In ethnographic research and analysis, reflexivity is vital to achieving constant coordination between field and concept work. However, it has been conceptualized predominantly as an ethnographer’s individual mental capacity. In this article, we draw on ten years of experience in conducting research together with partners from social psychiatry and mental health care across different research projects. We unfold three modes of achieving reflexivity co-laboratively: contrasting and discussing disciplinary concepts in interdisciplinary working groups and feedback workshops; joint data interpretation and writing; and participating in political agenda setting. Engaging these modes reveals reflexivity as a distributed process able to strengthen the ethnographer’s interpretative authority, and also able to constantly push the conceptual boundaries of the participating disciplines and professions.

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Since 2002, roughly 19,000 refugees have reached Maltese shores. Both European Union law as well as national Maltese policies shape their reception and treatment. In discourse, these refugees are repeatedly represented as a threat to the social order on the island and its unique Maltese identity. Through various practices of separating refugees from non-refugee society, the societal vision of Maltese uniqueness is stabilised as a sociotechnical imaginary. Through these practices a prison spatiality experienced by refugees emerges. The emergence of this spatiality is illustrated by drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with both refugee and non-refugee institutional actors. Pointing to the relationship between the emergent spatiality and societal self-understandings connecting past, present and future visions of Maltese identity, the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries is applied in conjunction with theories of islandness. It is analysed how practices of physical separation, the impediment of social participation, legal separation and its partial suspension enact Malta as a prison for refugees and thereby stabilise a concrete vision of Maltese identity.

BackgroundThe Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has been received considerable attention internationally.MethodsThe Convention’s main arguments are conceptually analyzed. Implications for the development of research designs are elaborated upon.ResultsThe Convention entails both a human rights and a sociopolitical dimension. Advancing a relational notion of disability, it enters a rather foreign terrain to medical sciences. Research designs have to be changed accordingly.ConclusionResearch designs in accordance with the CRPD should employ and further develop context-sensitive research strategies and interdisciplinary collaboration. Complex designs that allow for a relational analysis of personalized effects have to be established and evaluated, thereby systematically integrating qualitative methods.

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