Queering social research on Sexuality, Migration and Asylum through co-authoring with participants

Abstract

This article draws on a dialogue between a social researcher and a research participant. The analysis unfolds through our sustained dialogue and the autoethnographic narratives we share. Co-authoring gave us both unexpected insights pertaining to experiences of researching and undergoing the asylum process from the viewpoint of the sexual minority subject. We wanted to do this by producing an autoethnographic account (Reed-Danahay 1997; Ellis 2009), important to ‘revealing the interconnection of one’s personal experiences and larger social structures’ (Ruiz-Junco and Vidal-Ortiz 2011). In the writing of this article, one important consideration was to attend to the power relations that could shape our common undertaking. For this, we referred to the scholarly work of Richa Nagar whose thoughtful cross-border co-authoring practices reinforce the importance of critical self-reflexivity. In so doing we attempted to attentively contextualise the participatory methods we use as researchers of the social, and to take them out of the apolitical vacuum in which they may readily end up when they are co-opted by the managerial cultures of the neoliberal university.