Methods for the Future, Futures for Methods: Collaborating with Syrian Refugee Youth in Jordan

Abstract

Abstract What happens with data when the research process radically involves and engages those who are in the target group? How can we move towards collaborative insights by integrating our participants in the design of research, conduct of work, and, ultimately, its writing and dissemination? And how does this enable us to devise better futures when imagining such futures may be the very problem? Based on experimental research methods with Syrian refugee youth in Jordan, this article discusses how novel ways of engaging target groups in research can help push analyses in new directions. Collaborative methods, we argue, allow for 3 general analytical displacements that may help us work through the protracted nature of much humanitarian intervention and aid work: namely, moves from worldmaking to waymaking, from urgency to discernment, and from the biological to the biographical.