Our Research

By shaping the kind of knowledge we produce, research methodologies often lead to the reinforcement of existing imbalances in power relations and extractivist forms of research that benefit academics based in the Global North at the expense of research participants and collaborators in the Global South. Such research has rightly come increasingly under critical scrutiny.

Such debates are particularly urgent in research on in/security and vulnerability, given how security as a system of governance – through policing, border controls, international interventions, etc. – often reproduces, rather than challenges, social inequalities based on race, gender, class, disability, sexuality and other axes of inequality.

This project thus intends to provide a space for exploring alternative, anti-racist, feminist, indigenous and decolonising approaches to research methodologies in this field, and to establish more collaborative and equitable research relationships.

Through a series of virtual workshops with the group members and other co-researchers, we will create collaborative debate about research design and methodologies in the study of in/security and vulnerability.

As an interdisciplinary network with expertise in socially-engaged performance studies, feminist governance, history, innovative literary methods, law, international relations, environmental and Latin American studies to this debate, we will combine our experiences and ‘live’ practices of research methods to allow for knowledge exchange. We aim to establish how we can:

• Create collaborative research design practice
• Rethink data and evidence to co-produce knowledge
• Decolonise research methodologies and languages
• Acknowledge research tensions and ethics
• Address the obstacles to implementing indigenous methods
• Better support early-researchers and co-researchers

This research methods project sits alongside the Vulnerability Studies Network – find out more about this here

You can also find out more about our members’ individual research into in/security and vulnerability studies here.

This project extends conversations about research methodologies in the fields of in/security and vulnerabilities beyond academic circles and towards those who are normally characterised as ‘research participants’ – here recast as co-researchers.

Thus, the project will, first, positively impact relationships between researchers and co-researchers, providing an opportunity to explore sustainable ways of working together that embed equitable practice into our research. Second, by sharing and teaching our diverse research methodologies to each other and our coresearchers, the workshops will problematise and complicate our understandings of felt and lived experiences of in/security, with potential immediate practical applications beyond academia, into areas such as refugee law.