Description
The field of migration studies faces an existential question: how can it remain relevant amidst competing claims to knowledge on migration, increasing quantification of migratory flows, growing hostility towards migrants, and an increase in displacement globally? This paper reconsiders the role and value of qualitative research within this shifting landscape. It asks what qualitative methods can offer when metrics, maps, and algorithms increasingly dominate how migration is understood and governed. Through a critical reflection on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with displaced Rohingya refugee women in India, the paper explores how ethnography can serve not only as a research method but also as an ethical and political practice. It rethinks concepts such as statelessness, refugee, security, and care, weaving in interlocutors’ perspectives to understand what these concepts mean in situated, gendered, and racialised contexts. It also reflects on the role of the researcher in communicating this knowledge and making it legible to governments and policymakers, while remaining attentive to the risks of simplification. This paper draws on feminist and postcolonial methodologies to make a case for the continuing relevance of “everyday” approaches that can generate new ways of thinking and knowing, supplementing an increasingly technocratic turn in International Studies and global politics more broadly.
