Refugees as questioning subjects: A critical reflection of PhD fieldwork involving refugees

Migration scholarship and media representation ‘construct a narrative of refugees that centres trauma and deficit, that creates a hyper-visible stereotype of an assumed collective experience while leaving individual refugees largely voiceless and invisible’ (Jarratt 2020, pp. 368–369). This leads naturally to asking how refugees can reclaim their stories, find their voices and assert their knowledge in a research culture that renders them invisible, inaudible and unviable. The focus of this reflection is to articulate the missing links between the real bearers of knowledge and the processes of knowledge production in PhD studies such as mine, which focus on the realities of refugees in a carceral age. The primary objective here is to openly recognise that fieldwork is a shared enterprise, at the centre of which are the research participants such as refugees