The humanitarian infrastructure and the question of over‐research: reflections on fieldwork in the refugee crises in the Middle East and North Africa

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Egypt between 2011 and 2015, this paper brings together recent discussions of over‐research in refugee communities with theorisations of the ‘humanitarian infrastructure’, defined as the ensemble of technologies and spaces through which refugee migration and its governance are mediated and reproduced. It argues that engagements with the question of over‐research in geography need to focus on the material conditions that make ‘access to the field’ possible, leading to some places and people being far more researched than others. In the case of refugee research in the Global South, these conditions are often linked to the infrastructures of international humanitarianism, from international hotels to translation services. In increasingly unstable and ‘closed’ research settings, such as refugee settlements in North Africa and the Middle East, researchers’ presence, it is shown, often both relies on and feeds into the local infrastructures and economies associated with the humanitarian enterprise. Implications of the analysis for debates on access and ‘closure’ in dangerous field contexts are discussed.