Description
This project is an analysis of how IR scholars discuss refugees. Despite challenging the centrality of (the concept of) state sovereignty, in IR, refugees have been relegated to the margins of the discipline. Situated at the intersection of theorizations of subjectivity, ethics reflexivity, and turns to the study of the everyday, my project aims to rectify the marginalization of refugees and reorient the ethics of refugee research to highlight refugee subjectivity, building alliances with refugees, and recognizing them as co-producers of knowledge about the international. This paper asks: what ethical orientation informs engagement with refugees in IR without collapsing the complexity of their subjectivity into a preconceived ethico-political project? I posit that an ethics of care approach to research engages with refugees as complex, vulnerable, resilient and relational offering pathways to incorporate vulnerable writing as a core method for refugee research and teaching in IR. My research proceeds in three steps. First, I am reviewing articles on refugees published in 15 IR journals. In a second step, I will investigate the rationales behind the research designs chosen by researchers by conducting extended semi-structured interviews with 15 IR scholars. Informed by these insights on ethics reflexivity, the third step of my research will be an autoethnography of the researcher-refugee relationship. Through these steps, I am aiming to reorient research and locate transformative feminist pathways, in the field to mindfully bridge the distance, bringing, with care (and care-fully), refugees to the center of research and the classroom.
