Ethical and Methodological Issues When Conducting Research with Children in Situations of Forced Migration (original) (raw)

2022, 'Documenting Displacement: Questioning Methodological Boundaries in Forced Migration Research' (ed. Grabska, K. & Clark-Kazak, C.)

According to recent figures, more than half of the roughly seventy million people living in a situation of forced migration around the globe are under the age of eighteen (unhcr 2019, 3). This includes children who have been internally displaced as well as those who have fled across national borders in search of sanctuary. It also includes the thousands born each year in the world's many displacement camps, often to parents who grew up in the same location. Failure to attend to the perspectives of children in situations of displacement weakens our understanding of forced migration. In both ethical and intellectual terms, this is as unacceptable as ignoring the experience of say, adult women, or the elderly. At the same time, the fields of childhood studies and children's rights must pay attention to the perspectives of young forced migrants in order to move beyond normative assumptions about the role of the state-assumptions reinforced by research with child citizens, who are rarely identified as such (Boyden and Hart 2007). Recognizing the value of investigating children's experiences of forced migration leads to consideration of the approach to such inquiry, in terms of both methodology and ethics. In this chapter, my aim is not to provide a comprehensive guide to the issues surrounding research with children in situations of forced migration. That would require a far lengthier discussion than is possible here. Rather, I intend to offer prompts for reflection when considering how best to conduct research with children in such situations. These are organized around the themes of positionality, specificity, and power.

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