Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on nine years of visual and multimodal research with South-North/East-West migrant and refugee activists, this paper discusses opportunities and challenges of researching activism that is mostly invisible, often ephemeral, and sometimes problematic to present.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to summarise and bring together the experiences of the project “Visualising the Invisible: Using Visual Ethnography to Explore Extra-Institutional Activism of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities”, which began at the University of Manchester and continued at ZOiS Berlin. The project focuses on the activism of migrants and members of ethnic minorities that happens outside key minority or migrant institutions and therefore remains invisible to the media and academic research. Its aim is to transcend the image of migrant/minority activism as always self-centred and instead explore, and indeed visualise, migrant activism for causes important to the broader community.

The project is as much an experiment of using different visual and sensory methods, and modalities of presentation (video documentaries, multimodal articles, multiscreen installation, public discussions), as it is a journey in exploring dynamics of (migrant) social engagement and community building; fuzzy differences between being a refugee, minority, migrant or expat; discrimination, and privilege. In this presentation, I will reflect on the experiences of working with ethnographic documentaries and installations (co)produced as part of the project, and the opportunities and challenges of sharing them within academia and with the broader public.