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“Is it Commerce?”: Dehumanization in the Framing of Refugees as Resources
Get PDFThe idea that “refugees are resources” has been promoted as countering the dehumanization that frames refugees as burdens or security threats. But is framing people as resources truly humanizing? Resource theorists have highlighted how modern Western conceptions of what resources are depends on a distinction between the human and the non-human. This logic is similar to, and originates in the same epoch as, hierarchies of humanity. State appraisal and management of human and mobility continue to be shaped by race and perceptions of productive value in terms, just as the value of resources varies, and has always been social and political. This intervention highlights the perspective of a Burundian refugee in Tanzania who traces continuities between experiences and being called a resource—in that a resource can be sold or traded across borders with no input into its future. Refugees can and do meaningfully contribute to the communities and countries in which they live, but the “resources” lens curtails a truly humanizing perspective on refugees’ lives.L’idée selon laquelle les réfugiés constituent des ressources» a été prônée afin de contrer le cadrage déshumanisant des réfugiés comme des fardeaux ou comme une menace sécuritaire. Mais le cadrage des personnes comme ressources n’est-il pas réellement Les théoriciens des ressources ont souligné que les conceptions modernes occidentales de ce que constituent des ressources repose sur la distinction entre l’humain et le non-humain. Cette logique est similaire à la hiérarchisation racialisée de l’humanité et trouve son origine à la même époque. L’évaluation et la gestion du travail humain et de la mobilité par l’État continuent d’être façonnées par la race» et par la perception de la valeur productive en termes économiques, tout comme la valeur accordée aux ressources varie et a toujours été sociale et politique. Cette intervention met en lumière la perspective d’un réfugié burundais en Tanzanie qui retrace la continuité entre des expériences d’animalisation et le fait d’être traité comme une ressource - en ce qu’une ressource peut être vendue ou échangée sans être consultée sur son avenir. Il est vrai que les réfugiés contribuent de manière significative aux communautés et aux pays où ils vivent, mais le prisme des ressources» pose des limites à une perspective réellement sur la vie des réfugiés
Ethically (un)bounding camp research: Life histories within and beyond camp boundaries
Get PDFThe changing enforcement and porosity of camp boundaries have implications for research in camps and their environs. Camp research is increasingly blurring their locational and categorical boundaries. However, in contexts where camp boundaries are being actively “hardened,” researchers must be attentive to possible effects of research across boundaries for those who are targeted by encampment. Research has an ethical imperative to challenge exclusionary boundaries and categories, recognising the many ways these constructed boundaries are already crossed and contested. It must also conscientiously negotiate and even defer to boundaries in research when participants may otherwise be at risk because of the underlying violence that maintains camps as discrete spatial technologies of power. In conducting life-history research with Burundian refugees in Tanzania, I chose to “bound” my research with Burundian refugees to within camp boundaries, to reduce the risk to research participants. I argue that although research in camps may risk reifying camp boundaries, it can nevertheless conscientiously reach beyond and challenge camp boundaries through attentive methods. The stories recounted in this research reach far beyond camp boundaries, and include experiences of Burundian border-crossers seeking liveable lives in diverse places and situations, not always of their own choosing. Life histories thus weave an imperfect, inchoate “minor cartography” of often-invisibilised, diverse sites of refugee lives, bound up with the changing power and policing of camp boundaries shaping refugees' trajectories in the broader “campscape” over time
Closing camps
Get PDFRefugee camp geographies vary greatly; however, the most fleeting informal camps and decades-old institutional
settlements have in common that they are meant to be temporary. While research on camps has
been attentive to their spatialities, relatively little work has focused on closures. However, we consider the
permanent possibility of closure as a constitutive element of life-in-the-camp. Closures, then, must be
situated within the exclusionary landscapes in which states manage migrants custody, protection and displacement.
We accordingly present camp closures as manifestations of sovereign power and the study of
camp afterlives as key to critical understandings of camp geographies
Camp methodologies: The “how” of studying camps
Get PDFThis special section contributes to the growing interdisciplinary field of camp studies by examining the ways in which scholars methodologically approach and study camps and camp-like spaces. The characteristics of camps, which render them of interest to scholarship in the first place, simultaneously generate methodological, ethical, and practical questions for research. Yet comparatively few studies have explicitly addressed the methods and methodologies in camp research. How do camp contexts shape our underlying research philosophies and how do particular ways of doing research impact our conceptualisations of camps? The contributors to this special section provide a variety of answers to these questions, drawing on empirical research in/on current and historical camp settings. Overall, we gesture towards “camp methodologies” not as a set of prescribed tools, techniques, or epistemologies to be followed when studying camps but as a shorthand for approaches that consider first, how camp geographies delimit research activities and second, how methodological choices in turn (re)construct the camp conceptually in different ways. Ultimately, this collection aims to encourage critical debates and reflections to shed more light on the methodological effects, positionalities, responsibilities, complicities, and continuing necessities of studying camps
Introduction: Humanizing Studies of Refuge and Displacement?
Get PDFThis forum of Refuge offers interventions around the theme Humanizing Studies of Refuge and Displacement? as a theoretical and methodological debate for critical refugee and forced migration scholarship. However, rather than proposing a conclusive path towards humanization—which encompasses complex processes of (re)building, (re)constructing, and (re)thinking “the human,” humanity, and social relations—our aim is more modest, tentative, and reflexive. Our starting point was a workshop co-organized by the authors and Patricia Daley at the University of Oxford in November 2018. The workshop brought together an interdisciplinary set of scholars to reflect collectively on dehumanizing tendencies in the ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies underpinning scholarship on refugees today, and to think through, beyond, and against them.
Taking this event as an entry, we use humanization as a heuristic to accommodate multiple contradictory versions of what more emancipatory scholarship might entail. We are not only concerned with tracing, traversing, and pondering over our positionalities and epistemic complicities, or charting “the border between theory and activism” (Lafazani, 2012; Torres, 2018). Instead, we actively seek to practise and advance a radical scholarship that is grounded in political solidarity for social and racial justice. To do so means grappling with, and situating ourselves and our scholarly institutions within, abiding structures of violence and erasure that are—sometimes slowly, sometimes more spectacularly—perpetrating the very ontological destruction of people on the move that we are desperately trying to combat
Managing displacement: Negotiating transnationalism, encampment and return
No full textThe management of migration and displacement, including humanitarian response, is shaped by geopolitics and relies on the construction of two key spatialities of exclusion, containment, and securitization: externalizing asylum and refuge so that those on the move are kept in "regions of origin" away from the "Global North;" and encampment within those regions. Both are tied to a state-centric orientation that refugees return to their countries of origin, as preferred 'durable solution.' Yet refugees negotiate their own safety both within and beyond the humanitarian governance system, through extensive and often transnational networks. We explore the idea of transnational displacement as an alternate theoretical framing that is empirically rooted in more circulatory geographies. Observable pathways to safety are grounded in a case study of Burundian refugees and returnees. Ultimately, 'grand theories of humanitarian government' cannot fully capture the ruptures and sutures of displacement, return, and return again that may occur in the lives of families caught between violence, starvation, and family separation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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