Ethically (un)bounding camp research: Life histories within and beyond camp boundaries

The changing enforcement and porosity of camp boundaries have implications for research in camps and their environs. Camp research is increasingly blurring their locational and categorical boundaries. However, in contexts where camp boundaries are being actively “hardened,” researchers must be attentive to possible effects of research across boundaries for those who are targeted by encampment. Research has an ethical imperative to challenge exclusionary boundaries and categories, recognising the many ways these constructed boundaries are already crossed and contested. It must also conscientiously negotiate and even defer to boundaries in research when participants may otherwise be at risk because of the underlying violence that maintains camps as discrete spatial technologies of power. In conducting life-history research with Burundian refugees in Tanzania, I chose to “bound” my research with Burundian refugees to within camp boundaries, to reduce the risk to research participants. I argue that although research in camps may risk reifying camp boundaries, it can nevertheless conscientiously reach beyond and challenge camp boundaries through attentive methods. The stories recounted in this research reach far beyond camp boundaries, and include experiences of Burundian border-crossers seeking liveable lives in diverse places and situations, not always of their own choosing. Life histories thus weave an imperfect, inchoate “minor cartography” of often-invisibilised, diverse sites of refugee lives, bound up with the changing power and policing of camp boundaries shaping refugees' trajectories in the broader “campscape” over time.