Gender, racialisation, and border regimes: reflections on social positions and positioning in research with young people on the move

ABSTRACT

This article starts from our experiences as two Western women of Black mixed-race background, undertaking fieldwork among unaccompanied young men on the move in Europe. We add to scholarship on ethnographic accounts of encounters. We do this by reflecting on how our positionality affected the research process along often taken-for-granted social categories and markers of sameness and difference, as they related to our fieldwork and the space created between us and participants. We analyse the ways in which power is infused along multiple intersecting axes such as gender and race, and is imbued with movement in that space, helping people to feel, among other things, safe and unsafe, located and dislocated, and visible and invisible. We find that the social positions and positioning that emerged were tied into vulnerabilities related to gender and age, legal status, dimensions of race, class, and specific histories and imaginaries. We also show how performativity, shifting boundaries, and othering came into play and shaped bordering practices and a sense of belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration journey
• mixed-race
• positionality
• reflexivity
• unaccompanied minors

Acknowledgements

We extend our deepest thanks to the young people who participated in our research and those who supported us as gatekeepers and interpreters. We are also deeply grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to Professor Ravi K. S. Kohli and Professor Ilse Derluyn for their encouragement and constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. MNL also thanks FO’s Section for Social Workers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 OU’s project was approved by CNR Research Ethics and Bioethics Committee (Italy) and the Ethical Commission of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of Ghent University (Belgium). MNL’s project was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. She also spent a period in Greece prior to admission as a doctoral candidate and carried out an exploratory phase according to recognised ethical norms and guidelines.

2 Everyone cited has been given pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

OU’s work was supported by the European Research Council under Grant Number: 714222.