The Cautious Politics of “Humanizing” Refugee Research

Abstract

In this intervention, I reflect on what it may mean to ‘humanize’ refugee research. The assumption often made is that ‘humanizing’ can arise through a concern with the particularity of the individual, through drawing from ‘the mass’ the narrative of the singular and employing this as a means to identify, empathise, and potentially understand others. Yet such a move risks a reliance on creating relations of empathy and compassion that elide political responses to dehumanization and often relies on a universalist assumption of what constitutes the category of “the human,” an assumption that has been critically challenged by post-colonial writing.