A ‘Place’ for Stateless People? disadvantage and discrimination, but they are often able to mitigate those issues and advocate for change. Place-based working provides the ideal context for that goal. To conclude, place-based approaches offer the opportunity to establish an ethos in which stakeholder and community engagement become integral to research rather than an instrumental aspect of data collection or dissemination. When our research is embedded with local institutions we become part of the place-story and it becomes easier to construct research projects with and for communities, rather than about them. However, this also implies a much more engaged and sometimes uncomfortable role for the researcher, who becomes part of the ‘asset’ matrix themselves. This may at times generate a need to move away from research approaches that demand objective distance and reward information extraction towards accepting our responsibilities as a leader or coordinator for action. It is also patient work, which requires sustained engagement to build trust and relationships that can deliver benefits for both researchers and researched over the long term. For those caught in the loneliness of statelessness, this is surely one of the most valuable offerings academics can make. 152