Who is research for when the world is burning?

Who is research for when the conditions that make inquiry possible also make it ethically precarious? This reflexive article examines the unsettling of my plans to conduct dissertation research with refugee children in the context of intensifying anti-immigrant politics, surveillance, and my own precarity as an international doctoral student. Thinking with Anna Tsing’s concept of friction and Édouard Glissant’s right to opacity, I explore how political conditions shape research questions, methodological choices, and relations of responsibility. Friction emerges as both constraint and possibility: it interrupts research ambitions while provoking ethical reorientations that cannot be secured through procedural compliance alone. Opacity unsettles assumptions that visibility, documentation, and giving voice necessarily constitute care. Bringing these concepts into conversation with affective and new materialist approaches, I treat hesitation, withholding, and reorientation as situated practices that carry their own ethical tensions. The article asks how inquiry might remain accountable within uncertainty, without offering a methodological prescription or a redemptive account of failure. It locates hope in sustaining ethical relations without requiring transparency, mastery, or resolution.