Author: Paula Banerjee
Abstract
There was a proclivity to view forced migration from the perspective of law, legal and official discourses. In the last two decades, a group of social scientists from the global south has challenged the major theoretical assumptions of the field of forced migration as set by the global north. One of the new methodologies that was added in researching forced migration was feminist methodology with its own objectives and mode of study. Feminist objectives include some of the following characteristics: it presupposes gender as a central category of analysis; it questions what is recognized as “normal”; it serves as a corrective to andro-centric notions by generating new knowledge; it accepts women’s own interpretation of their identities and experiences. Feminists over the last two decades have not only feminized the discourse of forced migration, it created an alternative discourse with raising different questions, generated a value system that recognizes women’s agency which loosely can be termed as a feminist methodology.