Researching refugees: some methodological and ethical considerations in social science and forced migration

This paper discusses some methodological problems that commonly arise in refugee and forced migration studies. It offers some broad guidelines for how these concerns might be addresses without lapsing into the kind of academic abstractness currently characterizing much recent scholarship in political science, sociology and anthropology. The article concludes with a discussion of our own efforts to put these principles into practice in our current research on urban refugees and migrants living in Johannesburg.