Being invited. Ethics in participant-researcher relationships

Introduction

A sofre, a converted grey UNHCR felt blanket, was spread out on the floor of a tent in a large detention camp for asylum seekers. It was filled with a large metal tray of rice, fresh fruit artfully draped over a plastic plate to appear abundant, and several rations of the camp’s tasteless bread: Azada, her sister Golhai, her friend Samira, and their husbands Ali and Reza had invited me to a lavish dinner. There was more food than we could eat in a day, cooked from the saved, strictly rationed food parcels that the camp administration handed out. The food was seasoned with pepper and salt, purchased from their meagre savings. To honour the invitation extended to me, they had prepared the dinner for days.

By the time of that dinner in a refugee facility in Greece in the summer of 2019, I had already known 27-year-old Samira for 5 years. We had first met when I was a German guest undergraduate student at a university in Iran and when she left from Afghanistan to do the undocumented migration route to Europe, she allowed me to interview her as a researcher. It was Samira who introduced me to 23-year-old Azada and the others in her group. They had been smuggled together from Turkey, where they were undocumented Afghan refugees, and stayed together when they arrived in the Greek refugee camp. For more than a year, I was allowed to accompany them on their migration trajectory from Iran to Germany and conduct research interviews with them. One of the hallmarks of our time together was that I was repeatedly invited to have dinner with them.

In this article, I draw on months of ethnographic fieldwork on undocumented migration trajectories in Iran, Turkey, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Germany to explore the empirical conundrum that motivates this paper: While the act of being invited is beneficial for the researcher to gain access, it can also become a site for the exercise of agency and the reclaiming of dignity by participants. The research question is therefore: When researchers are invited by their participants, how does money shape the research relationship between researchers and participants in the context of hospitality? Through this question, I aim to reveal asymmetrical financial relationships in the researcher-participant dyad. It is through the act of inviting and hosting that the agency of participants is highlighted, without neglecting the power inequalities in which the process of conducting research is nevertheless embedded.

In what follows, I explore the act of ‘being invited’ as a researcher to spend time and live with informants in order to critically examine research ethics in ethnographies through the power asymmetries between researchers and interlocutors. I argue that the act of inviting can in itself be an act of agency and self-determination that defines the framework of the research setting. Specifically, I examine how research participants in forced migration research, who are often marginalised and potentially vulnerable, nurture and provide for researchers in qualitative and ethnographic research. While research has focused on reciprocity and giving back in asymmetrical research relationships, in this article I first argue that money and indebtedness in themselves have an impact. When invited, researchers extract not only knowledge, but potentially also participants’ own financial resources. Second, however, I argue that in doing so, participants gain a greater degree of agency in defining the conditions and settings in which data are generated in the first place. By highlighting the material and power asymmetries in these relationships, this article explores the complex researcher-participant dynamics that research ethics needs to recognise.

The article is structured into four sections. Part I establishes a connection between the literature on research ethics and the social meanings of money, aimed at facilitating the application of economic sociology to the analysis of ethical dilemmas in migration studies. Part II makes reference to the research methodology of a multi-sited ethnography of migration trajectories, emphasising the importance of being granted access to the field. Part III analyses the role of money in the relationship between researchers and participants through salaries, travel grants, and gifts. I argue that research participants renegotiate asymmetrical power relations and reverse research dynamics through the act of invitations and gifts. Part IV concludes with a discussion of the significance of the significance of money and invitations for the conduct of research with precarious subjects and related research practices in qualitative research. The article contributes to the socio-economic literature on research ethics in asymmetric power relations in research settings. For this, it offers ethnographic support for the role of money in interactions between researchers and participants through the act of being invited.

Ethics, money, and hospitality in asymmetric research relationships

This article draws on two distinct literatures to bridge the discussion of the act of being invited in research. It embeds questions on research ethics in qualitative research with a particular focus on marginalised communities through power relations in the socio-economic literature on how money expresses social relations.

Research involving human subjects is always ethically sensitive, but all the more so when there are strong asymmetrical power relations between researchers and those with whom the research is conducted. This is even more true in spaces where power dynamics have a dimension not only in terms of academic interpretation and evaluation, but also in legal or economic terms. Research with migrants, especially those who are undocumented, seeking asylum or already legally categorised as refugees, is particularly challenging (Bloch 1999; Clark-Kazak 2017; Mackenzie et al. 2007). As such, it raises particular ethical questions about migration studies, which are inherently linked to power inequalities. Establishing, maintaining and renegotiating respectful and, where possible, collaborative research relationships with participants in migration studies is a challenge that has been discussed at length (Bose 2022; Krause 2017). It is through these critical interventions that ‘reflexive reciprocity’ (Zadhy-Çepoğlu 2023) has itself become a research tool.

Agency has been central to research with migrants and refugees. At the level of the research subject, this regards the agency that migrants exercise prior, during and after the migration trajectories (Bakewell 2010; Belloni 2019; Mainwaring 2016; Safouane et al. 2020; Triandafyllidou 2017). This focus on agency has been crucial in research that criticises the binary distinction drawn between ‘voluntary’ and ‘forced’ migration and the strict differentiation between refugees and migrants (Crawley and Skleparis 2018). These externally drawn distinctions overlook that, first, migration trajectories change along the way and can inherently contain elements of both dimensions. Secondly, even in situations of extreme external pressure and political, legal, economic or physical coercion, people retain elements of agency. To deny this level of agency is to dehumanise the experiences and abilities of migrants.

At a methodological level, which critically reverses research relationships, the agency that migrants exercise as participants, collaborators, and agenda-setters throughout the research process is increasingly being examined (Hugman et al. 2011). The asymmetric power dynamics in research have led, on the one hand, to calls for more agency on the part of migrants as research participants (Chase et al., 2020), and, on the other, the imperative of reciprocity (Jordan and Moser 2020; Madziva 2015; Rozakou 2012) and notions of giving back (Field and Ali, 2021; Huschke 2015). This raises the question of what researchers can give to participants in return for data. In qualitative research, academic practices aim to accumulate knowledge in order to build an academic career (Coddington 2016; Limes-Taylor Henderson and Esposito 2019). My focus, however, is on what researchers take in addition to the reception of research data. The idea of knowledge extraction is aggregated here through the financial dimension.

Using money as a lens to understand social relations between people is a central theme in economic sociology. In her seminal work, Viviana Zelizer (1989, 1996, 2011) analyses the social meanings of money. Money is not a neutral and objective commodity, but instead an expression of the social relationships in which it is exchanged, saved, spent, or invested. These social relationships which are embedded in monetary transactions can be reciprocal, impartial, formalized, or individually negotiated (Polletta and Tufail 2014). Focusing on how money binds and affects social relationships reveals morals, values, hierarchies, and dependencies that structure social interactions (Hart and Ortiz 2014). As Maurer (2015) argues, money organizes and connotes social status and obligations.

Building on these insights into money and social relations from economic sociology, this article examines research ethics in migration studies with participants who are often marginalised.

This article views migration studies through the lens of “being invited”. The concept of hospitality is often invoked in migration studies, or more generally in interaction with strangers (Marsden 2012; Shryock 2012). However, concepts of hospitality and guesthood are usually used to describe migrants’ experiences in host countries. In critical scholarship this idea is linked to solidarity to assess how migrants are often not welcomed, but merely accepted (Benhabib 2006; Friese 2017; Heins and Unrau 2018). As Albahari notes, “Different modalities of hospitality and impossible reciprocity […] generate different entanglements, tensions, inequalities, and conflicts to be traced” (2015:28). In what follows, I invert this notion of hospitality to focus on the hospitality that participants extend to researchers when inviting them within a system of power hierarchies.

In this article, I reflect on the act of ‘being invited’ in ethnographic research settings from the perspective of critically examining the role of money in researcher-participant relationships in a research setting characterised by asymmetric power in a postcolonial academic context. I define ‘being invited’ as the process by which research participants, who are aware of the researcher’s aim to conduct research, actively invite them to share their narratives, to be interviewed, to refer other potential participants and to disseminate information. In addition, participants hereby exert agency as they actively invite the researcher, and provide food, accommodation or a place to sleep. It’s a process in which the participants feel that they want to contribute to the research not only with their intellectual insights and experiences, but also by creating the framework, the place and the food, by determining the locations and the conditions of the research encounters. Consequently, when ‘being invited’, the research process is further shaped by social norms of hospitality. The research process becomes one that is guided not only by the inherent power dynamics between the researcher and the participant, but also by the relationship between the host and the guest, which can redefine the inherent financial and power asymmetries.

‘Being invited’: Entering ethnography

This research project was conducted as a multi-sited ethnography (Hannerz 2003; Marcus 1995; Tomlinson 2011). In order to follow the entire undocumented migration trajectory from Afghanistan to Germany, I conducted research in Iran, Turkey, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Germany interviewing people from Afghanistan in Farsi and Dari. The research project took place between 2017 and 2021, with a follow-up period until 2022. For me, as a white German woman, this research was only possible because I had lived and studied in Iran between 2014 and 2015. During this time, I had met many of my later interviewees in Tehran, where they lived as undocumented Afghan migrants. These contacts led to my work as a volunteer Farsi translator for Afghans and Iranians since 2015. This research ethnography was thus shaped by the previous period as student and volunteer, as well as my new position as a female doctoral research student in my mid-twenties funded by a German research institution. Gender, academic status, age and financial funding determined access in shifting social environments throughout the multi-sited ethnography.

Access to this multi-sited ethnography meant that interviewees not only gave their informed consent to be interviewed, but also hosted me - for several hours or even weeks. However, in addition to these interviews, many of them contributed to the research by inviting me as a researcher into their homes or makeshift shelters, by serving me meals, and by keeping me constantly informed of their locations along their trajectories, so that it was only through their invitation that I was able to conduct this research project in depth.

Conducting ethnographic research and entering a relationship through the act of “being invited”, however, can imply that participants provide these meals as an act of generosity on the one hand, and to fulfil their self-determined roles and definitions of being good hosts on the other. Thus, the festive dinner described in the opening vignette that Azada, Golhai, Samira and their husbands prepared for me was an act of hospitality as I followed their invitation. At the same time though it meant that I was entering into our research relationship at a time when my employer, research institute or university, had dedicated a financial value that I could potentially be reimbursed for. At this intersection of bureaucracy, accounting, and ethnography, employers have to write down every meal they receive as part of the “given in their function as employers or researchers” which is then deducted from the daily allowance in the field. This money is saved by the employer but can neither bureaucratically nor in the regard of hospitality be given to the research participants.

‘Being invited’ also meant that gift-giving was an important pillar of the monetary and economic transactions between researcher and participants. When I first arrived on the Greek island of Lesvos on the night ferry from Athens, two participants were already waiting for me on the dock. Early in the morning, Samira and Honarmand had taken one of the first buses from Camp Moria to welcome me. In her hands was a large bouquet of pink flowers she had picked on the way and handed to me with a big smile. Similarly, as my time on Lesvos drew to a close, Janna, a twenty-year-old Afghan woman, presented me with a teddy bear as a gift that she herself had received from a charity organization. Meanwhile, I was carrying a plastic bag of packaged cooked food, meticulously prepared by Golshid for my departure.

In the realm of gift-giving, reciprocity prevailed. To return the favours bestowed upon me, I carefully adhered to what I considered to be a hierarchy of gifts: I divided my gifts, which I would bring both as a researcher and as a guest, when entering participants’ places. I would bring small pleasantries such as fruits, sweets or flowers when being invited. However, the dynamics of our research relationships, in which I was well informed about their economic needs, led me to bring a second contribution outside of the visible and presented exchange of “pretty gifts”. In an unspoken manner, I would discreetly place a second bag with oil, flour and other essentials in the cooking area. My intention with these items was to alleviate the additional expenses incurred by the hosts during my stays.

These vignettes illustrate the multifaceted nature of gift-giving in economically unequal research relationships. Reciprocal gestures as host and guest are expected, but at the same time these hierarchies need to be navigated through practical contributions that still underline the dignity of the host. Equality and gratitude had to be expressed without further judgement. The exchange of gifts symbolised the beginning and the end of my stays, as the two vignettes show. They were guided by the rules of hospitality that I had been taught when I lived with an Afghan host family between 2014 and 2016 during my time as a German exchange student at the University of Tehran in Iran. In this way, these forms of exchange and behaviour were extended and prolonged to the research sites along the trajectories of undocumented migration from Afghanistan to Germany.

The act of gift-giving, when ‘being invited’ in ethnographic researcher-participant relationships, implies a reciprocal process. In his seminal work on gift-giving, Marcel Mauss (1950) illustrates the reciprocal expectations that gifts express and create. In a qualitative research setting, Ansell et al. (2022) describe how not giving gifts creates a debt on the part of the researcher. However, in comparison, in a research setting where a small gift exchange took place between the researcher and the participants, a sense of equality was created between both sides. Drawing on the gift-giving practices as “commoditization and commercialisation of research encounters”, Hammet and Sporton (2012:498) writes that an “understanding of the meanings of payments and gifting is important as reciprocal exchange relations provide a common form of ‘insurance’ against future challenges”. In my research, these gift exchanges were so significant because none of the participants would accept any kind of financial compensation or exchange for the time, I spent with them and the resources I used during my stays. It is from this position that we need to consider the one-sidedness of research: While one side performs their job, the other side gives their information, time, insights, and, as I would argue, notions of hospitality, without any material reward.

Depending on their rank and academic institution, researchers are supported by a variety of financial resources, with some self-funding their research for years, others receiving fellowships that cover only the essential costs, and still others holding positions that provide a salary, logistical support, and daily subsistence allowances. The financial disparities that exist between researchers influence the construction of ethnographies in a multitude of ways. However, they are united by the fact that the time spent with participants conducting ethnographies, - whether it is perceived as enjoyable, enlightening or tedious,- is always situated within the context of research and therefore work.

This work-related money, which researchers receive in many forms from salaries, grants or personal savings, remains ‘earmarked’ for work, to use Viviana Zelizer’s (1989) term for special monies. When ‘being invited’ by participants, the money that participants spend on the researcher has different dimensions: It can be a gendered expenditure when the male participant wants to treat the female researcher, it can be a status marker when the older participant invites the younger researcher, it can be a recognition by the participant for the work the researcher is doing on their behalf, or it can be a role reversal in which the participants frame the interaction. In the case of participants who are marginalised in an economic, political or legal sense, such as undocumented migrants, it can be a demonstration of dignity and agency taking on the role of hosts.

‘Being the host’: Participants’ agency and relocation of power dynamics

Following how ‘being invited’ constructs the asymmetrical power dynamics of the frameworks in which research is conducted, I now turn to how participants renegotiate research relationships by being the host. When researchers are being invited by their participants, research relationships can become inverted. Participants actively decide that they do want to open their insights, homes, and tables to researchers. Acknowledging this allows to put participants’ agency to be foregrounded while simultaneously critically challenging researchers’ assumptions. I will do this by focusing on how by choosing to take on the role as hosts participants accumulate social capital, create debt, and frame the research environment. It is about the agency that arises from actively becoming hosts of a research environment.

Halime, who everyone called madar borzorg, grandmother, because of her age, had baked fresh bread in the olive groves near the Greek refugee camp for the evening she was to give me the interview. She waited until the end of the meal, nodded to me to start the recording, hushed me over my sentence capturing that the audio was being recorded with her consent, and then said that her story mattered. Her family had first fled the Soviet army, then she and her children had fled with the first reign of the Taliban, and now they were fleeing the xenophobia and brutal attacks of the Iranian regime.

Halime had deliberately chosen and orchestrated the setting in which the recording took place, and she had attached importance to it. The impact of her words mattered because she had invited me, prepared the food, decided who else would be present and allowed me as a researcher to record her story. She had controlled access to the data collection.

The act of ‘being invited’ creates the situation in which the interview can be recorded and thus, sets the framework within which the research is conducted. In ethnography, the time actually spent in the field taking field notes, observing and asking questions extends well beyond the limited time of the actual recorded interview. Building trust leads to the moment when researchers and participants feel sufficiently prepared to enter the formal part of the recorded interview. These instances of interviewing were staged and carefully prepared. Being invited to a large dinner was usually the onset for the recorded interviews in this research. After the meal and tea has been served, the interview would begin. The act of “being invited” is associated with privilege and access. In qualitative research it is the gateway to conducting research.

In the opening vignette, Azada, Samira and Golshid had invited me to dinner in their section of the camp where they were staying. But in addition to this, they had also informed and invited other neighbours. Their reasoning was that it would be a way for me to get in contact with other Afghans on their way to Europe. But it also meant that they had to host more people and cook for more guests at their own expense. While this meant an additional financial burden for my stay as a researcher with them entailed, it also meant that they represented themselves to and within the community. They served as interlocutors for me as a white, German researcher, and within their camp section they were seen as hosts who had connections with people outside the camp.

This raises the question of participants’ expectations. Although I was well informed about their daily expenditures, savings and informal loans for their migratory journeys, since this was the focus of the research, I myself was completely excluded from the financial relationships that people developed among themselves along their journeys. Not once was I asked if I could borrow money, make a donation or even contribute to the collection of money for birthday presents. Instead, as I interpreted it, the potential for access to information and future exchange was projected onto me. This served as a potential future asset upon arrival in Germany, but it could also enhance one’s status within the Afghan community in the camp.

Being a host is in itself a role that is connected to honor, esteem and respect. It can enhance one’s reputation not only in front of the immediate guest (here the researcher), but also as a status in the wider community. It displays connections and, through symbolic capital, demonstrates that one is as situated within a network. Networks and connections create social capital and it was therefore important to be connected to someone who was seen as potentially useful (Bourdieu, 1986). For a researcher in the field of forced migration research, however, this leads to a further caution of ‘do no harm’ and a weighing up of the potential consequences that ethnographic research and staying with informants can have (Clark-Kazak, 2021). I will do this by focusing on how participants accumulate social capital, create debt and shape the research environment by choosing to take on the role of host. It is about the agency that comes from actively becoming hosts of a research environment.

Debt, whether formal or informal, monetary or social, binds people (Carruthers, 2017; Peebles, 2010; Wherry et al., 2019). This is also true of the researcher-participant dyad. Debt is a way of rebalancing and rearticulating power dynamics. Rather than bringing reciprocity into an expected future where researchers want to return to their sites, being a guest creates an immediate form of entering into a reciprocal relationship. The invitation to stay with people creates a form of indebtedness that guides academic writing. The gifts and time that I, like so many other qualitative researchers, was awarded with cannot be undone. It shapes the perceptions and interviews recorded as relationships deepen.

Conclusion

This article investigated how the act of ‘being invited’ as a researcher has an impact on the power dynamics within which research is conducted. It addresses this question through the lens of money and agency, drawing on data collected during a multi-sited ethnography of migration trajectories. In doing so, I discuss how by inviting the researcher, interlocutors position themselves as agents who determine the framing of their narratives with dignity, which is particular important in the face of EU policies and research contexts that devalue and degrade their experiences. In this case of invitation, such efforts enforce recognition: undocumented migrants are the hosts of research, offering researchers a perception in exchange for recognition, thus inverting socio-economic relations through money and gift-giving.

Relationships between researchers and participants in migration research are imbued with asymmetrical power dynamics. By understanding the social meanings of money, the act of ‘being invited’ and the multifaceted meanings it holds for researchers and participants reveals a more active expression of participants’ agency and consent. However, this may shift costs to the participants themselves, who may even pay to host researchers according to their self-determined realms of appropriate hospitality. Financially, this increases the monetary gap between researchers and participants, but it redefines the notion of dignity. Ultimately, I argued that this is an act of dignity in which participants, as hosts, set the terms of research, accumulate social capital and create debt. While this does not fundamentally decolonise the system in which research is conducted in the first place, it does reverse power relations and express participants’ agency in the overall research process. It is essential that researchers and institutions reflect on the economic and power inequalities in research processes and recognise that the notion of reciprocity and ‘giving back’ needs to be understood more holistically.