Invisible Displacement

Abstract

By directing our gaze, we also avert our eyes. It is widely recognized—though the implications are rarely consistently analysed—that all perspectives are partial, and that therefore by seeing, describing and categorizing social reality, we also make people and processes invisible. This paper introduces a special edition of the Journal of Refugee Studies on the many aspects of invisibility in refugee and forced migration studies: at the conceptual level, from the perspective of forced migrants, in relation to policy, and from the perspective of academic knowledge production.