Writing the ‘Refugee Crisis’: Proposals for Activist Research

This chapter presents an antidote to the academic tendency to aestheticize a calamity like the refugee crisis. In it, I begin by arguing that because of the exceptional nature of the crisis symbolized by the young in exile, our academic engagement with their suffering should in fact be a ‘barefoot’ (Scheper-Hughes 1995: 417) endeavour that delivers a narrative of the ‘crisis’ wherein the moral and ethical commitment to doing something lies not in the background but the forefront of the ‘story’ we relay. But while some works on activist research often treat the academic endeavour as a tool for subsequent activism, I purport that the activism should be inherent in the way we academically write up the ‘stories’ of refugee children, not least those of young Syrians in exile. Subsequently, I present proposals for the conceptual and methodological choices this ‘brand’ of activist research should make that in turn would ensure that the resulting text shocks and alarms and refuses to treat the horror that informs this ‘crisis’ at an ‘arm’s length’.