Refugee camp geographies vary greatly; however, the most fleeting informal camps and decades-old institutional settlements have in common that they are meant to be temporary. While research on camps has been attentive to their spatialities, relatively little work has focused on closures. However, we consider the permanent possibility of closure as a constitutive element of life-in-the-camp. Closures, then, must be situated within the exclusionary landscapes in which states manage migrants custody, protection and displacement. We accordingly present camp closures as manifestations of sovereign power and the study of camp afterlives as key to critical understandings of camp geographies.

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The changing enforcement and porosity of camp boundaries have implications for research in camps and their environs. Camp research is increasingly blurring their locational and categorical boundaries. However, in contexts where camp boundaries are being actively “hardened,” researchers must be attentive to possible effects of research across boundaries for those who are targeted by encampment. Research has an ethical imperative to challenge exclusionary boundaries and categories, recognising the many ways these constructed boundaries are already crossed and contested. It must also conscientiously negotiate and even defer to boundaries in research when participants may otherwise be at risk because of the underlying violence that maintains camps as discrete spatial technologies of power. In conducting life‐history research with Burundian refugees in Tanzania, I chose to “bound” my research with Burundian refugees to within camp boundaries, to reduce the risk to research participants. I argue that although research in camps may risk reifying camp boundaries, it can nevertheless conscientiously reach beyond and challenge camp boundaries through attentive methods. The stories recounted in this research reach far beyond camp boundaries, and include experiences of Burundian border‐crossers seeking liveable lives in diverse places and situations, not always of their own choosing. Life histories thus weave an imperfect, inchoate “minor cartography” of often‐invisibilised, diverse sites of refugee lives, bound up with the changing power and policing of camp boundaries shaping refugees' trajectories in the broader “campscape” over time.

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Camps and camp-like spaces have long sparked interest among geographers, sociologists, historians, architects, political scientists, and anthropologists alike. This scholarship has varyingly conceived of the camp as a modern technology of humanitarian aid and population management, a thanatopolitical institution, a site of protest and resistance, a metaphor of sovereign exclusion, or a means of colonial expansion, and more. However, comparatively few studies have explicitly focused on the methodologies of actually doing research in/on camps. The characteristics of camps, that make them of interest to researchers in the first place, generate methodological, ethical, and practical challenges for conducting research. Consequently, this special section contributes to an already multifaceted and growing body of camp studies literature by dwelling specifically on the "how" of studying camps. It does so by drawing on broader critical methodologies