Research as a Home When No Home Exists
Contribution to the 2025 Workshop
Re-Search: A Workshop Exploring the Notion of Research as Theory, Practice and Identity
Organized by Marcia C. Schenck (University of Potsdam) and Morgan Robinson (Mississippi State University)
There are people for whom “home” is a physical place, defined by a country, a street, a house, a room. My life has never afforded me such a luxury. I was born into displacement: an Ethiopian child delivered in Riyadh after my parents fled conflict in Oromia, and raised by a mother who struggled to survive in a country where women could not legally exist without male guardianship. My father disappeared before my birth, deported without trace. Later, when we sought stability in Yemen, war followed us again. For a long time, I believed that my life was a sequence of temporary shelters. That I did not belong anywhere. But I learned something unexpected: research became the first place where I felt anchored, the first “home” I could build for myself.
This essay reflects on what it means to treat research as a home when one has none. Drawing on years of work documenting the lives of East African refugee and migrant women, and on my own experience as a displaced woman, I argue that research becomes a site of survival, identity formation, and resistance for those who have lived through instability. Rather than a distant academic pursuit, research becomes an intimate and emotionally charged refuge — a space where memory is preserved, voices refuse erasure, and truth finds a place to live even when the researcher does not.
I. The Researcher Formed by Displacement
My entry into research did not begin in universities or archives. It began in fragmented childhood memories: a mother navigating a foreign land alone; stories overheard from other migrants; quiet fears spoken in kitchens, living rooms, and corridors. I grew up surrounded by narratives of flight — stories of war, of crossing seas, of losing and rebuilding lives. These stories became my earliest forms
of knowledge, teaching me to listen carefully, to pay attention to nuance, to read silence alongside
speech.
When we moved to Sanaa, Yemen in 2015, I witnessed firsthand how instability shaped identity. The war that broke out shortly after our arrival made even basic survival a daily negotiation. Yet it was also in Yemen that I became a humanitarian worker, a facilitator, and — eventually — a researcher committed to documenting the lives of East African women and girls fleeing through the Gulf corridor. My research was never detached. I lived among the very people whose stories I sought to understand. We shared the same anxieties: fear of authorities, uncertainty about tomorrow, the longing for loved ones left behind. This positionality challenged traditional notions of researcher “objectivity.” Instead, I embraced a different kind of rigor — one grounded in empathy, lived experience, and accountability to my community.
II. Research Under Siege: When Method Becomes Survival
Conducting oral history research in war-torn Sana’a required improvisation and resilience. Electricity was scarce, so I worked through the night — midnight to dawn — when the networks were less overloaded and the streets were quieter. Internet access was limited; institutional archives were inaccessible; many global humanitarian organizations refused participation once they understood the depth of my inquiry. The violence around us was constant. In some cases, I conducted interviews in homes lit only by solar lamps or candlelight. Many of the women I spoke with were hesitant at first, traumatized by smugglers, criminal gangs, or corrupt officials. They opened up only because they felt I was one of them.
Traditional methodological frameworks rarely account for such conditions. Yet these circumstances shaped the research in significant ways. The scarcity of institutional resources forced me to rely on human trust as a primary methodological tool. In the absence of stable archives, oral testimony became not just a method but a necessity. Under siege, research transforms: it becomes a practice of survival, a means to resist erasure, and a commitment to preserving stories that would otherwise vanish.
III. When Institutions Fail, Testimony Becomes Archive
The workshop discussions emphasized how institutional archives privilege certain voices while excluding others. My research revealed this vividly. International humanitarian organizations in Yemen — those tasked with protecting refugees — often participated in the very injustices they were meant to prevent. Reports of bribery, extortion, and even sexual exploitation were common among the women I interviewed. Corruption was often systemic, not exceptional.
In such a context, relying on institutional records would reproduce the very silences that harm displaced women. Instead, I turned to oral testimonies as a form of counter-archive. These testimonies contain details that no official document would acknowledge: teenage girls thrown off boats, sisters dying in the desert, housemaids imprisoned inside employers’ homes, women beaten into miscarriages by gangs, migrants sold between smugglers like goods. By documenting these narratives with care, the research offered a justice that institutions failed to provide.
Testimony is not merely data. For displaced people, it is evidence of existence. It asserts: “We were here. This happened. We matter.” For a community rendered invisible, testimony becomes a home — one made of voice rather than walls.
IV. The Emotional Labour of Listening
To gather these stories, I often had to carry the emotional weight of trauma—my own and that of others. Women cried recalling the daughters they could not protect, the siblings they buried, the children they left behind. Some spoke hesitantly; others spoke in long, uninterrupted waves, as though releasing years of pain in a single breath. I listened, even when it felt unbearable.
This emotional labor is seldom acknowledged in academic research. Yet for researchers from displaced backgrounds, it is unavoidable. Trauma travels through stories; it moves between narrator and listener. There were nights after interviews when I could not sleep, haunted by what I had heard. But I also understood that silence would harm them more. Refusing their stories would be another form of abandonment.
Research, for me, became a way to transform their pain — and mine — into something that might create
awareness, accountability, and change.
V. Research as a Space of Agency
Despite the immense suffering, every story I recorded also contained resistance. Many East African women crossed borders seeking education, safety, or work to support their families. Their journeys were marked by extraordinary courage—by decisions made under pressure, by sacrifices for children, by refusal to accept the circumstances imposed on them.
Documenting these narratives allowed the women I interviewed to reclaim agency over their own histories. Instead of being reduced to statistics or humanitarian “cases,” they became narrators of their own lives. This empowerment is itself a form of home—a place where identity is shaped not by external categorizations but by one’s own voice.
VI. The Researcher Who Also Needed a Home
As I documented the stories of displacement, I discovered my own story reflected back to me. Every refugee woman I met reminded me of my mother’s struggles. Every teenage girl fleeing violence echoed something of my own childhood. Every story about losing home resurfaced my own sense of rootlessness.
Research became the first place where these fragments could coexist. In writing, analyzing, listening,
and contextualizing, I found stability — not physically, but intellectually and emotionally. When I had no home, research became one. It offered:
- continuity in a life of rupture
- structure in a world of chaos
- purpose when survival dominated everything else
- identity when displacement erased belonging
Through research, I learned that home is not only a geographical space. It can be a practice, a
discipline, a commitment. Home can be the act of preserving others’ memories while rebuilding your
own.
VII. Conclusion: The House Built of Testimonies
For displaced researchers, the work we do is never detached. It is shaped by the homes we lost, the borders we crossed, and the silences we refuse to accept. Through research, I constructed a home that war could not destroy — a home of narratives, testimonies, questions, and truths.
In a world where refugee stories are often simplified, sensationalized, or erased, research becomes an ethical responsibility. It allows us to resist both physical and intellectual displacement. It allows us to hold on to our identities when everything else has been stripped away. Most importantly, it ensures that the stories of those who survived the sea, the desert, the war, the smugglers, and the institutions that failed them are preserved with dignity.
Today, as I work as a licensed property consultant in Dubai, a city that offered me the physical safety and stability my earlier life lacked, and an inverse experience of the instability I documented in my research, I see how closely my current practice remains tied to my earlier inquiries. After years of documenting displacement and the collapse of home, helping others relocate or find a secure place to root their lives feels like a continuation of the same inquiry into belonging and safety.
When no home exists, research becomes one. And in that home, we build rooms for our communities, for our memories, and for the futures we still dare to imagine. In this sense, research has not only been my method, but the place where my identity could finally inhabit itself.