everyone to strive towards being more thoughtful on the issue of migration in general. More specific to policy itself, I hope my work inspires others to engage with more imaginative methods of working with participants when it comes to migration research. And I think that these methods shouldn’t be “creative” for their own sake, but genuinely honour as best as possible the desires and priorities of the people that we work with. And you know, at the end of this episode, I’m thinking that perhaps it is not so much important to be “creative” as it is to join our participants in constantly becoming and fostering opportunities in a world that is so harsh towards them.

Rachel: Thank you. And Sabina, how about you?

Sabina: I hope that my work will be useful in offering critical elements to question ‘voluntary’ return programmes and be wary of simplistic slogans that accompany them, such as those that link return with development in countries of origin or return with protection of vulnerabilities. At a deeper level, I would like to believe that ethnographic research and my work are an invitation to de-centre policy definitions, even when we have to use them or coexist with them as practitioners, and begin by practising empathy with people with a migratory condition. By it, I do not mean an emotional fusion, nor superficial sympathy or being nice, but the deep, honest attention to the constraints, reasoning and emotions that shape other people's situations and choices, with interest and respect for their trajectory. Engaging with this deeper understanding and respect should be a guiding principle for both migration research and practice.

Rachel: Thank you. And Franca?

Franca: Yeah, I think in terms of research methods, I would hope for two things. On the one hand, I think we should continue to work towards diversifying methods so that different types of knowledges can be represented, and that includes using creative methods. But at the same time, I would also hope for a more open reflection on the limitations of creative methods and that in order to contribute to social justice with our research, we need to have a much wider conversation than just talking about methodology. That conversation would include talking about funding structures, institutional processes and the state of academia more generally.

Rachel: Thank you, I think that is important. And Hend, how about you?

Hend: I think given this moment of intensified contestation of migration in Europe, many people might be on edge, welcoming any chance to voice their own stories. So one thing I will try to constantly work on is to make sure that my field research creates a safe space for participants to express their ideas and tell their own stories. I also hope that producing visual material in collaboration with the participants will help to widely share the findings beyond academia, aiming to contribute to challenging the essentialist narratives of migration which alarmingly
have dominated European popular discourse. But also I think by prioritising people’s perspectives, I’m hoping to be able to generate research that informs a people-centred policy to contribute to providing ethnographically informed evidence that could be relevant to the social and public sector including NGOs, activists and policy makers.

Rachel: Thanks Hend. Amandas, Sabina, Franca and Hend, thank you all so much for reflecting on some of the challenges of your research methods. And thank you to our listeners! This is the last episode of the first mini-series of Between Borders, and we would really like to hear from you. Please use the short feedback form in the episode notes to tell us what you liked, what we could improve, and what you’d like to hear more of. And please do get in touch if you’d like to discuss today’s topic with us.