Hybrid Ethnography and South Asian Migration Studies

Abstract

Using the empirical context of the digital identity of Rohingyas languishing in camps in India and Bangladesh, this paper argues that the dichotomous approach towards the suitability of digital/online ethnography vis-à-vis conventional/offline in understanding the formulation/reformulation of refugee identity in forced migration research should be eschewed. It serves no purpose to treat the “virtual” world as a completely separate social area from the “real” as people’s “online” and “offline” social lives are inextricably intertwined with the ubiquitous nature of the internet and digital connectivity. This has occasioned the need to redefine not just the “field” in which the refugee dwells, interacts, and survives within the host state, but also the approaches used to study the field warrants a re-introspection. Negating the Eurocentrically conditioned “methodological nationalism” which underscores the qualitative approaches such as conventional ethnography in the region, the paper makes a case for the adoption of “hybrid ethnography” in forced migration studies in South Asia, that in turn provides an avenue to incorporate both the positionality and reflexivity of the researcher vis-a-vis the field participants.