The stories behind stories: Reflections on the role of voice in research with unaccompanied refugee youth
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Author | Annika Lems |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13124 |
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/imig 365
Int Migr. 2023;61:365–368.
COMMENTARY
The stories behind stories: Reflections on the role
of voice in research with unaccompanied refugee
youth
Annika Lems
School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Correspondence
Annika Lems, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
Email: annika.lems@anu.edu.au
Funding information
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung, Grant/Award Number: 156476
DOI: 10.1111/imig.13124
Received: 30 January 2023 Accepted: 4 February 2023
In the summer of 2015, when I started to conduct research with unaccompanied refugee youth in Switzerland, I was
struck by the scarce guidance the refugee and migration literature offered in terms of the ethical and practical chal-
lenges of working with this highly vulnerable group of young people (Rousseau, 1993; Vervliet et al., 2015). Despite
the increased public and academic attention that refugee children had received in the years and months leading up
to my research, I had to piece together my research design from various methodological approaches and fields of
research. Several years and another European “refugee crisis” later, this situation has improved only marginally. Unac-
companied child refugees have entered research agendas with great force, leading to important new insights on the
social, cultural, legal and political factors impacting their everyday lives. Yet despite these innovations, the question
of how scholars approach research with refugee minors is still rarely debated (Chase et al., 2020).
In what follows, I will reflect on the challenges I encountered in my collaboration with young people who had
arrived in Switzerland without parents or other adult guardians in the wake of the great refugee movements to
Europe in 2015 (Lems, 2022). Drawing on my research experience, I want to caution against the uncritical use of
ideas of voice and agency that have become a prominent feature in scholarly collaborations with unaccompanied
refugee youth. While democratic and dialogical principles have a crucial role to play in research with marginalized
youth, it is important never to lose sight of the ways the unequal distribution of power and possibility in an increas-
ingly politicized European asylum landscape impacts young refugees' ability to make themselves heard. One crucial
methodological challenge in research with unaccompanied refugee youth is therefore not just to make their voices
heard, but to gain an awareness for the stories behind stories. It involves an empirical move that shifts the focus from
the products of collaborative research – the stories – to the social processes enabling or disabling the act of telling.
Doing so will allow scholars to gain a deeper understanding, not just of the experiences that can be shared in the form
of a story, but also of the experiences that refuse narrative closure. While having one's voice heard and recognized
by others can be empowering, not every story has this positive potential. For unaccompanied refugee youth, who
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© 2023 The Author. International Migration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Organization for Migration.
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