the role of ethnicity in qualitative migration research

Abstract

In contemporary social science research, researchers largely perceive ethnic groups as a result of a process of boundary making rather than a taken for granted part of our world. However, in methodological terms, researchers often still see ethnicity as imposed on the research process rather than as constructed throughout it. Using personal experience from several research projects, the author first presents the role of ethnic belonging in her research. She then identifies other factors as crucial in negotiating her insider/outsider status in the “field”. The author shows that the researcher’s insider/outsider status is not a fixed category, but is rather negotiated in the research process, depending on the researcher’s multiple and shifting positionalities. Drawing on the critique of methodological nationalism and on the theories of transnationalism in the social sciences and the humanities, she discusses the recent transformations of research designs in qualitative migration research and argues for more de-ethnicised research on migration. On this basis, she calls for migration research beyond locally bounded research sites.