2024 Volume 33 Issue 2 Pages 55-68
This paper aims to analyze the author's experience of conducting research and volunteering in refugee reception facilities in Italy, employing autoethnography as a methodology-with the concept of “inbetween” as a key analytical lens. The author was engaged in both research and assistance while conducting a study on the reception of the so-called “Mediterranean refugee crisis” during his master's degree program. During that period, the author found himself situated within a complex “in-between” space, oscillating between the dual perspectives of “Italian and Japanese” academia, the divergent point of view of “research and assistance,” and the contrasting positions of “host society and refugees.”
In the article, the author discusses the following experiences; the feeling of not being included in Italian academia despite being a full-time student at a local university, his own involvement as an aid provider in “disciplining refugees through aid” which he criticized from a research perspective, his struggle to act as an “ideal role model,” and the possibility of being neither a member of “host society” nor a “refugee.”
This “betwixt and between” position gave rise to internal conflicts for the author, yet simultaneously, it afforded opportunities that could not be accommodated within the confines of dichotomous categories.
By employing an autoethnographic approach to reflect on his own research experiences, the author is rediscovering the structures of discrimination and his own perspective on refugees, which he thinks is inconsiderate during his stay in Italy. The author presents his own experience as a case study to stimulate discussion, with the aim of promoting a more critical examination of the researcher's own position, which he believes will enhance the development of research in Japan.
