Invisible ‘in what way’ asks us to consider the categories we apply to people and situations and the functions those categories fulfil.
Invisibility is therefore fundamentally relational its impacts depend on the power relations and interests connecting those who see and those who are to be seen (or not). The question ‘invisible to whom’ reminds us of the range of actors in displacement situations, where a group, such as IDPs, may have been invisible to the United Nations and to ‘refugee studies’ academics, but very visible to the International Committee of the Red Cross, local governments and residents of the areas into which people were forced to move. A well known example is the category of internally displaced persons, but there are many others. The ‘who or what’ refers to various groups and processes that have long been part of the experience of displacement, but which were only ‘discovered’ by academics and policy makers as a new area of concern at a particular point in time. It asks not only who or what is invisible, but invisible to whom, in what ways, and why.
EXAMPLES IF IVISIBLE STRENTH SERIES
This special edition discusses 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.Ī critical look at invisibility begs a series of questions. 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. By directing our gaze, we also avert our eyes.
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