Developing new understandings of forced migration in Africa
WWW Technical Team
2023-09-12 | 04:12:54pm
Researchers of forced migration in Africa have largely appropriated, as a primary analytical approach, categories developed in refugee agency policy, resulting in policy-driven scholarship that obscures local and historical patterns of refuge-seeking and displacement. Contra this Eurocentric approach, empirical research conceived independently of dominant policy categories emphasizes shared commonalities of settled and displaced populations, such as language, identity, gender, economic status, occupation, political allegiance, and historical migration processes. Such findings can develop new understandings of forced migration in Africa, where many of those displaced remain outside organizational systems of protection, aid and support. Yet mobilizing empirical research produced in Africa remains a challenge. A 2020 study led by the Local Engagement Refugee Research Network found that scholars based in the Global North produced 90% of articles published in the flagship Journal of Refugee Studies---despite 85% of the forcibly displaced being located in the Global South.
In order to question, challenge, and ultimately change policy category-derived assumptions about displacement in West and Central Africa, researchers from Canada, Ghana, and Cameroon will form Frontiers of Belonging, a pilot International Research and Training Group (IRTG). Our aim is to collaboratively train doctoral researchers in the social sciences and humanities from our three institutions to deliberately center local processes and histories, thereby strengthening an evidence-based foundation for more viable, sustainable, and locally informed refuge-seeking and hosting practices. Access to different epistemologies and mentors in the IRTG network will enable students to acquire an array of professional/research skills and methodologies. The IRTG will emphasize knowledge mobilization skills as part of ongoing initiatives to decenter knowledge production about displacement from the Global North and to recenter it within Africa itself. A secondary objective is to identify systemic barriers to equitable North-South and intra-African research collaboration in PhD training.
The Frontiers of Belonging theme meshes with the research and internationalization priorities of our home institutions and is broad enough to enable us to recruit six doctoral students within three years of program completion, three of whom will be women, and two each from each partnering institution. The key innovation of our North-South partnership is to mobilize expertise across borders to train doctoral students in three countries: French-English bilingual, anglophone-dominated Canada, a middle-power latecomer to internationalization in higher education; Ghana, an anglophone leader in higher education in West Africa; and French-English bilingual, francophone-dominated Cameroon in Central Africa. The IRTG includes emerging and established researchers from each university. University of Ottawa's Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute will offer specialized French/English language instruction. Femmes Actantes, an NGO supporting women's associations in Cameroon, will lead sessions on the importance of gendered analysis and guide students in developing intersectoral community inclusion as part of their research. The skills acquisition for knowledge mobilization stems from a partnership with Walk With Web, a Canadian corporation supporting digital humanities research, and our collaboration with leading online publications and academic journals. This pilot IRTG is a model we intend to develop and scale up for a later SSHRC Partnership Grant application in the Talent category upon the completion of this three-year project.