Winter Reception and Transit Center in the Republic of Croatia: An Ethnographic View of the Slavonski Brod Refugee Camp

Sažetak

Starting in January and ending in April 2016, we stayed at the Winter Reception and Transit Center – i.e. the refugee camp in Slavonski Brod – on a number of occasions. At this time, this was the only place where refugees from the war-stricken, or otherwise deprived countries could stop on their way to Western Europe. This paper deals with the methodological issues, research methods and procedures (ranging from entering the field and the issues of researcher and participant roles, through observation and note taking to participation, and interviews) which we were employing and testing during our stay at the camp, and which we consider significant for the understanding of the camp itself. We focus on the numerous faces of methodological reductionism and methodological pluralism of our research at the camp. Certain ethnographic methods in our study were frequently reduced to their bare contours, but, upon taking a step away or their combination with other methods, they opened and created multiple doorways to the research field, taking on, among other things, the characteristics of investigative work.

methodology, ethnography, refugees, refugee camp, participant observation, fieldnote, interview