Paper short abstract:

How does immersive 360-video enhance the ability to understand the Other? This paper aims to give insight into ongoing longterm research on attitudes towards refugees of war, in which participatory 360-video is used as a methodology for ethnographic enquiry with Syrians in Sweden, Turkey and Jordan.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past 5 years, 360-video left a mark on documentary festivals world and immersive technologies continue to provide new and challenging opportunities for participatory approaches. This paper describes and analyses the preliminary results of a 6-year research programme entitled 'Refugee Migration and Cities: Social Institutions, Political Governance and Integration in Jordan, Turkey and Sweden', led by Gothenburg University in collaboration with Malmö University, Sweden and Bogazici University in Turkey. The programme has implemented a participatory methodology based on the use of immersive 360-video technology for an ethnographic study on refugee lifeworlds, conducted in three different geographical locations. The study makes use of 360-video cameras to capture and document everyday life from the point of view of Syrian refugees in respectively Gothenburg, Sweden, Adana, Turkey and Irbid, Jordan. The qualitative data and ethnographic 360-video data generated from this ethnography, will inform content for a subsequent survey field experiment on immersive 360-video stories on empathy for refugees. The paper will provide the first preliminary conclusions on the ethnography carried out with Syrian refugees in Gothenburg, Sweden. The participatory 360-video work concentrates on creating 1st person perspectives, as well as 2nd and 3rd person perspectives, generated from fieldwork and participatory workshops. The output of the ethnography informs an experimental part of the programme, which asks how 360-video enhances the ability to understand the Other and reduces prejudices against refugees of war? Applying this collaborative data collection, the author reflects on various levels of agency and authorship of the research participants.