MOBILIZING GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE: REFUGEE RESEARCH IN AN AGE OF DISPLACEMENT Edited by Susan McGrath and Julie E. E. Young ISBN 978-1-77385-086-3 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected] Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist’s copyright. 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Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org Mobilizing Global Knowledge Refugee Research in an Age of Displacement Edited by SUSAN MCGRATH AND JULIE E. E. YOUNG Mobilizing Global Knowledge Mobilizing Global Knowledge Refugee Research in an Age of Displacement Edited by SUSAN MCGRATH AND JULIE E. E. YOUNG © 2019 Susan McGrath and Julie E. E. Young University of Calgary Press 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta Canada T2N 1N4 press.ucalgary.ca This book is available as an ebook which is licensed under a Creative Commons license. The publisher should be contacted for any commercial use which falls outside the terms of that license. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Mobilizing global knowledge : refugee research in an age of displacement / edited by Susan McGrath and Julie E. E. Young. Names: McGrath, Susan, 1946- editor. | Young, Julie E. E., 1978- editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190103000 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190103043 | ISBN 9781773850856 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773850863 (Open Access PDF) | ISBN 9781773850870 (PDF) | ISBN 9781773850887 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773850894 (Kindle) Subjects: LCSH: Refugees—Research. Classification: LCC HV640 .M63 2019 | DDC 305.9/06914072—dc23 The University of Calgary Press acknowledges the support of the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund for our publications. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Susan McGrath and Julie E. E. Young thank contributor Nergis Canefe for creating and donating the beautiful cover painting titled Tree of life: version non-status. The image is a response to RRN members who had proposed that the network should have “more branches and less roots”. Copyediting by Kathryn Simpson Cover design, page design, and typesetting by Melina Cusano Contents Introduction: Mobilizing Global Knowledge in Forced 1 Migration Studies and Practice Susan McGrath and Julie E. E. Young SECTION 1 Power and Politics in Refugee Research 23 1 Capacity, Complicity, and Subversion: Revisiting 25 Collaborative Refugee Research in an Era of Containment Loren B. Landau 2 Rethinking Displacement: Transitional Justice and Forced 45 Migration Studies Nergis Canefe 3 The Asia Pacific Forced Migration Connection: Linking 67 Activists, Advocates, and Academics Susan Kneebone 4 Transitions from Knowledge Networked to Knowledge 87 Engaged: Ethical Tensions and Dilemmas from the Global to the Local Wenona Giles and Don Dippo v 5 Insecure Nation, Insecure Migrant: Postcolonial Echoes 107 from India’s Northeast Paula Banerjee and Ranabir Samaddar SECTION 2 Emerging and Developing Research Approaches and Tools 127 6 Big Data and Early Warning of Displacement 129 Susan F. Martin and Lisa Singh 7 Building and Sustaining a Web Platform for Researchers, 151 Teachers, Students, and Practitioners in the Field of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies James C. Simeon 8 The Promise and Potential of the Demography of Refugee 169 and Forced Migration Ellen Percy Kraly and Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi 9 Disseminating Knowledge in the Digital Age: The Case 193 of the Refugee Research Network William J. Payne and Michele Millard SECTION 3 Knowledge Production and the Ethics of Network Formation 213 10 New, Emerging, Emerged? Navigating Agency, Technology, 215 and Organization in Developing the Emerging Scholars and Practitioners on Migration Issues (ESPMI) Network Brittany Lauren Wheeler and Petra Molnar 11 What Constitutes Environmental Displacement? Challenges 233 and Opportunities of Exploring Connections across Thematically Diverse Areas Pablo Bose and Elizabeth Lunstrum vi Table of Contents 12 Bittersweet Symphony: Challenges and Lessons Learned 253 from Network Building in Latin America Beatriz Eugenia Sánchez-Mojica 13 Partnering on Research Methodologies in Forced Migration: 273 Challenges, Opportunities, and Lessons Learned Christina Clark-Kazak Conclusion: Reflections on Global Refugee Research 289 Networking Susan McGrath Contributors 303 Index 311 Table of Contents vii Introduction: Mobilizing Global Knowledge in Forced Migration Studies and Practice Susan McGrath and Julie E. E. Young Scholars from other societies and traditions of inquiry could bring to this debate their own ideas about what counts as new knowl- edge and what communities of judgement and accountability they might judge to be central in the pursuit of such knowledge. Arjun Appadurai Reflecting on more than ten years of work in conceptualizing and build- ing a network for refugee research, we pose the challenge—to ourselves and others—of “ethical networking” for research and practice. Research partnerships and collaborations have become the standard for funded re- search in recent years (Bradley 2007; McGrath et al. 2011; Landau 2012). A key question driving our work on the Refugee Research Network (RRN) was how to collaborate ethically—or at least how to think ethically when building a research network. Moreover, through our work together, we sought to generate and disseminate knowledge in ways that are accessible to multiple audiences and that would improve the well-being of refugees. 1 We recognize, and share concerns about, the politics of knowledge production in forced migration contexts. The global nature of the RRN means that partners are across the so-called north/south divide, with dif- ferent resources and capacities. It is an environment where people in the more marginal regions of the world risk being “simply producers of data for the theory mills of the North,” as Appadurai (2000, 5) has warned, and where donors, primarily from the north, are setting forced migration research agendas—often with the primacy of “policy relevant” research (Bradley 2007; Landau 2012). We have aspired to bring disparate cultures of knowledge production into effective relation with one another, which Jazeel and McFarlane (2007) describe as “responsible learning”—along the lines of the “strong internationalization” that Appadurai (2000) describes in the epigraph, in which scholars from a broad range of societies and traditions of inquiry determine what counts as new knowledge. This edited volume reflects on the lessons learned through our work as the RRN, a global network of academics, practitioners, and policymak- ers built around relationships among refugee research centres across the global south and north in Bogotá, Cairo, Chicago, Johannesburg, Kam- pala, Kolkata, London, Melbourne, Oxford,