“Thinking through friendship in forced migration research through a feminist decolonial lens”.

The 22^nd IMISCOE Annual Conference took place in Paris-Aubervilliers in July this year. The theme of the conference was ‘Decentring Migration’, seeking to foster epistemological dialogue and collective reflexivity that challenges the ways in which migration research is produced: “The majority of research on migration has been conducted by scientific institutions and published in English, with an emphasis on immigration. The objective is to challenge conventional representations of the migration phenomenon by adopting a decentered perspective, thereby exposing the biases that contribute to an incomplete understanding of the complexities of contemporary migrations.”

The conference included hundreds of parallel panel sessions and five plenary sessions, including speakers such as Peggy Levitt, Michel Agier, Bao Xiang, Amrita Pande and Aissatou Mbodj-Pouye among others. In the opening plenary, Peggy Levitt stated that we need not just to critique, but to chart a way forward towards, decentring ourselves, our relationships and our institutions.

I was invited by colleagues Rachel Benchekroun (University College London) and Hannah Grondelaers (Ghent University) to be part of a panel entitled ‘Doing friendship in precarious spaces of migration’. Following the theme of the conference, I used the opportunity to reflect on the relationships I have cultivated over several different projects with the people I have researched with, for and about, through a feminist decolonial approach. With much refugee-related research in the social sciences, in many ways, being a direct descendant of early anthropological and ethnographic approaches, “where white researchers from colonial nations imposed outsider gazes on the ‘other’” (Lenette 2022:24), it feels crucial to me – particularly as a white European researcher with no background of forced migration –  to reflect on the ways in which I may unwittingly be continuing to play out oppressive power structures in the research I carry out.  

Writing this paper, and taking part in the discussions which followed with fellow presenters around various forms of relationships and friendships in precarious migration situations, also helped me to reflect on the role of care, as both an ethical approach, as well as a crucial part of survival and well-being in precarious migration situations.