Documenting Syrian Refugee Children’s Memories: Methodological Insights and Further Questions

Abstract

Several scholars advocate for children’s experiences to be articulated by children themselves, and some have offered strategies on how to facilitate this. Yet there are hardly any studies that record children’s memories while they are children and offer methodological guidance on how to do so. None that we know of have recorded the unique memories of Syrian refugee children, possibly because of ethical, relational, and practical challenges of working with children considered especially vulnerable due to their age, ethnicity, and experiences as refugees. This article offers an account of how we engaged 13 Syrian refugee children (5–13 years old) in creating their autobiographies—based on memories of their lives in Syria, a transit country, and Canada—which they presented to other children in the study, in the presence of their parents, a school principal, and the researchers. In this article, we identify insights we gained by addressing issues raised by our Research Ethics Board; negotiating our roles and relationships with the children, their parents, and each other; and collecting data from the children in multiple forms. We also raise many questions, which we hope will engage other researchers in developing our collective expertise for recording understudied children’s memories.