Gender, migration and intimate geopolitics: shifting senses of home among women on the Myanmar-Thailand border

This article examines changing experiences of home among migrant women from Myanmar in the context of the Myanmar-Thailand border. Drawing upon semi-structured interviews with migrant women and participant observation within a women-led organisation, the article demonstrates the ways in which women’s journeys from Myanmar into Thailand are also journeys of personal transition in which ideas of home are questioned and reconfigured. Developing perspectives on the geopolitics of home and bringing them into dialogue with feminist theorisations of borders, the article conceptualises home on the border as a site of vulnerability and potential in which participants can challenge gendered norms that associate women with reproduction, domesticity and the preservation of national culture. The article reveals a complex reality in which women negotiate multiple insecurities, developing alternative ideas of home while contributing to social change across borders

The ethics of collaboration with museums: researching, archiving and displaying home and migration

Collaboration has become an increasingly important aspect of higher education policy agendas in which impact and public engagement are regarded as crucial elements of publicly funded research. Collaborative research raises ethical issues relating to the collection, archiving and dissemination of data, but also in regard to the complex and emotional nature of relationships between participants, practitioners and academics, that are currently under‐explored. This paper examines ethical considerations raised by collaborative research with museums, drawing on doctoral research conducted in collaboration with the Geffrye Museum that examined home, work and migration among Vietnamese communities in East London. The paper examines the challenge of balancing the interests of participants with the museum's aim to document and display testimonies and images of participants’ homes. It explores the ambivalent response of participants to the archiving of their research at the museum. I examine my positionality as a researcher, reflecting on the emotions involved in collaborative research. The paper identifies contributions from museum studies that account for the multiple viewpoints involved in collaboration. In the conclusion, I suggest that the ethical issues in collaboration speak to wider challenges of reflecting critically on research relationships that are complex, emotional and underpinned by differing needs and priorities