Ethical Loyalties in Migration Ethnography: Researcher Responsibility, Silence, and Long-Term Engagement

Vertongen, Youri
(2026) ‘Crossing Borders: Enhancing Ethnographic Approaches in Research on Migration and Diversity’ — Location: University Erasmus Rotterdam (4.June.2026)

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This paper proposes to shift the analysis of loyalty in migration research toward a dimension that remains insufficiently examined: the ethical loyalty of the researcher toward their field, and more specifically toward migrant actors whose lives are shaped by administrative precarity, political exposure, and social vulnerability. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on migrant struggles and undocumented mobilisations, the contribution interrogates the specific responsibilities that weigh on researchers when producing, circulating, and reusing knowledge about populations who may face concrete risks as a result of scholarly visibility. Ethnographic fieldwork in migration contexts confronts researchers with recurring ethical dilemmas that go beyond standard methodological safeguards: what can be said, and what must be withheld? What becomes of collected narratives once they circulate beyond their original context of enunciation? To what extent can researchers be held responsible for the foreseeable and unforeseeable effects of their analyses, particularly when academic outputs may contribute—indirectly—to exposing, weakening, or endangering research participants? Rather than treating these issues as individual ethical precautions, this paper conceptualises them as expressions of an enduring form of loyalty, enacted through narrative restraint, deliberate silences, and long-term accountability. Adopting a reflexive perspective, it argues that researchers’ ethical obligations do not end with leaving the field or completing a project. They extend into the temporalities of writing, publication, public engagement, and the afterlives of ethnographic materials as they circulate across academic, activist, and institutional spaces. By framing loyalty as an ethical and political commitment embedded in ethnographic practice, the paper aligns closely with the objectives of the event by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue on positionality, ethics, and the boundaries between research, activism, and responsibility in migration and diversity studies.
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Vertongen, Y. (2026, June 4). Ethical Loyalties in Migration Ethnography: Researcher Responsibility, Silence, and Long-Term Engagement. ‘Crossing Borders: Enhancing Ethnographic Approaches in Research on Migration and Diversity’, University Erasmus Rotterdam. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/276004