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Paper short abstract

This paper explores collaborative storytelling in the context of forced return movements to Ghana. How can participation based on people's modes of expression unfold in a context of violent borders? What are the opportunities and challenges of a collaboratively developed multi-sensory methodology?

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic research conducted in 2023 and 2024 with Ghanaians on the move, who were forcibly returned to Ghana from Germany and labelled as 'returnees', this paper gives an insight into the multiplicity of collaborative research practices in a context of violent border regimes. It invests the question: What can participatory methodology look like when it thinks from research partner's preferences for expression? And how does this approach bear the potential of uncovering hidden stories of exclusionary border regimes?

By describing the work with three research collaborators and the different ways of storytelling - through audiovisual forms, co-writing, and documents - I focus on the role of different artefacts within participatory research. Rather than pre-determined approaches, the engagement and modes of sharing stories and thus understanding people's experiences were discussed and developed within the encounters.

As I will show, the methodological openness to different modes of expression allows for engagement with experiences of inequality in contexts of crisis. This approach links the question of how we know with what we know and highlights the importance of asking with whom we know. However, this attempt towards a decolonial approach to ethnographic research comes with its own challenges and remains in tension with the reproduction of power dynamics and inequalities.

Overall, this contribution is an invitation to reflect on what the approach of 'taking others seriously' (Ingold 2018) - particularly, taking others' aspirations for collaboration seriously - can add to the discussion of participative research methods.