Key points

• • This chapter disrupts the academy by redefining lived experience from a collective, community-led perspective.

• • We use a collaborative writing process to generate new angles on the ethical conduct of collaborative research (co-research).

• • We discuss two under-explored ethical dimensions of co-research in refugee studies: the ethics of relationship and the ethics of witnessing and documenting lived experiences.

• • To ground our discussion, we describe our positionalities and critique our own research approaches.

Introduction

Co-research in refugee studies involves bearing witness to and documenting significant and ongoing marginalisation and oppression. Thus, it requires a deep commitment to, and a nuanced understanding of, relationships in research. On the surface, these statements will not surprise those involved in refugee research – they are common themes across the literature (see Ahmed, 2011; Kahn and Fábos, 2017). However, pervasive homogenising and colonising tendencies in refugee studies affects co-research, particularly influencing who can participate and how, as well as impacting the way the academy acknowledges and values contributions of co-researchers.

Our collaborative project on ethics in community-based participatory research (Atem et al, 2021) considered these and other challenges associated with co-research and identified two under-explored ethical insights about researching with people from refugee backgrounds. We name these the ethics of relationship and the ethics of witnessing and documenting lived experiences. Both have a significant bearing on the ethical conduct of collaborative research. In this chapter, we explain what these ethics mean to us and what they could mean for refugee studies research, acknowledging the wisdom of our project group and honouring and building upon their work.

Who we are

Atem

I was born in South Sudan. My family left Sudan after the Second Civil War broke out in South Sudan. Like many South Sudanese, I found myself in Ethiopian refugee camps. Years later, hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese refugees were forced to flee back to South Sudan as the Ethiopian rebels liberated Ethiopia. As violence escalated in South Sudan, South Sudanese who had just come back to South Sudan from Ethiopia joined many more South Sudanese displaced persons to find their way to Kenya. This happened to my family, and we arrived in Kakuma Refugee Camp in 1993.