Introduction: Humanizing Studies of Refuge and Displacement?

This forum of Refuge offers interventions around the theme Humanizing Studies of Refuge and Displacement? as a theoretical and methodological debate for critical refugee and forced migration scholarship. However, rather than proposing a conclusive path towards humanization—which encompasses complex processes of (re)building, (re)constructing, and (re)thinking “the human,” humanity, and social relations—our aim is more modest, tentative, and reflexive. Our starting point was a workshop co-organized by the authors and Patricia Daley at the University of Oxford in November 2018. The workshop brought together an interdisciplinary set of scholars to reflect collectively on dehumanizing tendencies in the ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies underpinning scholarship on refugees today, and to think through, beyond, and against them. Taking this event as an entry, we use humanization as a heuristic to accommodate multiple contradictory versions of what more emancipatory scholarship might entail. We are not only concerned with tracing, traversing, and pondering over our positionalities and epistemic complicities, or charting “the border between theory and activism” (Lafazani, 2012; Torres, 2018). Instead, we actively seek to practise and advance a radical scholarship that is grounded in political solidarity for social and racial justice. To do so means grappling with, and situating ourselves and our scholarly institutions within, abiding structures of violence and erasure that are—sometimes slowly, sometimes more spectacularly—perpetrating the very ontological destruction of people on the move that we are desperately trying to combat.