ABSTRACT
Refugee Studies as an inter-disciplinary scholarly field has always had critical analysts and voices, often underscoring the experience of displaced people themselves and highlighting the ways colonialism and imperialism produce displacement. Yet Refugee Studies also falls prey to empiricism that has spectacularised suffering and victimhood by producing the refugee as an ahistorical fact rather than a political invention or technology. Over the past decade, a more intentional and explicitly critical approach to Refugee Studies has emerged, engaging in distinct ways of producing knowledge that resists the objectification of refugees and their bodies, while making more visible the violence of dislocation. The categorisation of displaced peoples can itself be an act of epistemic violence. The autonomy and self-authorised strategies engaged in by ‘people on the move’ are vital to keeping Refugee Studies relevant and critical. By drawing awareness to ordinary, intimate, and invisible sites of displacement and by challenging its salient language, scholars in the field actively re-imagine more accountable ways to understand and represent protection for people who seek it. Refugee Studies has always been critical.
