We’re thrilled to share the latest Migration podcast episode: "A Conversation with the 2025 GenSeM Best Paper Winners"! In this episode, Kate Dearden sits down with Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot and Herbary Cheung, the brilliant minds behind the award-winning paper, to explore the themes of position and power in research.
🔗 Listen now on the IMISCOE website: Position and Power in Research 🔗 Or catch it on SoundCloud: The Migration Podcast – Ep10 S5
In their paper, they argue that researchers’ power and positionality shift across research phases, relationships, and institutions.
In this episode, you’ll hear Kate Dearden speaking with Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot and Herbary Cheung. At IMISOCE’s annual conference in summer 2025, they won the “Best Paper Award” from IMISCOE’s Standing Committee on Gender and Sexuality in Migration Studies (“GenSeM”). Their paper is called: "Temporal contextuality of agentic intersectional positionalities: nuancing power relations in the ethnography of minority migrant women".
Kate speaks with them about what their paper is about and gets an update on her understanding of reflexivity and positionality in the research process. In their paper, they argue that researchers’ power and positionality shift across research phases, relationships, and institutions. We also discuss their collaboration – and how they overcome the fact that it can be hard to collaborate on comparative work as ethnographers.
Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot is a tenured research associate of the Fund for Scientific Research and Senior Lecturer at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Her recent research focuses on Belgian-Asian couples and the decision-making process of people called “Asians” aspiring to migrate towards or remigrate within the European Union.
Herbary Cheung is a Lecturer in Gender Studies, Monash University Malaysia. His work critically examines the intersections of gender and migration; family, marriage and health; social development and social policy, with a focus on their wider social impacts in Southeast Asia.
The paper for which our guests won a prize is “Temporal contextuality of agentic intersectional positionalities: Nuancing power relations in the ethnography of minority migrant women”
In the episode, Dr. Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot mentions work related to these two projects: BelMix (2017-2027: https://belmix.hypotheses.org/) and AspirE (Jan. 2023-Feb. 2026: https://aspire.ulb.be/).
Dr. Fresnoza-Flot is grateful to the study participants who entrusted her their personal stories. She also thanks the two anonymous reviewers for the journal Qualitative Research, whose constructive comments and useful suggestions helped her co-author Herbary Cheung and her improve their article "Temporal contextuality of agentic intersectional positionalities: nuancing power relations in the ethnography of minority migrant women". She is also thankful to the members of the evaluation jury of the IMISCOE's Standing Committee "Gender and Sexuality in Migration Research" for the GenSeM Best Article Award 2024 and would also like to acknowledge the Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) in Belgium for a three-year postdoctoral fellowship (2012–2015).
Further reading from Dr. Herbary Cheung:
-Cheung, H. (2024). Single Mothers in Thailand: Women, Motherhood, and Going It All Alone. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
-Cheung, H. (2022). Engendering Migration Journey: Identity, Ethnicity and Gender of Thai Migrant Women in Hong Kong. Palgrave Macmillan Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship Book Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
-Ng, I., & Cheung, H. (2022). Navigating the ethnic boundary: From “in-between” to plural ethnicities among Thai middle-class migrant women in Hong Kong. Journal of Sociology, 58(1), 59–75.
Dr. Herbary Cheung would like to acknowledge Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot for her collaboration and intellectual partnership in developing the concept of agentic intersectionality, as well as the Thai migrant women who generously shared their time and experiences, without whom this research would not have been possible. He would also like to thank the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong and the Institut de Recherche sur l'Asie du Sud-Est Contemporaine (IRASEC).