By Susan Beth Rottmann (Özyeğin University)
The research challenges that RESPOND faces are enormous. It is an ambitious project involving research in 11 countries with migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe who speak more than 15 different languages! It also involves research with stakeholders who work in many different areas of migration management from border control to protection to housing and labor market integration. The goal of the project is to sift through this diversity—to make sense of it—in order to understand where policies are failing and succeeding and, ultimately, to make policy recommendations. Given this scope, how can we ensure that the information gathered through interviews with diverse migrants and stakeholders will be comparable and useful? RESPOND researchers are political scientists, legal scholars, sociologists and anthropologists, each with their own methodological knowledge. How can their expertise be integrated to ensure that that research is conducted with cultural, gender and psychological sensitivity? What best practices for conducting research with victims of trauma will the project implement? These are just some of the questions that RESPOND researchers debated at a meeting on May 25 and 26th at Glasgow Caledonian University.