ABSTRACT
At the end of a long day, my first day, in Nduta refugee camp in Tanzania I sat on a stool in front of the food distribution area, next to the information resource centre. I had spent the day in individual and group interviews, and had been in one place for more than three hours talking to large and small groups, some individuals, sometimes with the aid of translator, sometimes in English, occasionally in simple French. I ended my day more aware of my relative position of power and privilege than I had ever been, a position marked not only by my status as researcher/graduate student/visitor/Westerner, but also by the colour of my skin, my class status, and my gender. I was more aware of the power relations implicated within my study. It is this awareness, nascent in my project design and more deeply meaningful as time went on and these dynamics became more apparent, that profoundly shaped my methodological approach to my research. This approach began with a conscious privileging of narrative, and was pursued with a continued awareness of voice and of silence, understanding narratives not as authentic statements of the way things are, but as subjectivities within an ongoing dialogue of meaning-making and knowledge creation in the global migration and asylum regime.
