Digital embodiments: a two-day workshop with migrant women

This chapter draws on Digital Storytelling (DS), a process that allows research participants to tell their stories in their own words through a guided creative workshop that includes the use of digital technology, participatory approaches, and co-production of personal stories. As such, it is a method devised for bridging the gap between theory and experience and can be considered a social practice as well as a research method. During a workshop with migrant women, DS enabled all research participants to express personal truths that are worked on using technologies of telling, listening to each other's stories, writing, and giving each other comments and feedback within the group. In this chapter, DS is interpreted as embodied feminist research as it draws on repertoires of co-production that are typical of feminist activism and research.

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.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book aims to explore and situate the concept of ‘embodiment’ on the map of research methodologies at a time when what counts as data in qualitative research is expanding. The book attempts to systematize the current work on embodiment within migration studies and set it firmly in the field of qualitative data collection and analysis. Doing embodied research is crucial for deploying a noninvasive approach to working with research participants in vulnerable positions, such as migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking women, as will become evident through the theoretical stances and the application of embodied research in the course of the book.

Conclusions

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book sought to address the question on the importance of embodied research by first highlighting the theoretical underpinnings of embodiment, and second by providing examples of embodied research which made use of creative and participatory approaches with migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking women in London. Epistemologies such as post-phenomenology, sensory, and affective approaches concur that the body is material, socially constructed and the social relations it produces are generative and agentic. By looking at the intellectual tradition where embodiment is situated, this book interrogates the process of doing embodied research with migrant women in London.

Doing embodied research: participatory and creative approaches

This chapter provides examples of creative and participatory work done when qualitatively researching race, gender, and migration. The ground-breaking practices developed by voluntary and community organisations and NGOs to help the communities they target is constantly evolving, differs according to the area of intervention, and is not systematically documented or mapped in a coherent body of work. Rather, it is fragmented, unevenly developed within organisations and highly dependent on the context in which these experimentations with creative methods take place. The chapter reviews the experience of third-sector organisations using embodied approaches to engage their service users and discusses examples of research conducted using participatory and creative research methods in the social sciences, before focusing specifically on research which has dealt with embodied methodologies in the field of migration. Colonial relationships in research are considered from a critical perspective.

Beyond phenomenology: embodiment in qualitative research

This chapter looks back at the intellectual traditions within which embodiment is situated, that is, the phenomenological tradition on the one hand and the overcoming of the phenomenological tradition through Foucauldian understandings of the body on the other. It interrogates embodied research by looking at the embodied positionalities of researcher and research participants during the research process. It discusses affect and the sensory as examples of embodied epistemologies that stem from phenomenology and post-phenomenology, and the specific contribution of feminist research to embodiment theory is highlighted. Attempts at embodying research are becoming more common and the field is expanding in several directions. The chapter engages with the origin of this approach and with its current debates.