Contribution short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research in Siena, Italy, this study combines photography and ethnography to explore migrant women's bodies and experiences, liberating their narratives through collaborative, dialogic methods.

Contribution long abstract:

Based on an ethnographic research on the politics of representation and the perception of the body of migrant women living in the province of Siena, Italy, this intervention focuses on their experiences and the visual narratives that surround them. It explores the combined use of photography and ethnography as tools for new collaborative research methods. The aim is to offer a nuanced perspective on the subject of the body and the experiences of migrant women, revealing the ways in which their identities are shaped by cultural, social and political contexts, while avoiding the reduction of ethnography to a simple 'data extraction process' (Ingold 2014). By integrating photography into the ethnographic process, this research seeks to free migrant women's stories from stereotypes tied to their migratory backgrounds and instead present them as women telling their own stories.

Tracing my training and research in photography and anthropology, I emphasize the integrated use of visual and ethnographic representations as tools for interaction and co-construction of meaning. From this perspective, photography becomes a conversational practice (Gunthert 2015) in which images initiate and sustain meaningful dialogues with interlocutors.

This approach foregrounds the relational and dynamic nature of knowledge production, focusing on "the production of knowledge and ways of knowing rather than ... the collection of data" (Pink 2013, 35). It values collaborative engagement in which meaning emerges through shared experience and ongoing dialogue, creating a deeper, contextualized, including visual, understanding of the subjects involved.