Creating a safe space for storytelling: navigating symbolic violence in the research encounter

When working with displaced individuals, creating a space of trust is very important at the beginning of any research endeavour. To methodologically and ethically establish this trust, symbolic violence must be addressed before and during the research process, given that it is inherent in the research encounter. In this article, we address the issue of methodological and ethical tensions in research with vulnerable populations. Specifically, we discuss our ongoing collaborative research with displaced Ukrainians living in New Zealand since Russia’s mass-scale invasion of 2022 and the methodological choices we made to reduce the potential for symbolic violence in our research encounters. This article focuses on the process of conducting collaborative research with humanitarian migrants from Ukraine to New Zealand 2023–2026. For our research design, we chose to use collaborative ethnography and to practice strategies of reducing symbolic violence, such as showing total availability to the person and relating through a shared objectification in the interview. In this article, we discuss what each method entails and how weaving them together helped us to create a safe space for participants to tell their stories.