This book examines the politics of fieldwork and the challenges of researching migrants constructed as outsiders both nationally and transnationally, showing how interdisciplinary, self-reflexive, fieldwork-based approaches can provide insights into the ways in which which migrants take part in producing their transnational worlds.
This volume examines the politics of fieldwork and the challenges of researching migrants constructed as outsiders both nationally and transnationally. Based on research with undocumented migrants, temporary workers, refugees, international students, and those who, having received citizenship status find their lives to be discursively and legally restricted, it shows how interdisciplinary fieldwork-based approaches can provide detailed accounts of migrants voices and their conditions of existence, offering insights into the ways in which they understand and take part in producing their transnational worlds. Applying critical, self-reflexive methodological approaches that challenge assumptions about who has the authority to produce knowledge and what types of knowledge have the authority of truth,
Migration and the Politics of Methodology will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, and communication and cultural studies with interests in research methods and migration.
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Migration and the Politics of Methodology: Doing Fieldwork,
Decentring Power, and Foregrounding Migrants Perspectives by Kirsten Emiko
McAllister, Ayaka Yoshimizu, and Daniel Ahadi
Section 1: Community-based Projects: Collaborative Research and Questions of
Power
Chapter 1: Decentring Media and Recentring People: Politics and Ethics of
Doing Feminist Ethnography on Migrant Workers Mediated Activism by Siyuan
Yin
Chapter 2: Building Solidarity between Im/migrants and the Local Population:
Lessons from a Community Project in a Remote Region of Quebec by Jorge
Frozzini
Chapter 3: The Tayybeh Turn: How Food and Kindness Changed Me as a
ResearcherAn Interview with Adel Iskandar
Chapter 4: Embodying Affective Fieldwork with Internal Migrant Women in
Ecuador: Methodological Considerations by Belen Febres-Cordero
Section 2: Problems of Ethics and Power: Questioning Narratives and
Relations
Chapter 5: Responsible to Whom? Informal Relationality and
Community-engagement in Applied Forced Migration Research Ethics by Erin
Goheen-Glanville
Chapter 6: Criminalizing Chinese Ethnic Ride-Hailing: The Yellow Peril and
Research Ethics by Yijia Zhang
Chapter 7: Research Asylum Seekers and Community-based Art as an
Ethnographic Outsider: Extended Fieldwork, Resocialization and Academic
versus Relational Understandings of Forced Migration by Kirsten Emiko
McAllister
Section 3: Negotiating Spatial Dynamics: Fieldwork, Power, and Embodiment
Chapter 8: Walking in the South: Understanding the Researcher as a Site of
Embodied Knowledge by Marcos Moldes
Chapter 9: Re-imagining Migration and Communication Studies through Fieldwork
in Transnational Yokohama by Ayaka Yoshimizu
Chapter 10: Not Just Immigrants: Exploring Power Relations as Heterotopic
Experiences through Fieldwork Research by Elisa Beatriz Ramķrez Hernįndez and
Āngela Cristina Salgueiro Marques
Chapter 11: The Unpacking of Go back to where you came from: Reflections
of the Tormented Mind of an Othered Subject by Daniel Ahadi
Index
Kirsten Emiko McAllister, Professor, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
Ayaka Yoshimizu, Associate Professor of Teaching, Department of Asian Studies, The University of British Columbia
Daniel Ahadi, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
