This interdisciplinary roundtable will discuss emerging lines of inquiry within critical refugee and migration studies on alternative modes of practice and research in the context of increasingly complex positionalities of oppression and privilege–pushing the boundaries of how we conceptualise “Asia” and “Asian American.” Critical Refugee Studies challenges us as a field to take up the “refugee” as an analytic and ask what conditions of knowing are made possible when we treat the refugee as an ideological construct in producing meaning (Espiritu, 2014), who perform critical ideological work for refugee-saving enterprises which serve global imperial and settler colonial interests (Ngo, 2019; Phu & Nguyen, 2021). As “knowledge producers in life-making” (Espiritu & Duong, 2018), people with refugee and migration experience possess a feminist refugee epistemology that disrupts the refugee/migrant binary and the settler/Indigenous binary and considers the interrelating oppression of migrants with precarious state status, racialized populations with histories of enslavement, and precariously employed migrant labourers (Adese & Phung, 2021; Kouri-Towe & Mahrouse, 2023; Walia 2021). In a context in which refugees, despite being overrepresented as subjects in research, are underrepresented as producers and creators of that research, the need for new frameworks for being in relation and solidarity with refugees in the act of writing, viewing, and listening has become urgent. Research fatigue among refugee peoples and the ethics of refusal (Tuck & Yang, 2014) mean that there is a need to reconceptualize research in and of itself, to reconsider the marginalization and oppression that happens within research, and to seek alternative ways of being and knowing.

Our intervention in this roundtable, which consists of members of the Critical Refugee and Migration Studies Network in Canada, is to examine how we enact our relationality and solidarity to the refugee and migrant communities we work with while firmly grounding our allyship within and beyond our communities. We ask: What are some critical ways we must re-envision research within complex positionalities of marginalization and privilege? How might centering refugee and migrant perspectives intervene in Asian American studies by providing insight into intersectionally-informed gendered, sexualized, and racialized histories of oppression in forced migration? At the same time, how might this be done in such a way that complicates and nuances migrant settler positionalities and responsibilities within contested settler colonial lands?

We engage in community based research that strives for accountability systems which acknowledges and embraces multiple positionalities and stakes whilst bringing people together across differences. This includes the reclaiming of and returning to knowledges beyond colonial frames of knowing (Kumsa, 2022; Mignolo, 2011; Taiaiaki, 2004), foregrounding place-based concepts to unearth rich and diverse epistemologies and ontologies that remakes and retraces connections beyond colonial separations through Earth bound and constellational relationships (Aguilera-Moradipour, 2023); and enacting a feminist ethics of care that centers relationality in liberatory archival practice (Caswell & Cifor, 2016; Caswell, 2021; Collier & Sutherland, 2022) that requires us to work in community at the “speed of trust” (Bailey, 2021). We offer examples of how we enact these ethical practices in our various community-based and participatory research projects using critical and counter-archives (Collier et al., 2022; Haritaworn et al., 2018); storytelling research within one’s own families (Dodds & Hess, 2020; Norton, 2006); the critical use of everyday stories and visual images to transform embodied norms and reveal invisible relations of power (Campt, 2017; Phu 2018), and a relational approach to refugee and migrant cultural production in literary analysis. We are inspired by critical scholar and author, Y-Dang Troeung (2023), who gently challenged us all in her own search for “regenerative possibilities of speaking”, to deeply consider what stories might be elicited and created when refugees are supported and enabled to define their own narratives of their migration process and resettlement.