On the Use of Visual Methods to Understand Local Immigration Politics

In this chapter, I present the making of an ethnographic film, which I filmed during a research project in geography carried out from 2013 to 2017 and entitled Victory Day. The chapter provides a reflection on the use of film to capture political actions, specifically the ones targeting immigrant groups. It also shows the extent to which filmmaking relates to experiences of the participants involved, and to the sensorial experience of a place. With this, it builds on previous works that have highlighted the potential of moving images to represent the sensory, experiences and intersubjectivities. Finally, it tackles the ethics of working in conflict cities, and even more specifically, when participants take a hawkish stand in that conflict.

Afterword: Visual Research in Migration. (In)Visibilities, Participation, Discourses

Profound developments in terms of scale, diversity of digital media and prosumerism (García-Galera & Valdivia, 2014; Madianou, 2011) in the last decade have resulted in vast monitoring of movement, migratory or otherwise. While migrants have been outlined as digital natives, early adopters and heavy users of digital technologies (Ponzanesi & Leurs, 2014); the intersection of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) and migration is still under-researched (Oiarzabal & Reips 2012), Madianou’s (2011) work being a notable exception. As Leurs and Prabhakar highlight (2018, p. 247), the implications of the rise of ubiquitous and pervasive technologies (software and hardware) for the migration experience can be grouped in two sets of media practices. On the one hand, these technologies are used to reproduce and (forcefully) enforce top-down control by (state) authorities. On the other, they enable migrants - both voluntary and forced - to connect (dis)affectively, manage kinship and other relationships (Cabalquinto, 2018; Madianou, 2012; Prieto-Blanco, 2016), participate in collective processes (Siapera & Veikou, 2013; Martínez Martínez, 2017; Özdemir, Mutluer & Özyürek, 2019), establish a sense of belonging (Yue, Li, Jin, & Feldman, 2013; Budarick, 2015; Gencel-Bek & Prieto-Blanco, 2020), and move money across borders (Aker, 2018; Batista & Narciso, 2013). “[T]he transformed epistolary base and the communication infrastructure of the migrant experience” (Hedge 2016, p. 3), with their distinct affordances, impact on how migration is currently understood via a focus on connectivity and presence. Stay in touch. Remain within reaching distance. Leave, but let your presence linger.

Migrants’ Mental Maps: Unpacking Inhabitants’ Practical Knowledges in Lisbon

A common consequence of sticking to a research topic for a fair amount of time is that it starts colonising your everyday life to a point where you may find yourself asking questions to every new acquaintance as if they were participants in your project. Your friends may become tired of your constant interrogations, but unknown people might simply take you as someone with a peculiar sense of curiosity. I believe this is what recently happened to me when coming back from a conference and decided to call an Uber driver at Lisbon airport. This chapter explores some of the functionalities mental maps offer to migration research. Mental maps (or cognitive maps) have long helped understanding how individuals use and perceive local space. Yet, as a visual method, mental maps may be produced and analysed in distinct ways. This chapter navigates through existing research employing mental maps and argues for an interactive approach to mental map analysis, in which the researcher-participant engagement becomes as fundamental as the actual visualisation produced. Based on fieldwork with migrants in Lisbon, Portugal, the chapter illustrates the methodological potential of mental maps for yielding information about the ways migrants actively mobilise urban resources.

Conclusions: Migrants Through Images

The three chapters in this part of the book have quite different starting points, objectives and questions. This makes them rich and allows a dialogue between the authors on a meta-level: not in the methods of description or analysis of the daily life of migrants, or the representations in their new lives, but in the one that questions the choices made by the producers of images to account for this reality, immaterial, intimate and profound.

Conclusions: Touching and Being Touched – Experience and Ethical Relations

Sometimes, research can hit you in the stomach, making you angry and upset, possibly sick. With a bit of luck, this can be fine, as discontentment can be a force that propels you to become active and engage yourself. Sometimes, research can resonate in your heart, making you aware and empathetic. Not much luck is needed in these cases, as this will hopefully also stimulate you to get new ideas, a better understanding or hopefully even give you a better foothold for whatever you do in practice. Most of the time, research just passes you by, not leaving much of an impression. We do know that words can make a difference, that words can touch you. They evoke many different thoughts and emotions. It is not a single word alone that does this, it is the flow and rhythm of a text, how it takes the reader along, cognitively but also in space and time and in an embodied manner. To achieve different effects, we place words differently, we craft sentences that appeal to different senses and sensibilities, we use terms or jargon, we write complex sentences that juxtapose hosts of different qualities, as Michel Serres does in in The Five Senses (2008). We present a clear definition, we unfold arguments or put something to the point. Most of the word work we do, we do on our keyboards, sitting at a desk, in a train carriage or lying on a sofa. Thus, this word work happens remote from the site where our study took place, it is definitely not the same as the field work that we do, it is not the same as the numbers and algorithms that make up our data. But done well, it can still evoke the sense of what happens or happened “out there” in the field, the phenomena that the numbers point to, be they the numbers of people crossing a border or the feeling of someone who is lost or maybe even hunted (Guttorm, 2016).

Introduction

A significant effort in theorising and conceptualising the visual has been made within various disciplines. To mention only a few, Howard Becker (Art as collective action. Am Sociol Rev 767–776, 1974) in visual sociology, Lucien Taylor (Visualising theory. Routledge, 1994), Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy ((eds): Rethinking visual anthropology. Yale University Press, London, 1999) and Jay Ruby (Picturing culture: explorations of film and anthropology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000) in visual anthropology, Chris Jenk ((ed): Visual culture. Routledge, 1995) in cultural studies, Gillian Rose (Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual methods. Sage, 2001) in geography and Sarah Pink (Doing visual ethnography. Sage, London, 2001) in visual ethnography, all produced fundamental works focusing on the visual in social sciences. This book, however, without diminishing the disciplinary work within the subject, proposes to approach visual methodologies in the specific context of a field of study, adopting an interdisciplinary approach that brings together geography, sociology, anthropology and communication studies. As Adrian Favell (Rebooting migration theory: interdisciplinarity, globality and postdisciplinarity in migration studies. In: Brettell C, Hollifield J (eds) Migration theory: talking across disciplines. Routledge, pp 259–278, 2007, p. 1988) has suggested: “On the face of it, there could hardly be a topic in the contemporary social sciences more naturally ripe for interdisciplinary thinking than migration studies.” In this piece we will attempt to explain why the adoption of visual methodologies in the field of migration studies is of particular interest.

Migrant Cine-Eye: Storytelling in Documentary and Participatory Filmmaking

The so-called European ‘refugee crisis’ has bred a profusion of audiovisual accounts throughout the region, many of which aimed to give voice to hitherto voiceless, uprooted people. But as many of these ‘untold stories’ gain material expression as storylines, we are urged to consider the implications of yet another form of displacement: from the historical person to the film character, from personal stories to media representations. The growing interest into the migrant issue and visual representations of refugees have played an important role in the public construction of the ‘crisis’ but have also, paradoxically, obscured or silenced migrant voices. The authors of this paper, a documentary filmmaker (Trencsényi) and a social anthropologist (Naumescu) seek to explore narrative strategies and ethics of representation in European documentaries made after 2010 as well as their participatory filmmaking project developed in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis in Hungary. Having collaborated on several documentary films and filmmaking workshops, they approach this issue from the perspective of practitioners, offering a critical reflection as well as possible strategies for those aiming to produce audiovisual works in this field. The inclusion of refugees’ insight and their ways of constructing their own stories as well as their own observations on the receiving societies can open new possibilities for collaboration and creative engagement for social scientists and filmmakers preparing visual fieldnotes, ethnographic and documentary films as well as participatory projects.

Story-Making and Photography: The Visual Essay and Migration

It can be argued that migrants express their own agency, via spatial practices, to change the meanings of the spaces and places they occupy and use. Although they are not the most powerful agents in our glocalized world, they nevertheless sometimes consciously and more often unconsciously, compete with others to visually define their micro-worlds for themselves and, therefore, for more powerful others as well (Krase & Shortell, 2015). Of course, migrants move, but they also settle and can establish more or less permanent enclaves. As students of mid- to large-scale urban change, we focus on commercial neighborhood vernacular landscapes which we argue have the greatest visual impact on observers. As we argue here, special attention should be paid to the visible products of their settlement which are enacted in local vernacular landscapes. For example, markets, places of worship, and even the patterns of dress of people on the street can serve as powerful semiotics or “markers” of change due to migration. It must be noted at the outset that social scientist, like ordinary observers, must avoid the common tendency to essentialize these visible signs that contribute to the problem of stereotyping social groups.

The Researcher’s Nightworkshop: A Methodology of Bodily and Cyber-Ethnographic Representations in Migration Studies

Migrants working the night shift (MWNS) have been invisible to the public eye for far too long. The failure to acknowledge the crucial role played by migrants working in the evening and night-time economy of developed societies is difficult to tackle with classical research tools alone. This chapter offers to novice and seasoned migration scholars a threefold methodological strategy to immerse, inhabit and to bring out of the dark a nocturnal landscape that has been invisible to diurnal people. The researcher’s nightworkshop’s innovative approach provides migration scholars with visual-analytical tools to capture the hidden experiences of MWNS. Theoretically, this chapter considers the broad aspects of representation (reel) and reality (real) of migrants in the public space and in migration scholarship. Night workers, the invisible people of the nocturnal city remain so to scholars, due to the impracticalities of doing nocturnal research (MacQuarie, 2019a). Empirically, therefore, the researcher’s nightworkshop’s strategy offers a solution to the puzzle of ‘invisibility’ of night shift workers. But it also reckons with the fact that to make visible the working lives in the realm of the night is a daunting task for scholars. Readers should interpret the notion of visibilisation with caution, using it as a visual metaphor to expose the factors that alter the night-shift workers’ precarious working conditions. This challenge is addressed here, through efforts that bridge the contingent of night workers, their minds and bodies that share the precarious landscape of nightwork with the researcher – alert and awake via the senses and suffering turned into skills.

“Have You Just Taken a Picture of Me?”: Theoretical and Ethical Implications of the Use of Researcher-Produced Photography in Studying Migrant Minorities

This paper aims at discussing the value of researcher-generated visual methods in studying migration. It focuses on photography as a data collection method, and the problem is presented in the context of researching urban and rural arenas of exercising transnational belonging by migrants and their descendants in new and ancestral homelands. Photography is approached here as a sensorial experience mediating a relationship between the researcher and the participants. The author argues that the relationships occurring around photo-taking in the field are as important as the data collected intentionally. Moreover, the chapter discusses ethical questions prompted by the employment of visual methods, problematizing them in a context of different social, cultural and national settings. With this chapter, the author attempts to answer a question whether researcher-generated visual data can open new angles of analyses of migrants’ life-words and how the employment of visual methods can influence theoretical perspectives within migration studies.