Papers, cards, and perilous encounters with the state 29 turns and tangents, the contradictions and elaborations, the silences and the chatter, the interruptions, and the distractions. All of these are both impossible to avoid and a central part of research in crowded refugee camp settings. Narrative interviews ranged in duration between 30 minutes and 3.5 hours. Focus groups Focus groups involve the interaction between participants. They can develop ideas collectively and collaboratively to bring forward group priorities and perspectives (Alasuutari, Bickman et al. 2008). The elaboration of stories and themes in focus groups can help researchers ‘understand how participants structure and organize their social world’ (Hughes and Dumont 1993). One of the key reasons that I chose this method is that the unit of analysis for this research was the group. The method allows for the movement of discussion between personal experiences and collective experiences (Smithson 2000; Alasuutari, Bickman et al. 2008) and so, as Munday (2006) asserts, it can be particularly effective in considering the construction of group identities. Interactions and group dynamics come into focus, as do disagreements and resistances that contribute to the construction of collective narratives (Alasuutari, Bickman et al. 2008). I conducted nine focus groups in Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia. This included eight single-sex groups and one mixed group. Participant observations Participant observations and fieldnotes have long formed one of the core components of ethnographic research (Emerson, Fretz et al. 2001). Through observations of the social world, the researcher can explore group and individual interactions and dynamics in ways that supplement interviews and focus groups. In more recent ethnographic work, observations do not just record the social world of the ethnic ‘other’ but also include reflexivity, positionality, and interactions between social structures and individual subjectivities (Emerson, Fretz et al. 2001). Often observations involve the interactions that take place within certain locations—for example, the refugee camp—or during events with particular cultural significance—for example, memorial days. Observations also provided insights into issues that I would not have been able to gain from interviews alone. For example, the negotiations and contestations and conflicts relating to the strategic concealment of Rohingya identities that occur around the use of irregularly obtained identity documents for accessing education and livelihood opportunities. In all, I recorded 28 sets of observations separate from interviews and focus groups. ‘Walking histories’ is the term I assigned to a research method I devised in Bangladesh whereby I took two or three Rohingya from different generations of displacement with me on visits to sites in the area with historical or cultural significance in order to generate talk and interpretation of the past.