Problematic Insiderness in Migration Research: Refugee Researcher Researching Other Refugees
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Problematic Insiderness in Migration Research: Refugee Researcher Researching Other Refugees Amanuel Isak Tewolde 1 Accepted: 22 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In the area of race, ethnicity, and immigration studies, there is little discussion on the insider/outsider positionality when the refugee researcher and the researched refugees commonly experience ascribed racialization by the host society. I address this lacuna by reflecting on how insider/outsider positionalities played out in all phases of the research process during a research study that explored the racialization experiences of fellow Eritrean refugees in South Africa. Although my ethnicity, nationality, common experiences with racialization, and being known to some of my study participants positioned me as an insider, to others who had never been interviewed by a researcher in the past and who did not know me personally, I was viewed as an outsider. Asymmetric power relation was also a factor in shaping the research process and the knowledge produced. Reflecting on my problematic insiderness, I argue that within the field of refugee/migration studies, commonalities in ethnicity or nationality do not automatically make a co-ethnic/conational researcher an insider. Insider or outsider positionality emerges and is shaped during actual encounters. Insiderness is also both beneficial and problematic throughout the research process from conceptualization of the study to interpretation of data. Keywords Insider . Migration . Outsider . Positionality . Racialization . Refugee . South
Africa
Introduction The main objective of this paper is to unpack my insider/outsider positionality at every step of the research process through self-reflexivity as an Eritrean refugee researcher researching other Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers’ experiences with racialization1 1 Drawing on Omi and Winant (1994, p. 14), the term racialization or racial ascription is defined as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship or group.” When individuals are racialized, they are ascribed racial labels by others based on observable physical traits such as skin color, facial features, and hair type.
* Amanuel Isak Tewolde [email protected] 1
Centre for Social Development in Africa, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
Tewolde A.I.
in South Africa. This article builds on debates in the field of migration studies on insider/outsider positionalities. I conducted individual interviews with 46 participants residing in three South African cities, namely Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. I set out to examine the everyday experiences of Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers with racial ascription and how they self-identified in the face of imposed racial classification by the host society. I myself experience racial ascription by South Africans in everyday interactions and on official forms where I am asked to check my race box. It was this personal experience with racialization that motivated me to e
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