Doing Biographical Interviews with Refugees As a Young European Scientist. from Data Extractivism to Care Work

Since 2015, refugee camps in Greece’s border islands have attracted both media’s and social researchers’ attention. In over-researched communities (Sukkarieh, Tannock 2013) such as EU’s refugee camps, people are often left with the feeling of being “used” by researchers’ extractivist methods. Whilst emerging research calls for qualitative research methods’ decolonization (Davis and Walsh 2020, Kinsella 2021, Kinkaid 2020, Cheng 2019, Smith 2012), most discussion focuses on the analysis and knowledge production process and dissemination rather than practices in the fieldwork. In this paper, based on an ethnographic research (observations, in-depth interviews) conducted in the Moria refugee camp (Greece) in 2020-2021, and an ongoing (2021-today) ethnographic research (participant observations, biographical interviews) on refugees living in Paris/Berlin but have lived in Greek camps, I shall explore concrete ways that conducting interviews, more than a mere means to data collection, can became spaces of care and identification of socially excluded groups’ needs. In order to avoid reproducing existing power structures between me as a young European researcher and my study participants as non-European refugees, as well as further traumatization of a socially excluded group that has experienced State violence and social injustice, I have firstly found important to begin the interview process by emphasizing consent, providing a detailed explanation of my research process, and coming to an agreement on our emotions’ management method. Secondly, active listening and applying self-reflection during the fieldwork has made evident that the inherently problematic effort to maintain scientific neutrality and objectivity, can be replaced with intellectual honesty. I thus hope that this paper contributes to the discussion on social research’s decolonization, through the effort to transform biographical interviews into spaces where people are able to tell their stories to simply be understood, listened to, to exist.