Collage-making with migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women

This chapter discusses collage making is an art-based, non-textual form of representation. The process of engaging in a group activity has the potential to elicit verbal explanations that alone might otherwise be too narrow and not necessarily include broader life experiences. Collage-making was used to engage migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking women in order to elicit personal stories about individual experiences of sensitive nature, such as accessing mental health services. It should be noted that participants' subject position of vulnerable women is not an essential feature of their personality but a structurally determined, and hopefully transient, material condition. Most of the women are strong, assertive, and resourceful migrants who have been able to negotiate and embody their experiences of displacement in different ways.