Embodied Research in Migration Studies: Using Creative and Participatory Approaches 9781447339076

Table of contents :
EMBODIED RESEARCH IN MIGRATION STUDIES
Contents
1. Introduction
Embodiment in the social sciences
Embodiment and neo-materialism: A contradictory companionship
Exploring the boundaries of qualitative research
2. Beyond phenomenology: embodiment in qualitative research
The dilemma of embodying research – whose body?
Phenomenology in qualitative research: embodying research participants
Post-phenomenology and affect
The sensory
The ‘embodied turn’: A feminist perspective
3. Doing embodied research: participatory and creative approaches
Embodied engagement in voluntary and community organisations
Embodied research using creative approaches
Embodied research with migrants
4. Collage-making with migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women
Why collage?
Practising embodiment: collage-making with migrant women
Embodied qualitative research: examples from the field
Focus group 1
Focus group 2
5. Digital embodiments: a two-day workshop with migrant women
The Digital Storytelling workshop
DS as a feminist methodology and practice: dialogical production of knowledge and co-authorship
The political within the personal: digital stories as narratives
Some epistemological and ethical considerations
Concluding remarks on DS as an embodied research approach
6. Conclusions
References
Index

Citation preview

ELENA VACCHELLI

EMBODIED RESEARCH IN MIGRATION STUDIES Using creative and participatory approaches

POLICY PRESS

RESEARCH

ELENA VACCHELLI

EMBODIED RESEARCH IN MIGRATION STUDIES Using creative and participatory approaches

POLICY PRESS

RESEARCH

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol 1427 East 60th Street BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA UK t: +1 773 702 7700 t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773 702 9756 [email protected] [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu © Policy Press 2018 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN 978-1-4473-3906-9 ISBN 978-1-4473-3908-3 ISBN 978-1-4473-3909-0 ISBN 978-1-4473-3907-6

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The right of Elena Vacchelli to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Policy Press Front cover: image kindly supplied by Getty Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

Contents

one Introduction

1

two

Beyond phenomenology: embodiment in qualitative research

13

three

Doing embodied research: participatory and creative approaches

31

four

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

49

five

Digital embodiments: a two-day workshop with migrant women

69

six Conclusions

89

References

95

Index

113

iii

ONE Introduction

In this book I aim at exploring and situating 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 aims at systematising 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, for instance, 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. Several grassroots organisations, including migrant and women’s community and voluntary sector organisations in the UK, make use of embodied approaches to engage their service users through practices that involve the use of the body such as, for instance, yoga, gardening, meditation and dance. Very often these activities help new migrants break from the isolation of their own homes, especially women who tend to be the key beneficiaries of voluntary and community sector provision. Through the process of caring and being cared for, these bodily practices contribute to create forms of solidarity relying on mutual affect between community members. The bodily practices I have observed, and to an extent contributed to set in motion, during

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my work with migrant and women’s VC (Voluntary and Community) sector organisations in London have been the inspiration to explore how research approaches and methodologies can be embodied and how research participants’ multiple identities are accounted for and engaged with during the research process. Embodiment is defined in the online ‘Oxford Dictionaries. Language matters’ as ‘the representation or expression of something in a tangible or visible form’. According to Hudak et al ‘embodiment is the human experience of having and simultaneously being a body. The term conceptualises the body as a dynamic, organic site of meaningful experience rather than a physical object distinct from the self or mind’ (2007: 32). Embodiment has inspired several feminist scholars (Grosz, 1994; Probyn, 1996) in developing a framework that draws on Merleau-Ponty’s work on the phenomenology of lived embodied existence in order to ‘understand the relations between conscious and nature, between interiority and exteriority’ (Grosz, 1994: 86) from a specifically feminist perspective. A growing body of work looks at embodiment in research methods adopting a feminist lens (Pedwell, 2007; Olivieri and Leurs, 2014) and some of this work specifically addresses intersectional aspects of both the researcher’s identity and the research participants’, while also critically examining the relational space where knowledge is produced during fieldwork (Norris, 2015). The positionality of both researcher and research participants when doing work with ethnic minorities and the need to continuously interrogate the locus of knowledge production, that is, its critical positioning outside hegemonic, Western and Eurocentric frameworks, contribute to a de-colonial perspective which complements the ongoing feminist framework for understanding and practising embodiment in research. The emerging paradigm of embodiment points to the need for questioning what ‘embodied’ research might look like when working with so-called vulnerable groups1 and uses the example 1

As argued elsewhere (Caretta and Vacchelli, 2015), I am uncomfortable with the idea that it is up to the researcher to empower research participants and

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INTRODUCTION

of the long-standing work I have been conducting with migrant, asylum seeking and refugee women in London over the last decade. Exploring ‘embodied research’ in the specific context of researching diversity and migration is an addition to the field of social research methodologies, especially as embodiment has been mostly developed in the fields of health, psychoanalysis and sport (Hudak et al, 2007; Todres, 2007; Harris, 2015; Norris, 2015; Wellard, 2015) and more seldom has been discussed in the area of migration studies (Silvey, 2005; Gorman-Murray, 2009). Using a critical approach informed by intersectional and de-colonial frameworks for thinking about diversity and migration, I endeavour to situate embodied research in opposition to hegemonic ways of producing knowledge. Intersectionality was developed within feminist research (Crenshaw, 1991; Brah and Phoenix, 2004; Hill Collins, 2004; McCall, 2005; Yuval-Davis, 2006) to further emphasise the centrality of social locations of both researchers and research participants in order to develop situated and embodied epistemologies. Recognising the specificity and situatedness of these interactions provides conceptual avenues for breaking with identity politics as we know it and moving forward from it. In the past few years, feminist debates have been characterised by the increasing appreciation that individual identity grounds, as expressed throughout the 1960s and 1970s identitarian struggles commonly referred to as ‘identity politics’ (Fraser, 2013), can no longer be understood in isolation. The definition of difference needs to be complicated by understanding its relational features (Brah and Phoenix, 2004) such as for example race, gender, age, class, and so on. Difference acts simultaneously on all attributes that define a subject, therefore it is not possible to talk about one aspect of difference without calling into that research participants, especially if they are migrants, are necessarily vulnerable. Throughout the years of my research with migrants, participants’ own power in their life context was apparent; the key question was how to make this evident in the research, and how to negotiate researchers’ and research participants’ own power in the research relationship.

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question other aspects as well. Politics of difference have assumed a new twist aimed at recognising intersecting genealogies of co-existing systems of oppression (such as, for instance, racism and sexism) in order to understand the way these interact with each other, thus creating forms of social disadvantage (McCall, 2005; Yuval-Davis, 2006; Lutz et al, 2011). Recent developments in feminist theory and migration studies led the UK-based policy think tank Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) to state that the current ‘diversity’ turn represents a successful attempt at overcoming identity politics (Fanshawe and Sriskandarajah, 2010). The report emphasises the interrelations existing between different single-ground aspects of one’s identity and root causes of social divisions. It argues that even the predictable traditional classificatory strands of gender, ethnicity, social class, age, and so on, are highly contested and fraught with contradictions as the relationships within these axes of identity vary according to specific social contexts. This new intersectional sensitivity in the understanding of difference suggests that people can no longer ‘be put in a box’ as proposed by the title of the report (Fanshawe and Sriskandarajah, 2010). Feminist and diversity theories provide means for understanding power relations between researcher and research participants and addressing them both ethically and pragmatically. The paradigm of intersectionality has contributed to shift the attention to questions of ethnicity and other differences suggesting that gender has to be understood in combination with other layers of difference. This book aims to expand the reach of the recent ‘embodied’ turn within the social sciences to include migration studies, while exploring the concept of embodiment according to a feminist and a de-colonial ethos. In this book creative and participatory approaches are seen as overcoming representational and textual traditions in the social science. Qualitative data is produced through active and engaged participation using creative activities such as collage-making and Digital Storytelling (DS), where the body is re-inscribed in different stages of the research process. The experience of creating a collage or a digital story draws on non-linear processes such as the selection of images, storytelling and the affective experience of sharing and co-constructing personal

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INTRODUCTION

stories. The approach therefore is not merely visual and productoriented as a representational framework would imply. It encompasses methodological practices aimed at validating and inscribing the body, understood as both material and discursive, in social research. By highlighting these theoretical stances and their application in the act of conducting research, this book aims at providing a foundational basis for lecturers, postgraduate students, academic researchers and practitioners alike, who are interested in considering different epistemological approaches and their application. The book could be used as a guide to thinking about and doing embodied research with so called ‘vulnerable groups’. Embodiment is reflected upon as a qualitative research tool and researchers are guided through what it means to do embodied research ranging from phenomenological and Foucauldian theory to experiential approaches to knowledge production through participatory and creative research.

Embodiment in the social sciences Several analyses of the body begin by underscoring its absence (Fraser and Greco, 2004) which has often informed several disembodied sociological disciplines. Although the human body and organism have offered metaphors for interpreting the social world, the body in itself was not considered relevant as subject of sociological inquiry. The mid-1980s and the 1990s, however, marked a shift in a renewed attention to the body within academia as evident by a proliferation of publications, undergraduate courses and even the founding of a journal, Body and Society. Thanks to this renewed interest, the body became central to a novel sub-discipline, that is, the ‘sociology of the body’ which was developed along with other sociological sub-disciplines such as sociology of health and illness, sociology of emotions, sport, and sociological studies of science and technology (Fraser and Greco, 2004). The body became a crucial site for rethinking the scope and the limits of the social scientific imagination (Fraser and Greco, 2004: 2). Elisabeth Grosz’s book Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism can be considered a turning point for embodiment theory. It was written in

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the mid-1990s and advanced an epistemologically grounded critique to Western thought from a philosophical and psychoanalytic perspective grounded in feminist theory. Grosz argues that ‘body’ contains ‘women’ and inevitably constructs them as vulnerable and in need for protection (1994: 13–14). A decade later (Grosz, 2005a, 2005b) Grosz called for a return to the ontology of the body relying on the interweaving of affective and new materialist agendas to call for a politics of acts and not identities (Pedwell and Whitehead, 2012). Her work points to the ways in which Western philosophical traditions have shaped contemporary conceptions of the body focusing on the body/mind dualism and how this dualism maps onto other binaries differentiating man from women in a hierarchical manner. Grosz’s work highlights the current failures at accounting for the complexity of the body, its corporeality and its agency (Fraser and Greco, 2004). Post-structuralism has also been determinant in the articulation of embodiment theories. Gilles Deleuze’s (1988) contribution to embodiment to the social sciences is to have challenged the notion of the body as a bounded entity which instead lacks boundedness and unity and is not defined by biology or psychological attributes. Rather than the body itself, for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988) subjectivity is at the core of embodiment. In their A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia they speak of an embodied subjectivity, a body without organs’ which is the outcome of dynamic tensions between culture and biology (Fox, 2002). The nature of subjectivity is understood as ‘embodied’ because subjectivity is at the crossroads between the body as matter and the cultural world that limit it and make it possible: ‘Implicated in the construction of subjectivity, embodiment needs to be understood as an always unfinished project, of conforming and transgression; while the true discipline of the body is political science, the study of diversity and resistance’ (Fox, 2002: 349). A body, according to Deleuze, should not be interpreted as it is not a locus of meaning. Rather, it is the spaces in-between and the convergences between bodies (not necessarily human bodies as Deleuze includes non-human and artificial bodies too) that should be mapped. His cartographic approach consists of situating all bodies on the same

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INTRODUCTION

ontological level to matter, and should be understood according to space, speed and by their capacity to affect and be affected (Fraser and Greco, 2004). Importantly, for Deleuze, the body is not an object but a becoming consisting in a range of processes, movements, intensities and flows (Fraser and Greco, 2004). It is a mobile assemblage defined by its unpredictable and highly contingent affective capacities. Like Deleuze, Judith Butler also understands the body as a process, however, the norms that regulate society have a far greater impact in its materialisation, in particular the invisible norms that influence gender which Butler defined as heteronomativitity (1993). Importantly in Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’ (1993), Butler asks if there is a way to link to the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender and how the category of sex is positioned within such relationship. Matter according to Butler is not something fixed and immutable, it does not exist of itself but is the outcome of a continuous process of enactment. It is through being performed that identities come into being and are mapped into the body through performativity (Butler, 1993). Feminist geographers, from the 1990s onwards, have enriched the debate on epistemology of science and argued for a phenomenological approach to embodiment (Diprose and Ferrell, 1991; Pile and Nast, 1998; Longhurst, 1997, 2000, 2005). This was a response to the until-then ‘disembodied’ geographical discipline (Longhurst et al, 2009). Emotional geographies, also borne within the field of critical geography, have a similar epistemological starting point (Thien, 2005). In the field of qualitative research, there is increasing recognition of the role of emotions in producing and shaping data during the research process (Hewson, 2007; Holland, 2007; Ezzy, 2010). This is exemplified by the use of autoethnography as a self-produced reflexive narrative (Spry, 2001), and the so-called ‘visceral methods’ such as, for instance, body mapping (Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2015). The ability to evoke bodily reactions through the researcher’s memory is powerfully expressed in Harris’s (2015) work on the experiences of people living with hepatitis C. Other work such as the in-depth account of patients’ own perceptions of their own body

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parts after surgery and the articulation of the triad body-self- society as described by Hudak et al (2007) is breaking new ground in the field of phenomenology and embodiment. Scholars have pushed the boundaries of what constitutes research data by including art-based approaches such as visual methods (as exemplified by the work of Gillian Rose and the visual sociology tradition) and other sensory experiences such as forum theatre (Rice, 2009; Erel and Reynolds, 2014) and yoga as research tools able to produce embodied data (Buckingham and Degen, 2012), as discussed in Chapter 3. The burgeoning attention creative, embodied and participatory research approaches are gaining within academic circles is confirmed by a growing number of publications (Kara, 2015; Perry and Medina, 2015; Mannay, 2016; Ellingson, 2017). Although not all these authors explicitly situate their creative work within the embodiment literature, they often provide a comprehensive account of how creative research can be conducted in every step of the research cycle, from collecting data to analysing and presenting creative research. This novel attention to creative research methodologies entailing a less conventional and more participatory and embodied approach to research can be understood as part of a current shift in epistemological paradigms in the social sciences.

Embodiment and neo-materialism: A contradictory companionship Like embodiment, new materialism is a response to the so-called textual turn primarily focusing on discursive dialogical phenomena (Pedwell and Whitehead, 2012; Moore, 2017) and representation from a textual perspective. This approach relied principally on language and communication and overlooked a great range of other factors linked to human experience. New materialism marks the shift from discourse, epistemology and culture towards thought, ontology and materiality (Pedwell and Whitehead, 2012) and away from Cartesian towards more Deleuzian scientific paradigms (Lather, 2013). Because of its focus on ontology and an increased sensitivity to matter, new materialism is often discussed alongside embodiment. However, the

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INTRODUCTION

kind of embodiment imagined by new materialism is one that attempts at de-centring the body resulting in an inattention to intersubjective interaction, which has been criticised by post-colonial scholars for not being able to recognise or validate non-European ontologies. The importance of neo-materialism in shaping theories of embodiment cannot be overlooked, but I choose to situate this book in a tradition of work which considers the body as simultaneously material and discursive, agentic, situated and relational (Cavarero, 2000; Chadwick, 2016). Creative and participatory research implies the validation of research participants’ non-hegemonic knowledge, reflexivity on the subject positions of both researchers and research participants and action-oriented engagement for the co-creation of embodied research data. This book does not specifically embrace the post-human drift in its theoretical frameworks and analyses. Instead, new materialism is outlined to acknowledge its influences on embodiment theory and highlight possible research avenues within embodiment theory, avenues I consciously decided not to explore. It cannot be neglected that debates within the multifarious intellectual field of neo-materialism (Colebrook, 2000) constitute one of the recent edges in feminist theory in that, like feminism and phenomenology, neo-materialism holds as its starting point the ontological fallacies of the Cartesian division of mind and body. A central feature of new materialism is its discomfort with the split between nature and culture which has been blamed on Western, and in particular European, humanism (Last, 2017). The cultural theory stemming from a critique of Cartesian understandings of mind and body resulted in a search for agency outside the human, as well as a re-conceptualisation of the human as ‘not only human’ (for example, Bennett, 2010: 116) or ‘more than human’ (Whatmore, 2006) or posthuman (Braidotti, 2013). Iris Van der Tuin and Rick Dolphijn (2010) attribute the term ‘neo-materialism’ to Rosi Braidotti and Manuel de Landa who have come to it independently from each other (and without ever quoting each other’s work). While the Marxian matrix of historical materialism emphasised the material dimension of inequality and socio-economic relations,

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new materialism has introduced a concern with the non-human (Last, 2017). New materialism interrogates the relationship between material processes and human culture and has become regarded as either a poor successor to historical materialism – anaemic version of the ‘full-blooded’ materialism (Last, 2017) – or an outright antithesis to it according to Angela Last’s analysis (2017). Despite several attempts to bring the two materialisms into dialogue with one another (Swyngedouw, 1996; Castree, 2002; Haraway, 1990, 2004; Moore, 2017), their politics continue to be perceived as mutually exclusive, because of their different approaches to economic production and social relations. One of the merits of new materialism is its unifying perspective of mind and body (according to a Spinozian monist perspective of the human being) and its attempt at re-inscribing the materiality of the body as a way to disrupt dualist thought which has dominated knowledge production over the centuries – valuing mind and culture (that is, men and the masculine) over body and nature (that is, women and the feminine) in scientific, philosophical and public imaginaries.

Exploring the boundaries of qualitative research Some of the ideas shaping post-qualitative research can be made to work as a way to inform the epistemological perspective of this book. Patti Lather (2013) is one of the advocates of post-qualitative research as a ‘meta-method’ that moves beyond current scripts and their conventional codifying and disciplining of inquiry. She asks what does it mean to move beyond the limits of the kinds of change that can be produced within current paradigms in an area, social research, which is crushed by demands for more evidence-based research. The key to post-qualitative research is contesting what counts as science. Talking about research that seeks to deconstruct traditional ways of carrying out data analysis and going beyond ‘coding and categorising’ to identify dominant and resistant discourses at work, Lather describes post-qualitative research as follows:

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INTRODUCTION

Escaping binaries into continuums and multiplicities, new events of thinking were materialised; data could be relieved from differing subject positions; thinking became creation as researchers were transformed into creative thinkers in assemblage with one another in a state of virtuality. Here being used by thought has its pleasures, ‘zigzagging through networks of difference’ in a non-hierarchical manner. (2013: 639) One central feature of post-qualitative research is breaking with binaries and allow for continuities that are multiple, non-hierarchical and non-linear. The call for adopting more creative and embodied ways of conducting research posits subjectivity as relational, using understandings of positive and affirmative difference as both continuum and multiplicity. Lather (2103) advocates a kind of analysis that allows for unexpected readings of and listening to materials in a way that the object of research can potentially break with rigid frameworks so that they can be ‘pulled out of shape’. This thinking outside the box identified by Lather holds the radical potential of ‘challenging who you are’ and is envisaged as a way to progress and advance the critical edge of practice in qualitative research. As suggested by the epistemological positions rooted in post-qualitative research, this book welcomes the disruptions to traditional qualitative research advocated by Lather (2013). This book can be placed in an intellectual tradition, alongside feminism and post-colonialism, which tries to overcome the limitations of more traditional approaches to social research and advocates the use of embodied, participatory and creative research in migration studies as way to spark a reflection on the implications of opening up research to different ways of engaging participants, collecting, analysing and disseminating research. In Chapter 2 I explore the evolution of embodiment theory, that is, the phenomenological tradition as opposed to Foucauldian understandings of the body. This chapter interrogates embodied research by looking at the embodied positionalities of researcher and research participants during the research process. Affect and the sensory are discussed as examples of embodied epistemologies that stem from phenomenology and post-phenomenology and the

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specific contribution of feminist research to embodiment theory is highlighted. Chapter 2 is a theoretical chapter providing the necessary ground to understand embodiment. In Chapter 3 I review the experience of third-sector organisations using embodied approaches to engage their service users and discuss 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 looked at from a critical perspective. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 provide examples of embodied research I conducted with migrant women in London as part of two separate projects. Both chapters are based on two recent articles which have been published in methodology journals, Qualitative Research and Methodological Innovations respectively. In Chapter 4 I discuss collage-making as an artbased, non-textual form of representation. Collage-making is 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. The process of engaging in a group activity has the potential to elicit verbal explanations that alone might otherwise be too narrow and unable to include broad life experiences. In Chapter 5 I draw 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 the workshop with migrant women conducted with my colleague Magali Peyrefitte (Vacchelli and Peyrefitte, 2018b), DS enabled all research participants, including ourselves who also took part in the workshop, 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.

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TWO Beyond phenomenology: embodiment in qualitative research

In this chapter I look 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. In her recent article in Qualitative Research, Rachelle Chadwick (2016) specifically asks what the methodological challenges to embodying qualitative research are. While an interest in embodiment within the social sciences is not new and the narrative-expert Arthur Frank (2010) has previously offered insightful advice on how to re-inscribe bodies into social research, there is not much work that gives a comprehensive account on how to actually carry out embodied research and what this means in practice. An exception is Chadwick (2016) who chooses to ‘bring the body back in’ and provide ‘fleshier’ accounts of qualitative research methods by problematising transcription and using poetic representational devices to highlight multivocality and bodily contradictions in child birth narratives. As evident from this chapter, attempts at embodying research are becoming more common and the field is expanding in several directions. Here I engage with the origin of this approach and with its current debates.

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The dilemma of embodying research – whose body? Discourse and narrative approaches have dominated critical thinking since the 1970s in the humanities and the social sciences; however, there has been a recent surge of questioning this approach and asking what is the role of the extra-discursive, of the body and how affect and emotions can be inscribed in critical thinking. Extra-discursive turns in the social sciences include the ‘embodiment’ turn, the ‘sensory turn’ and the ‘affective turn’ which have contributed in different ways to make research less disembodied. Chadwick asks: ‘How do we find ways of doing embodied qualitative research which goes beyond the regular scenario of describing and interrogating talk about the body? How do we succeed in attending to the bodily and fleshy aspects of storytelling and talk?’ (Chadwick, 2016: 2) In order to address these questions, it is key to reflect on what embodied research means and what methodological strategies have been used to embody qualitative methods. Despite several experimental data collection, writing and interpretation efforts made by qualitative social researchers, embodied reflexivity has emerged as the most common attempt at embodying research strategies. The starting point for embodied reflexivity consists of researchers situating themselves as embodied in the field as, for instance, in the work by Sandelowski (2002), who questions the body of the researcher as an obvious point of departure for any process of knowing, especially during participant observation. This particular approach scrutinises researcher’s bodies in the course of research activities, interpretation and knowledge production where the emphasis is on the researcher’s experience, their feelings and sensations channelled through the senses (Turner and Norwood, 2013: 696). Chadwick (2016) drawing on Rice (2009) effectively articulates a critique of embodied reflexivity arguing that if on the one hand its addition to qualitative research on reflexivity is undeniable, on the other it does not address the need of doing research about bodies and of carrying out embodied research which is able to take on board both researchers’ and research participants’ embodiment. By just focusing on

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the embodied experience of the researcher, embodied reflexivity falls into the trap of marginalising the experiences of research participants.

Phenomenology in qualitative research: embodying research participants Phenomenology posits itself as an alternative to positivistic rationality and is key to embodiment as it plays a pivotal role in ‘humanising’ science by developing a vocabulary able to explain human experience of nature, space and time (Ash and Simpson, 2016). Its roots are in Western philosophy and go back as far as Plato who first conceptualised a separation between the experiential world, constituted by a set of intangible phenomena that include consciousness and perception and by material and inanimate objects. Phenomenology interrogates the body and its interface as a perceptual surface able to capture experience through the senses. It was not until the early years of the 20th century that this idea was picked up and further developed. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is considered the father of phenomenology, and the greatest contribution of his work to qualitative research is setting up a systematic reflection on the possibility of studying experience, perception, emotions and consciousness from a perspective that does not involve a medical approach. On the contrary, phenomenology rejects the possibility of truly objective research and advocates the subjective nature of research which progresses through reflective attentiveness to individuals’ life experiences (Creswell, 2007). This fluidity allows for a broadening of what counts as data in research and this, as well as phenomenology’s typical emphasis on the perceptual world, are important epistemological features that feed into embodiment. Theories of embodiment can be used as a way to orient research which aims at overcoming the overly rationalistic approach of many data collection techniques commonly used to produce qualitative data. Before the recent proliferation of creative, visual and sensory research methods (Pedwell 2008; Mannay, 2016; Erel et al, 2017), traditional data collection techniques listed in qualitative research manuals include interviewing, focus groups, and ethnographic research. These mainly

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rely on data drawn from spoken words, text and observed reality and tend to downplay perception and experiential aspects of research participants’ lives. Data analyses in these studies, even when claiming to use an embodied approach, tend to rely heavily on verbal descriptions and discursive approaches (Henwood, 2008). Relying exclusively on verbal communication, intended as written and spoken words and textual analysis, has the inevitable effect of marginalising the body and failing to understand its material and beyond-discursive nature. This validates the feminist critique to a Cartesian dichotomy of mind/ body when conducting qualitative research as I have attempted to demonstrate in my previous work (Vacchelli, 2013), along with other feminist scholars. According to Donna Haraway (1995) the relation between bodies and knowledges is riddled with power relations and the Cartesian dualism of body and mind is hardly neutral as bodies are constantly feminised, racialised and ‘othered’ from the subject of knowledge. Rosi Braidotti (2013) discusses the gendered nature of the separation of mind and body seeded in Western thought in a chapter in Patters of Dissonance whose sub-title brightly encapsulates this issue: ‘I think therefore he is’. One important point of reference for a critique of rationalistic approaches in the social science is the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1969, 2002) who problematised the scientific method as the only legitimised way to understand the world. Importantly Merleau-Ponty contested the focus on cause–effect reasoning typical of the natural sciences and its downplaying of perception. He sought neither to privilege body over mind nor to unify them in an overarching theory (Fraser and Greco, 2004: 43) complicating the boundaries of this dichotomy and demonstrating that experience and perception are at the basis of both subjectivity and objectivity. The body is simultaneously a subject and an object, is mind and materiality, transcendence and immanence (Fraser and Greco, 2004). In other words, Merleau-Ponty tried to dismantle the existing hierarchy between body and mind and assert that knowledge can be accessed through the body which in turn shapes experience. The body is a condition through which it is possible to have relations with objects,

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ie the world situated outside the body and this exclusive perspective is marked by an impossibility to transcend the materiality of the body. For phenomenologists perception is a privileged site for interpretation of meaning to take place. Phenomenology, as theorised by Merleau-Ponty situates the bodily ability to perceive through the senses as central in providing an experiential understanding of the real world. Despite the exceptional epistemological innovation advanced by the standpoint of phenomenology, the social context of the body as a perceiving agent is overlooked. This critique claims that the universalism of the human body fails to acknowledge the specificities of the experiential world as experienced, for instance, by women and people of colour and all other non-hegemonic subjects who do not fall under the one-size-fitsall universalism of positivist knowledge production. Phenomenology’s perceiving body is therefore a/historical, Eurocentric and substantially ethnocentric. Merleau-Ponty’s scholarship remains influential for its insights on embodied understanding of the world through perception. His ground-breaking work consisted in locating subjectivity not in the mind or consciousness but in the body. Because of its emphasis on the body and perceptual world, his work has also been pivotal to the articulation of feminist epistemology. Differently to Merleau-Ponty, however, feminist epistemology has focused on the politics of location and the fact that the ability to perceive and to produce knowledge is highly contextual and shaped by who we are-in particular our social class, our ethnicity, our gender and other social determinants that might shape our interpretation. This epistemological position is shared by social constructionism and post-structuralism, with less emphasis on the extent to which the female experience is situated in particular ways. It is worth acknowledging that phenomenology cannot be subsumed under one cohesive and uniformed approach. According to John Creswell (2007), there are two types of phenomenology: hermeneutic phenomenology (vanManen, 1990) and empirical transcendental phenomenology (Moustakas, 1994). The former is mostly used in education and is an interpretative process in which the researcher makes

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an interpretation of the meaning of the lived experiences of research participants. The latter is the kind of pheonomenology mostly used in psychology, it tends to focus more on the experience of research participants and by using epoche (or bracketing) the researcher makes a conscious attempt at setting aside her/his experiences. ‘Transcendental means ‘in which everything is perceived as fresh, as if for the first time’ according to Moustakas (1994, cited in Creswell 2007: 60). Importantly, both approaches aim at developing a textural description (that is, what participants experienced), a structural description (that is, the context) and a combination of the two conveys an overall essence of the experience. Creswell (2007) notes that the phenomenological method is only partially constructivist as it is fraught with contradictory and contentious realist tendencies; it believes there is no world independent of our experience, and it does not matter whether the objects we attend to exist or not. The approaches I have discussed so far point to different perspectives when it comes to making embodied research: while on one side of the embodied research spectrum we have phenomenological epistemologies that tend to emphasise research participants’ experiences, on the other side of the embodied research spectrum we have embodied reflexivity which tends to emphasise the bodily experience, reflections and situatedness of the researcher. As I have noted above, while the latter is at risk of marginalising the experiences of the research participants, phenomenology’s over reliance on human perception is unbalanced towards research participants’ perceptions and neglects the situatedness and the embodiment of the researcher during the research process. A recent example of this is Justin Spinney’s (2015) work on the embodied experience of mobile subjects, where he makes use of a phenomenological framework for his study. His approach, by emphasising the description of the experience from the point of view of the participants and attempting to place the researcher in the position of those experiencing the phenomenon, also ends up privileging the point of view of the research participant at the expense of the embodiment of the researcher, an outcome that was somehow implicit in this epistemological standpoint. So, how to conduct embodied research able to take all experiences on board?

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Post-phenomenology and affect Recently scholars such as Don Ihde (2009) have developed the idea of post-phenomenology. This epistemological approach moves away from the flesh of the human body and seeks to understand the role of technologies and non-human social actors in shaping the social world. Similarly to new-materialism discussed in the introduction, post-phenomenology draws on Non-Representational Theory (NRP) born within cultural geography to encompass aspects of lived experience such as affect that might escape conscious thought and language, in this way capturing the pre-personal. According to James Ash and Paul Simpson (2016) post-phenomenology attempts to escape the centrality of the subject by moving away from the assumption of a subject that exists a priori from experience. It asks the question of how the subject is constituted through experience and acknowledges objects’ autonomous experience outside the way they appear, are perceived or used, by humans. Post-phenomenology is concerned with the ontological status of inanimate objects and the role of technologies and non-humans in assembling the social. Post-phenomenology interrogates the relationship between the body and the world taking on board both the body as a lived entity and the socialised body; the lived body and socialised body are seen as mutually constitutive. Post-phenomenology’s novelty compared to phenomenology is that it frames embodiment as both actional-perceptual and culturally endowed (Ihde, 2009: 13). Post-phenomenology has also been praised for overcoming pheonomenology’s limitation to understanding the body-subject as abstract from space and time coordinates. Post-phenomenology’s ability to explain social differences as material and not embedded in discourse and its attention to corporeal sense of difference which is articulated through affect and bodily ability to act in the world make it a more situated approach (Ash and Simpson, 2016). The reconfiguration and expansion of the conceptual boundaries of pheonomenology through the post-pheonomenological thought has also brought attention to ‘the study of those aspects of lived experience such as affect that might

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escape conscious thought and language and thus can be described in some ways as being ‘beyond’ experience: experience as pre-personal’ (Spinney, 2015: 234). Cultural geographers have been pivotal in studying the body as a site of affect since the mid- 2000s onwards. Affect is determinant in mediating the relations between the body and everyday life and, together with feelings and sensations, is what shapes cultural practices, enables identity work and ultimately helps with making sense of the world (Spinney, 2015). Despite a lack of a clear definition of these terms (Spinney, 2015) cultural geographers seem to be in agreement about the fact that, similarly to phenomenology, affect is concerned with how emotion occur in everyday life and the body is its key site (Thrift, 2007). Affect moreover is highly dependent on context and the sources of affect are situated outside the body. Brian Massumi (2002) differentiates affects from emotions where affects are understood as pre-personal and non-intentional, while emotions as personal and intentional; Janet Holland (2007) argues that from a biological perspective, emotions are instinctual, or are the brain’s conscious response to instinctual visceral change (p.197) while a sociological take on emotions suggests that they are socially constructed and intertwined with discursive practices. Holland draws on Arlie Hochschild’s (1998) pioneering study on the management of emotions (that is, the attempt to change the way one feels according to their inner cultural guidelines) to suggest its gendered character. Sara Ahmed (2014: 207) also concurs that the ‘contrast between a mobile impersonal affect and a contained personal emotion suggests that the affect/emotion distinction can operate as a gendered distinction’. One other aspect of affect as studied by cultural geographers which is resonant for embodiment is not much around practices of affect. Rather, affects are looked at as a form of absence as they only become present through performance; through the interaction of bodies, spaces, representations and objects (Ihde, 2009). Value and meaning of facets of experience (notably affect) are highly contextual and contingent. Burgeoning geographies of affect (Anderson and Smith, 2001; McCormack, 2003; Thrift, 2007; Bondi et al, 2005; Thien, 2005) understand the body as constructed by emotions. Other authors

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(for example, Edwards and Holland, 2013) contend that emotions are necessary to knowledge as people make sense of the social world through emotions as well as cognition and intellect. The feminist post-colonial scholar Sara Ahmed’s (2014a,b) contributes to defining affect as embedded in social relations and situated in a liminal space between subjects and objects, between individuals and experiences. Ahmed reads emotions (more than affect itself) as cultural practices able to link bodies with each other as happens, for instance, in families and communities. Affect, however, does not just hold the potential to unify bodies, families and help imagining communities. It also has the ability to actively exclude other bodies as evident in the ‘othering’ processes at stake in racism and Islamophobia described in her book Cultural politics of emotion (2004b). Emotions like discourses have material effects on people’s bodies and lives, they are gateways into the social and material world and constitute the terrain for political dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Exploring the links between emotion, power and embodiment, Ahmed argues that power works through affect to shape individual and social bodies (Ahmed, 2000) and affective attachments to social norms are so deeply rooted that social transformation is made difficult even in the face of collective forms of resistance. According to Carolyn Pedwell and Anne Whitehead (2012) the very importance of feminist engagements with affective politics resides in the recognition that feelings have the potential to reproduce dominant social and geo-political hierarchies and exclusions (2012: 120). Margaret Wetherell (2015) argues that one of the limitations of Ahmed’s theorisation of affect is that in her work affect is a reification and becomes decontextualised from the multimodal situated events where it takes place. In advancing this critique, Wetherell suggests that a focus on affective practice rather than affect itself would be more fruitful. As evident from this section, both post-phenomenology and affect theories are at the centre of current developments of embodied research. There is increasing recognition that the researchers’ own emotions are a necessary part of research (Emerald and Carpenter, 2015) which enable an involvement in the research participants’ life. However,

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the idea that emotions themselves can be seen as data could be considered a further step towards an even more radical understanding of reflexivity. In feminist research, reflexivity stresses the importance of acknowledging how the researchers’ emotions, values and positionality influence the research process and data itself. Using emotions as data in autobiographical approaches means reflecting on the researchers’ vulnerability and emotional labour and making this evident during the research process and particularly in the analysis of research data (Emerald and Carpenter, 2015). Magdalena Harris (2015) describes her bodily reactions and their ability to evoke memory during fieldwork suggesting that the materiality of the body is reactive to discourse: ‘Bodies can be socially influenced, but they can also be seen to actively negotiate, adopt or resist normalising discourses’ (p  1696). Bodies, however, are not just reactive, they are also agential and productive in a way that cannot be fully captured by normative discourses as Harris herself acknowledges. Another qualitative research paradigm linked to embodiment which is rapidly expanding is based on sensory experiences transcending the visual and will be explored in the next section.

The sensory Research methodologies based on the sensory are broadly based on a phenomenological epistemology. Jennifer Mason and Katherine Davies (2009) reflect on the complex ways in which the senses are tangled with other forms of experience or ways of knowing. They argue that in everyday life the senses are central to understanding our lives and people’s experiences and for this reason it would seem strange to filter out from social research the reality we perceive through the senses. There is an increasing attention to the cultural meaning of the senses that until recently had only been understood as a domain of psychologists and neurobiologists who focused on their cognitive and neurological dimensions. David Howes (2006a, 2006b) calls this a ‘revolution in the study of the senses’ that has invested disciplines as different as history, sociology, anthropology, geography and literature:

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‘This revolution in the study of the senses is based on the premise that the sensorium is a social construction, which is in turn supported by the growing body of research showing that the senses are lived and understood differently in different cultures and historical periods’ (Howes, 2006a: 114). Howes (2006a: 115) explains that the attention to the sensory is born from a popularity of the notions of embodiment and materiality in the 1990s arising from a reaction to a scholarship which was rooted in visual culture and perceived as disembodied: ‘Grounded in a methodology of what could be called “participant sensation” as opposed to “observation,” the new sensory anthropology focuses not on the measurement of the senses, but rather on their meanings and uses as understood and enacted in specific cultural contexts (Howes, 2006a: 121). The new sensory paradigm captures the imagination of anthropologists who considered sensory anthropology as part of the corporeal turn of the 1990s, albeit slightly different. The attention, rather than being on the on the ‘mindful body’ that is, stressing the unity of body and mind, focused more on the sentient and sensuous body (Howes, 2006a) thus inaugurating a theoretical paradigm foregrounding a relational perspective on the body and its various modes of being in the world. In other words, if embodiment suggests an interconnection between body and mind, it follows that the sensuous interrelation of body– mind–environment would then point to a paradigm of emplacement highlighting the centrality of space to this concept (Low, 2015). According to this new paradigm, ways of sensing vary across cultures and ethnography’s task is finding out how different cultures mediate the relationship between mind and body, ideas and object, self and environment (both physical and social) (Howes, 2006a: 121). The innovative aspect of this perspective is that the perceptual sphere previously existed in the exclusive domain of psychology and neurobiology can now be studied as a cultural and political phaenomenon. The sensory paradigm marks a shift from theories of representation based on textual and discursive interpretations of cultures and societies towards an increased role of the senses as

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mediating the social world. Mason and Davies (2009) contend that sensory methods have mostly been concerned with the visual which has a long-standing tradition in the social sciences and, in particular, in social anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, human geography (as well documented in the pivotal work of Sarah Pink, 2015 and Gillian Rose, 2001). The recent surge in interest and practice of visual methods is partly due to the increased accessibility of user-friendly digital technologies that do not require highly specialised skills and to an expansion of visual communication as found in social media. Mason and Davies (2009) insightfully observe that the methodological repertoire of knowledge and skills required by researchers to do sensory research is not well developed, except for visual research. Interestingly, sensory research tends to mean ‘other than sight/ vision’ and authors tend to talk of ‘visual and sensory methods’, highlighting that visual research is seen as separate from sensory research. Other senses beyond the visual are integrated in a range of methods, which explore sensory experience and culture using, for instance, hearing/sound but also smell and touch. The work on sound and ‘soundscapes’ developed within urban studies, for instance, challenges conventional ways of knowing what the urban is about (Raimbault and Dubois, 2005; Botteldooren et al, 2006). Crucially, recent work in urban ethnography devolves its attention to who is embodied in sensory research. Kelvin Low argues that including both the body of the researcher and of the researched as part of the process of ethnographic inquiry and data collection would facilitate greater phenomenological sensibility to ethnography (2015: 298). This is well exemplified by walking methods where walking is seen as a way to become involved in a place using all the available senses such as sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. This represents an acknowledgement of the fact that perception, reception and production play a central role in everyday fruition of the city. The issue on who gets to experience the city and how is highly contextual to the question orienting the research. Drawing on Robyn Longhurst et al (2008), Low (2015) highlights that reflexivity on the researcher’s body can function to inform sensory methodology as, for instance, happens in

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his own research, where the body becomes a research tool, placing the ethnographer in the field and allowing for him to ‘[be] in the world’ (Merleau-Ponty [1908–1961], 1969). Sarah Pink (2015) has originally developed the idea of sensory emplacement which is particularly useful for sensory urban ethnography suggesting that the body is a primary means for producing sensory ethnography. The kind of embodiment suggested by sensory ethnography strongly relies on the use of multiple senses as a way to decipher encounters and social environments in line with the phenomenological approach. The understanding of the body as a perceptual filter to make sense of reality through a multisensorial panoply differs, however, from an approach to embodiment which is perhaps more complex and comprises the understanding of the body as a material and symbolic construct. This view has emerged within post-structuralism and in several feminist theorisations of embodiment as will become clear in the following section.

The ‘embodied turn’: A feminist perspective There has recently been an ‘embodied turn’ in the social sciences reflected in an emergent tradition of scholarly work (Brown et al, 2011). One major strand represented in the ‘embodied turn’ includes social theories of the body drawing on Michel Foucault (1977, 1979, 1984). This strand of work emerged in the 1970s and its importance lays in its ability to fill existing gaps in social theory, which until then had failed to fully engage with the body both as a socio-political construct and as an un-constructible site of oppression and liberation. Foucault’s influential work points to the fact that the body is the central mechanism through which social order is reproduced and this process is reflected in the idea of ‘biopolitics’. Feminist scholars praise Foucault’s attempt to provide ways to situate the body at the centre of women’s oppression without falling into biologism or essentialism, yet the gendered character of many Foucauldian disciplinary techniques is overlooked (Braidotti, 1991; McNay, 1992). Explorations into aspects of embodiment more recently have ranged from writings on body modification techniques and practices

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such as tattooing and branding (Pitts, 2003; Wohlrab et al, 2007), understandings of disability (Lupton and Seymour, 2000), masculinity (Gill et al, 2000, 2005), anorexia (Bordo, 1993), cosmetic surgery (Heyes, 2007; Alexias et  al, 2012) post-humanism and materiality (Bakker and Bridge, 2006; Braidotti, 2006; Whatmore, 2006). Embodied methodologies are also being articulated as part of qualitative epistemological approaches in the social sciences though the use of a range of creative techniques (Perry and Medina, 2015; Chadwick, 2016; Mannay, 2016) and include the multimodal use of visually endowed talk and text methods, photo elicitation techniques and collage (Finn and Henwood, 2009; Reavey, 2012), poetic transcribing (Chadwick, 2016), relational mapping (Bagnoli, 2009), memory books (Thomson and Holland, 2005), reality boxes (Winter, 2012), metaphorical models (Gauntlett, 2007), self-portrait, graphic elicitation methods and timeline (Bagnoli, 2009), image-making storytelling (Esin, 2017), digital storytelling (Poletti, 2011; Alexandra, 2015; Vacchelli and Peyrefitte, 2018b), digital multisensory engagements (Terracciano et al, 2017) and many other approaches whose variety and spectrum is difficult to fully account for. Only a few of these accounts, however, have reflected on embodiment as a research approach where the body is not considered as an inert object but its agency and materiality contributes to the active narration of the participants’ stories through an experiential activity. Research that already has the body at the centre of its inquiry (such as cosmetic surgery, sport or health), moreover, is more easily embodied in a self-explanatory way. This book aims at exploring embodiment when carrying out research that does not necessarily feature the body itself as the centre of sociological inquiry. Within embodied research, the body is key not as an inanimate object of research but as agentic and productive force within research. It is actively inscribed in research even when it does not feature as self-explanatory object of research. The body plays a central role in generating qualitative data suggesting that how we feel, how we perceive, how we relate to our own bodies and the place they have in the order of things – is contextual, gendered, relational, historically and culturally situated.

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Key to embodied methodologies is also the consideration for the relation between researcher and research participants and how their interaction contributes to shape the research outcomes. In embodied research, the artefact which is created through embodied, activitybased approaches to collecting qualitative data, the narrative used to discuss it, the memories and the emotions evoked by the research participants are used to ‘hear the stories’ the participants tell through their bodies (Frank, 2010; Chadwick, 2016). Feminist research has played a fundamental role in defining embodied research methods, mainly through articulating embodied reflexivity and devolving critical attention to power relations and how they are played out between researchers and research participants. Feminist methodologies have challenged the Cartesian dualism of body and mind and re-defined accounts of subjectivity, thinking, memory and emotion. Feminist research perspectives, and specifically standpoint theories, highlight the importance of social location and identification of the researcher. These have suggested that the researcher’s gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, religious beliefs, educational background, and so on, have specific impact on the research questions which are shaped and also, importantly, on the way in which data are generated (Vacchelli, 2013). In other words, feminist standpoint theories argue that objective research is a mere idealisation in that research questions, data collection and analysis are heavily influenced by the embodied social position of the researcher and his/her relationship with both the people and the field which are being researched. Feminist geographers in particular have contributed to set the parameters to think about embodiment. This is exemplified by Browne and Nash’s (2010) definition of the body as a polysemic term, indicating the place where subjectivity and experience are located, pointing to the body’s existence as an a-priori to conscious reflection and a site where individual and collective experiences are entangled in power relations. Scholars like Braidotti (1991), Haraway (1995), Harding (1986, 1990) and Rich (1986) have been active in defining central debates in feminist methodology. Their work resonates with Foucauldian theories

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of power/knowledge but comes from a different experience, the feminist one. According to this ground-breaking work, it is necessary to admit the relativity of any standpoint, not just as partial and situated within given discursive coordinates, but as mobile and connected to many factors related to one’s personal experience. Influenced by phenomenology, psychoanalytic theory and post-structuralism, feminist theorists have come to describe the body in terms of social contexts and affect, as differential and fluid process of construction, as habitual performance, as desiring- in other words as ‘bodies without organs’ according to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) catchy metaphor in Thousand plateaus. In particular, the work of Rosi Braidotti (2011) is key in developing the idea of embodiment. She argues: ‘Conceptually, nomadic thought stresses the idea of embodiment and the embodied and embedded material structure of what we commonly call thinking. It is a materialism of the flesh that unifies mind and body in a new approach that blurs all boundaries (2011: 2). In her recent work, drawing on post-humanist theory, Braidotti (2011, 2014) problematises standpoint theories and difference as the sole dialectical motor of social change and suggests that more complexity is needed in this debate in order to fully acknowledge how ‘otherness’ and ‘sameness’ interact in asymmetrical power relations. Braidotti (2011) proposes a complex and articulate notion of ‘embodiment’ if compared to previous notions defined by standpoint theories. Braidotti’s embodiment as defined in her post-humanistic theory is close to the phenomenological tradition where perception plays a key role in understanding reality experientially, in other words ‘the idea of a transgenerational, nonlinear memory of one’s belonging to one’s species and community’ (2011: 4). The central idea of embodiment is its lack of linearity and yet the fact that it is also, simultaneously, a material manifestation of the body itself. In this sense, reflexivity and broadening the horizon of what counts as data in scientific and academic research (Henwood, 2008; Vacchelli, 2013) through the ‘nonlinear memory of one’s belonging’ is part of the post-humanist project which is being developed by a plethora of feminist scholars and practitioners.

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In this chapter I have focused on the phenomenological roots of embodiment and have critically discussed phenomenology in relation to other epistemological approaches such as affect, postphenomenology, the sensory and feminist theory. Notwithstanding the differences between these approaches, what they have in common points to the interdependence between mind and body, cognitive and affective and the centrality of the body as a socially situated, gendered, receptive, perceiving, sentient, agentic construct able to make sense of reality through experience. The discussion has also highlighted how these different theoretical positions understand the relational space created during the research encounter between researchers and research participants and what kind of standpoints are at stake when carrying out embodied research. The next chapter will look specifically at research with migrant women, assessing to what extent this research is embodied. Examples of qualitative methods used for conducting research in the field of migration studies will be discussed, providing a comprehensive although not exhaustive account of what it means do embodied research with migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women using creative and participatory approaches.

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THREE Doing embodied research: participatory and creative approaches

In this chapter I provide examples of creative and participatory work done when qualitatively researching race, gender and migration. The account of the research undertaken by academics, activists and community organisations practitioners making use of embodied research approaches cannot possibly be exhaustive. The ground-breaking practices developed by voluntary and community organisations and NGOs to help the communities they target is constantly evolving, is different 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. What is important to notice, moreover, is that what academic researchers see as ‘methods’ are not necessarily so for civil society practitioners and social workers. They are methods in so far as they are embedded in a research strategy and represent a way of collecting data, as stand-alone methods of sociological enquiry or in combination with other aspects of more composite research designs. In the social sciences, a mixed-methods research design, for instance, would

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often include a quantitative component such as an online survey and could potentially include a combination of qualitative methods such as semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and creative focus groups with service users in a given service. Practitioners’ reasons for engaging the community they target, however, are different from the ones of academic researchers and social workers are not likely to see the strategies they use to work with their service users in the same way academics do, certainly not as ‘research methods’. Apart from the need to monitor the impact of their services, where a certain amount of data is indeed collected, the overall aim for using certain strategies to engage communities does not have to do with complying with a given research design or research agenda. Instead, community development tools are usually deployed for promoting civil engagement, for fostering transformative and social-justice oriented social change and for promoting bottom-up integration (Vacchelli and Peyrefitte, 2018a). This is not to say that academic work does not also have social-justice oriented aims. The context in which academic researchers and practitioners work is produced serves different agendas. Similar aims may result in different strategies to achieve them. Participatory Action Research (PAR) is an example of socialjustice oriented research involving ongoing work with communities and cross-fertilisation of practices between civil society and engaged scholarship (Kindon et al, 2007). As Margaret Ledwith’s inspirational book Community development: A critical approach (2011) demonstrates, pillars of critical scholarship such as Paulo Freire, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and their critique from a feminist and anti-racist perspective inform community development work as much as they inform critical academic work. However, Ledwith warns of the dangers of the co-optation of terms such as ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ into the mainstream and points to self-help as a toxic de-politicisation and shift in responsibilities for structural inequalities to the most vulnerable individuals in society. Aware of this critique and conscious of the important work done by civil society organisations to fill the gaps in mainstream service provision, in this chapter I provide some examples of embodied work

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done in third-sector organisations. The second part of the chapter discusses examples of embodied research methods used by academic researchers in the field of migration studies.

Embodied engagement in voluntary and community organisations I have been researching civil society organisations, mainly women’s organisations for about a decade. Over the years, I have come across the most imaginative ways of engaging service users which organisations constantly deploy as a way to reach out to their communities. These include, for instance, gardening and growing vegetables that are then cooked and consumed collectively; organising group bicycle rides; swimming; yoga; meditation; befriending; using art therapy and other group therapies; forum and playback theatre; sewing; making puppets; storytelling; digital storytelling and this list could go on. One organisation in Hackney uses an itinerant bus equipped with a mobile playground reaching particularly deprived areas of London as a way to engage mothers who can meet up around children’s play. Overseas NGOs and national voluntary and community organisations have a consolidated experience in using participatory techniques such as time lining, body imaging, cognitive mapping and at times using digital methodologies such as Digital Storytelling and Participatory Video. The spectrum of embodied creative strategies deployed within civil society is broad, heterogeneous, ever evolving and thus difficult to capture in its entirety. Before providing some examples of these approaches, I would like to outline why these strategies can be understood as ‘embodied’. In the previous chapter, when discussing the epistemological roots of embodiment, it became clear that feminist and post-colonial understandings of the body have contributed to de-centre the patriarchal norm of the disembodied rational white man, according to dominant views of Western philosophy based on the Cartesian separation of body and mind. New-materialist epistemological approaches including post-phenomenological, sensory and affective understandings of the body have worked towards a more integrated

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concept that extends to the social context in which the body, and the social relations that produce it, are situated. These social relations are both discursive and material and translate into social practices. According to Elisabeth Grosz (1994), the body is therefore a social and discursive object, bound up in the order of desire, signification and power. As the body has been identified with women, what is at stake is the activity and agency, the mobility and the social space accorded to women (Grosz, 1994): ‘Far from being an inert, passive, noncultural and ahistorical term, the body may be seen as the crucial term, the site of contestation, in a series of economic, political, sexual and intellectual struggles (1994: 19). Grosz also points to an intersectional understanding of the body when she argues that the relation between body and mind needs to be re-theorised in order to appreciate the contribution of the sexualised and racialised body to the production of knowledge systems, regimes of representation, cultural production and socio-economic exchange. This epistemological question is at the core of embodied research. In this book, this question is articulated through the exploration of social practices of solidarity taking place in community organisations as well as in a wealth of academic literature on creative and participatory methodologies. Organisations in the voluntary and community sector carry out embodied work through social practices that are both material and symbolic and involve affective and relational aspects of people’s lives. Kye Askins (2016) develops the idea of emotional citizenry in her work on the encounters between refugees, asylum seekers and more settled residents in a befriending scheme in Newcastle (UK). Askins makes a powerful argument for a politics of engagement which is mobilised through day-to-day encounters at a local level where affective relationships between befrienders and migrants are constantly negotiated. Askins understands emotion as an outcome of how the physical and the cognitive spheres are intertwined, and thus emotion as being at the same time individual, socially circulated and spatially contextual (Askins 2016: 517). Another example of embodied work enabling synergies between physical, cognitive, material, symbolic

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and relational spheres is the work of the charity Ourmala in Hackney City Farm2 in London which provides free yoga classes for refugee and asylum-seeking women who have been victims of sexual trauma or violence. In the words of the CEO of the charity, yoga helps victims of domestic violence reconnect with their bodies. The value of embodied research achieved through creative engagement at the interface between research and social work is evident in the project Sue Buckingham and Monica Degen (2012) carried out when they volunteered in a centre designed for helping vulnerable women, many of whom had been sex workers, reclaiming their lives. Both researchers are trained yoga teachers and used an ethnographically inspired approach for sharing sensory spatial experience through the practice of yoga and using touch to release emotional blockages during the practice. Researchers’ sensorial response to women’s embodied experiences allowed them to access, share and analyse information about the women they were working with, which cannot be accessed through other qualitative methods such as focus groups, interviews or exploratory walks. Central to Buckingham and Degen’s (2012) approach is their analysis of the body, both of the researchers and of the research participants, as a vector for transmissions of meaning, understanding and experience. Drawing on Loîc Wacquant (2004)’s ethnography of boxing in Chicago, they argue that ‘[There is a need for] a sociology not only of the body, in the sense of object, but also from the body, that is, deploying the body as a tool of inquiry and a vector of knowledge’ (Wacquant, 2004: viii). The aim of moving towards ways of working that both conceive and enact research as a form of body work is achieved through a combined reflection on the body of the researcher’s sensorial response to yoga students’ bodies and the material effect of this exchange on the relationship between the people involved. Reflections on unspoken embodied experiences of the women involved using teaching yoga were recorded in the course of ethnographic diaries, informal conversations, interviews and discussion groups. The authors argue that the sensuous ethnography based on the practice of yoga 2

See: http://hackneycityfarm.co.uk/projects/hackney-yoga-project

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enabled them to explore a third space between the researcher and the researched, in which they have learned more about each other than any conventional qualitative research method would have permitted. The somatic attention to the physicality and embodiment of the researcher and the researched moreover added a further layer their understanding to the everyday lives of an extremely hard to reach group of women. In addition to using experimental approaches for helping service users, voluntary and community organisations look at service users’ lives holistically and are known for their effectiveness in addressing structural problems such as access to housing, healthcare and the financial barriers they are likely to experience (Vacchelli and Kathrecha, 2013; Vacchelli et al, 2015; Jarret et al, 2016). Along with Ahmed (2004b), Askins argues that emotional belonging is embedded in cultural, political and economic spheres. Magali Peyrefitte and I (2018a) have recently discussed the work of a North London organisation MEWso (Middle Eastern Women support organisation) engaging with relational and embodied approaches. MEWso helps Middle Eastern women to break out from isolation, guide them out from the confinement of the home and make them feel more integrated in the community. The organisation relies on 17–18 community-based volunteers, most of whom share the same cultural and migration background of the women they help; others are with white British women who devote some of their time for or to this cause. At MEWso, the day-to-day care for the socially excluded and marginalised is based on the unpaid volunteer work of both migrant and white British women who offer their time to help migrant women integrate and feel part of British society starting from the communities they live in. MEWso deploys embodied and solidarity-based ways to break the isolation of many migrant women. These activities range from health workshops, group meditation, holistic massage, dance therapy classes, classes for selfesteem, art therapy, storytelling, gardening and other group sports activities (such as cycling and swimming) to one-to one counselling. Sometimes this involves organising events in the communities and workshops on advocacy in welfare. Other activities include support in physical and mental health and range from emotional support to

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counselling, signposting and accompanying women in need to the GP to help with language barriers. Cultural barriers and power relations within a group of people can prevent disclosure when activities are led in a group where participants already know each other and are reluctant to disclose personal matters. Women’s organisations are sensitive to cultural issues and are constantly developing ways to overcome potential frictions and find alternative approaches to provide customised support to the women they help. In the opinion of the director of MEWso, building solidarity is more important than the kind of services provided by any one organisation. During an interview in 2015 she argued that she is very sceptical about integration in the larger society, this is ‘a big slogan’ and she firmly believes in a kind of ‘integration’ that happens in small steps, ‘in small groups in the neighbourhood so that they can feel the benefits for it … they are more empowered and they cannot go from isolation to the broader English society’. Grassroots women’s organisations like MEWso are working towards developing bottom-up participation through solidarity-oriented practices. This is central at a time when citizenship is becoming a more and more central factor in determining the eligibility of services and top-down agendas of active citizenship are being imposed through governance discourses and practices (Vacchelli and Peyrefitte, 2018a). Grassroots women’s organisations like the ones exemplified in this section are using creative and embodied approaches to inform their work aimed at developing bottom-up participation through solidarityoriented practices.

Embodied research using creative approaches The increasing use of art-based and creative approaches in research points to a cross-fertilisation of practices between grassroots organisations/NGOs/charities and academic research. While several creative tools drawing on embodied research have been developed by NGOs and community organisations to engage local communities, academic researchers have contributed to systematise this work and

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develop it into an epistemological tool for social research, often informed by a participatory ethos. Very often third-sector organisations provide essential services to people in vulnerable situations and for this reason they have been able to develop, over time, approaches which are sensitive and responsive to vulnerability. Similarly, creative research methodologies used by social researchers are often informed by a participatory ethos and pay attention to how power relations are played out in the field. Creative methods often consist of alternative ways to engage research participants and contribute to destabilise traditional ways of conducting qualitative research. This approach opens up questions with regards to power relations in knowledge production, the role of language in its ability to fully represent reality and the use of extra-linguistic research tools as a way to embody research. While I do not attempt to provide an exhaustive account of all of the creative research currently being undertaken in the social sciences, I endeavour to offer a glimpse of the sheer variety of methodological approaches that increasingly make use of creative methods in qualitative research and chime with the definition of embodied research. These creative approaches work at best in combination with other qualitative or quantitative approaches, however, they can also be considered as stand-alone methods. The appropriateness of one method over another is highly contextual to the kind of research, the research participants and needs to be aligned with the research question driving the research itself. Creative approaches can vary according to the overall aim of the research and what the project is trying to achieve. The visual is the field that more than other creative methods captured the imagination of social scientists. Visual methods have become a discipline in itself as evident by the consolidation of the workings of the IVSA (International Visual Sociology Association) over the past two decades. The number of approaches used and classified as visual methods is vast and range from data collection tools that are to a more or lesser extent participatory, to strategies for analysing visual data. Gillian Rose has established herself as one of the most authoritative voices in the field of visual culture for providing a comprehensive account and a systematised language to talk about and analyse visual

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data for social researchers (see Rose, 2001). Some of these strategies include both visual and discourse analysis and be applied to analogic as well as digitally produced images, to moving as well as still imagesfrom paintings to photography to film. In Visual narrative and creative research methods, Dawn Mannay (2016) spans across a wide range of visual approaches and makes a differentiation between found materials, which position the social scientists as image and narrative collectors, and researcher-initiated productions where the researcher creates the image, be it from behind the lens of a camera or ‘holding the paintbrush’ (Mannay, 2016: 17). Mannay combined interviews with the use of photos, mapping and collage in her study on mother and daughters living in a social housing estate in the UK. Poignantly Mannay affirms: technological developments in the nineteenth century saw photographic methods centralised as an evidential base from which to analyse and represent ‘other’ cultures. The creation of these photographs, their dissemination and their analysis were firmly embedded in the power relations of Imperialism, where photography became part of the objectifying gaze of the colonial project. (Mannay, 2016: 17) Photographs were also deeply implicated in the scientific regimes aimed at cataloguing and verifying reality. Several studies have demonstrated that photographs can also be manipulated, used as propaganda tools and like all knowledge production, photography is partial and situated. Despite its colonial origins, however, photography can be used as a participatory tool which as such equalises power relations in research rather than making them more marked, as it happened at its inception. The use of photography is constantly evolving and ways to use photography include photo-elicitation (Harper, 2002) and the participatory tool of photo-voice, which is where photography can be used as an embodied research method, as demonstrated by Caroline Wang (1999) who pioneered this method when working with community women in rural China. In Wang’s research, participants

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were asked to take pictures of health-related aspects of their community they wanted to change. The pictures portrayed members of the community who were farmers spraying pesticides without a mask and adequate protection and dim light in their children’s classroom. These pictures were exhibited at an event where stakeholders had the opportunity to listen to people’s quests they had been able to articulate through their pictures and take on board their requests. While the use of photos to elicit talk is not new, elicitation can transcend the representational value of the photograph both materially and symbolically. Both photo-elicitation and photo-voice are extensively used to mobilise self-reflection and emotions in research participants. Some the principles informing these methods have been applied to digital and mobile phone photography, video and to the use of web applications. Although Participatory Video (PV) usually consists of a role play where people involved impersonate the roles of a video interview (for example, camera person, audio technician, interviewer and interviewee) (Lunch and Lunch, 2006), it can also be used in more flexible ways, that is, video diaries, which also contribute to inform the field of embodied research. Melissa Butcher and Luke Dickens (2016), for instance, have used PV to engage with teenage mainly BME youth in the London Borough of Hackney to look at experiences of displacement resulting from a sheer gentrification process in the London East End. The medium they used, that is, video cameras left with participants, enabled them to communicate their experiences in the form of video diaries. The findings of this research point to nuanced understandings of the usually polarised narratives of gentrification. The young people in Hackney who participated in this project experienced a sense of disorientation due to the speed of urban change in their neighbourhood, suggesting that new classed and intercultural interaction fuelled by a rapid demographic change engendered a diminishing sense of belonging to the area. Affective displacement was also one relevant aspect of the embodied approach used by Butcher and Dickens due to the constant threat of spatial dislocation (such as eviction or homelessness). Using an embodied

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methodology such as PV allowed the researchers to go beyond the usual narratives on gentrification and highlight its potential gains for second- and third-generation migrant youth living in Hackney. These included the possibility for an increased sense of security, the opening up of new opportunities to access resources and the new social relations and everyday practices that reflected research participants’ transforming subjectivities. Contextualising PV as a practice of looking, which in geography like in other social sciences disciplines is tainted with the prominence of the colonial and masculinist gaze, Sarah Kindon (2003) contends that PV is enabling feminist research practice for its non-hierarchical and embodied claims to knowledge creating spaces for transformation allowing researchers to do their work alongside research participants rather than observing them from a separate and voyeuristic standpoint. Embodied methodologies can be achieved through digital means or just with the help of pen and paper. A crucial example of creative and embodied visual research which does not require technological skills or resources is body-map storytelling. Elizabeth Sweet and Sara Ortiz Escalante (2015) bring this method to life in their work with feminist urban planning where they argue that the body is situated at the nexus between public and private spaces, a key concern for feminist urban theory (Vacchelli and Kofman, 2018). In Sweet and Ortiz Escalante’s (2014) work, the body is at the centre of their inquiry into gender violence and fear in public spaces. Body-map storytelling has been used since the 1980s in the development field to produce shared meanings of reproductive health related to body parts (Cornwall, 1992) and is currently used in Africa with people affected by HIV/ AIDS by several organisations as a mean to reflect and communicate people’s life experiences, as a way to boost their self-esteem and raise awareness in communities. More recently this strategy has been used as a research method in migration (see Gastaldo et al, 2012, quoted in Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2015). Body-map storytelling is particularly appropriate for helping participants to tell their story through the activity of drawing a life-size map of their own body and plot visual elements (such as speech bubbles

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or details of the body that have a meaning for the participant) on the real-sized body map that are then talked about. This work with urban planners is discussed in the context of visceral methods which draw on the sensory and affective experience the authors mobilise to reveal discursive, material and structural aspects of their stories (Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2014). Cognitive maps have been seen as a mixture of spatial cognition, place representations and spatial imagination that can provide information not only about places themselves, but also about people’s identities and behaviours in relation to them. Cognitive maps are able to fulfil ideas and images of individuals’ economic, political, cultural or social contexts with an emphasis on their emotions and feelings (Mendoza and Morén-Alegret, 2013: 775). In the same article the authors push their embodied approach even further by developing the idea of using the body of the researchers as a research tool in itself. In what they call the ‘shared sensory spatialexperience’ method, during a field work in Colombia they created a safe space for the participants during day-long activities where women who know each other could shop for food, prepare meals and eat it together. The affective space they created through embodied everyday practices was the starting point for personal storytelling where one of the women disclosed a disturbing episode of domestic violence. The authors describe how the gestures of the participant became more aggressive while she was preparing food and telling her story and how the visceral engagement of the researcher, her anger, fear, indignation became a tool for interpreting and understanding data. This approach to embodiment resonates with other research around food and migration conducted by Longhurst et al (2008) who discuss the body as an instrument of research and as a primary tool able to ‘filter’ interaction and emotions when accessing research participants. While researching migrant women in New Zealand, they explore the performance of migrant women’s cooking in the private sphere in order to create continuity with the country of origin and re-signify the diasporic sense of ‘home’ (Longhurst et al, 2009). In this work, the body is always situated in space and is performative (Butler, 1997), that is, it does not have an ontological status per se or fixed characteristics;

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it is simultaneously material, imaginary, symbolic and real (Johnston, 2009). Moreover, it is constructed by emotions. Mendoza and MorénAlegret (2013: 775) argue that creative and embodied research holds a potential for studying the contingency of place. This might include, for instance, the spatial implementation of migration policies, or embodied understandings of the nation state, especially for feelings and emotions mobilised towards places through performances. The use of research as both a method and a practice to work with diversity is also evident from cutting-edge embodied approaches which are being piloted in the field of performance art. For instance, the Verbatim Formula is a new applied performance-based research project with looked after children and young people. This approach is defined by the research team (led by Dr Maggie Inchley at Queen Mary University) as a portable testimony service, where listening is made visible through a performance where sections of interviews are edited together into an audio file. Using an earpiece, performers relay the exact words of the interviewee to the audience. This allows researchers to invite participants to be collaborators on the project and place the voices of the participants at the centre of the research. In the opinion of the researchers, these performances help people listening, open meaningful dialogue, share and take action. Inchley’s work (2015) has engaged with the idea of voice and public witnessing using feminist approaches and participatory and creative research.

Embodied research with migrants Creative research methods are particularly appropriate for working with migrant groups for a range of reasons,, for instance, when language barriers make communication in more traditional research settings difficult, or when research aims at exploring sense of place, displacement and ways in which identities are shaped by place and social relations. As will become clear in the following chapter, creative methods are less intrusive ways of discussing personal and sensitive issues and present the advantage of allowing research participants for time to reflect on how to negotiate feelings, emotions, what to disclose in

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a safe way. The scale of the body is the starting point for the active creation of an artefact which is often achieved through complex layers of elicitation, visual and verbal representation of one’s experiences. In this section I provide examples of embodied research which have been conducted with migrants. Almost a decade ago, Maggie O’Neill and Phil Hubbard (2010) conducted a research on arrivals in the East Midlands whose methodology involved an arts project called ‘A Sense of Belonging’. This project made use of participatory artsbased methods (including guided walks and arts/research workshops). By doing so, the researchers stimulated high-quality interdisciplinary research and the production of art visual works that were used for facilitating connection, communication and feedback, thus contributing to public awareness of the issues newcomers have to face (O’Neill and Hubbard, 2010). The project used the concept of ‘politics of dislocation’ to explore how people attach themselves affectively to different places in different ways. In a 2014 talk at the Open University, O’Neill explained that her work with migrant women is grounded in action research and informed by critical thinking and feminist theory. The use of arts-based and participatory methods is particularly effective at creating impact on policy and practice as is embedded in the historical, social and political context of the participants. In her work exploring lived experiences of women situated in the asylum system, creative and participatory methods allowed for inclusion and valuing of all voices and not just the dominant ones. Importantly this work generated an intervention in the public sphere and the ability to enact citizenship as in Tracey Reynolds’ work on the practices of migrant motherhood (Reynolds, 2010). Art’s constitutive focus on praxis makes purposeful knowledge and social justice possible through a combination of biography, storytelling, oral history and ethnographic methods that are key for thinking psycho-socially about research and art. O’Neill recalls that ethno-mimesis is the outcome of ethnographic participatory and art and in her work the combination of walking methods and storytelling, drawing maps and video-recording created themes which informed a film about solidarity, connectivity, racism, discrimination and belonging.

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Further deployment of creative methods to work with migrant women is Umut Erel et al’s (2017) work with participatory theatre used to broaden the understanding of how migrant families create and contest narratives of who can claim belonging and participation. This is done through Playback and Forum Theatre. In Playback Theatre (Fox, 1994) the participants watch their own story performed to them by trained actors. This creates a reflexive distance between the tellers and their stories (Kaptani and Yuval-Davis, 2008). This distancing is useful as to make sense of the dramatised story where identification and reflection lead to personal and collective change, achieving in this way an integration between drama and socio-cultural processes (Yuval-Davis and Kaptani, 2009). While playback theatre brings together participants in an embodied exchange of experiences where narratives are shared and played by professional actors, Forum Theatre (Boal, 1985) is particularly effective for developing strategies for critical interventions in social life beyond the research process. Forum Theatre consists of a series of workshops where the participants construct dramatic scenes of their choice and show them to other participants who step in to challenge and change the unfolding events on the stage- suggesting improved strategies for changing the course of action. This form of participatory theatre was developed by Augusto Boal (1931–2009), who worked throughout the 1970s with oppressed population based in Brazilian slums. Using the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ (TO) methods that inspired Forum Theatre, Boal sought to achieve collective empowerment and emancipation by redressing privilege and power asymmetries through embodied ways of producing knowledge along with the radical pedagogist Paulo Freire (Freire, 1970). In their recent work with migrant mothers, Erel and colleagues (2017) have argued that when participants intervene in the scene to change the course of action, Forum Theatre becomes a critical site of negotiation where active citizenship, collective mobilisation and empowerment are enacted by migrant women experiencing marginalisation and inequalities in the UK society. Emancipatory theatre, research and performance to delimit the boundaries of migrants’ citizenship is also used by Alexandra Lewicki’s

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(2017) analysis of the Berlin-based Center for Political Beauty’s artinformed political activism which staged a performance on the migrant deaths in the Mediterranean in order to subvert the idea of fixed sites and scales of citizenship. The activist group created a symbolic graveyard in the Berlin square, Platz der Republik, which fulfilled several acts of citizenship in the vision of the activist group: first, the performance exposed the undignified burial practices of dead bodies found in the Mediterranean sea; second, it symbolically enabled these dead migrants to get to Germany. This was achieved though the identification of two ‘unknown’ deceased bodies of Syrian refugees. After contacting their families and asking for permission to exhume them, the activist group organised the transport of their bodies across Europe all the way to Germany. This action was also used to expose the paradoxes of the Schengen Area and the bureaucratic obstacles when non-Europeans were involved, even if dead. Both participatory and staged performance in an activist context are effective at challenging personal and collective dominant narratives by enabling reflective processes which are simultaneously affective and cognitive. The power of personal life stories and narratives in mobilising affect is foregrounded by Cigdem Esin’s (2017) work where creative research enables migrant women to shape their own narratives as a way to negotiate their positions as members of migrant communities. This is done through multimodal methodological approaches arising in the course of her research with young British Muslim women in the London East End. Visual storytelling was used to disrupt the normativity involved in co-constructing narratives in research interviews. Participants were provided with a range of image-making resources such as acrylic paint, coloured pencils, crayons and craft materials. Research participants were asked to create visual images about any aspect of their lives with no specific instructions. They were then interviewed using a narrative-led dialogic approach taken from Riessman’s (2008) dialogic narrative analysis model. This embodied research made use of the movement across different narrative modalities (visual, verbal and interactional) which allowed the researcher to forge a relational space for the co-construction and analysis of the individual

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narratives in mobile way. Multimodal narrative methodology offers a contact space between the researcher and the research participants who can develop relations in non-linear ways through engaging in art work and processual crafting (Esin, 2017). In a 2016 piece in the Open University CCIG (Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance) blog, Agata Lisiak writes about the importance of creative methods in migration research and how they help emphasise the singularity and uniqueness of individual migrants’ experiences. Reporting on a recent workshop organised by Umut Erel in cooperation with the Migration Museum Project, she offers some important reflections on the embodied nature of creative research and their role in her work on Polish immigrant mothers. As part of a study asking participants to respond visually to the question: how is it for you to be a mother here? (for example, in Birmingham), researchers gave the women a white sheet of paper and a bunch of colourful felt-tip pens and, when participants are finished with the drawing, researchers elicited a discussion on the images which were created. The images produced were analysed in combination with the narrations used to describe them and Lisiak’s approach to analysis takes on board the intention of the research participants in producing the image in question. The potential of creative research methods to open up embodied and affective meaning for challenging racialised citizenship (Erel et al, 2017) is useful to complicate dichotomous representation of migration and diversity. In the UK context, in particular, Muslim women are situated in a contradictory discourse that sees them on the one hand as victimised subject in need of protection from their own patriarchal communities. On the other hand, the public debate frames them as incapable of speaking English and therefore responsible for the threat to social cohesion their insufficient education levels pose to the country’s security (Erel, 2007) given their role of educators of future generations of British Muslim children. Migrants negotiate their own experiences of citizenship through everyday practices and creative and participatory methods, provide means to represent and reflect on these embodied everyday lives and experiences, while challenging mainstream negative narratives from a grassroots position.

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As demonstrated in earlier work on biographical methods in research with migrant women (Inowloki and Lutz, 2000; Erel, 2007; Gedalof, 2007; Christou, 2009; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010) innovative visual and digital research as well as reflexive and biographic methods mobilise affect through storytelling and have the powerful effect of foregrounding participants’ agency and subjectivity. Research approaches that enable self-representation of migrant women in a way that take into account their agency form part of an epistemological shift that views migrant women’s knowledges on self and society they live in as central and can potentially inform shifts in policy and political discourse. Lisiak ( 2016) argues ‘innovative visual and digital methods for sharing knowledge provide us with new ways of countering antimigration propaganda’ – they do so by exposing personal stories that are embodied and through the mobilisation of affective understandings of people’s stories situated in their everyday lives. Personal stories speak louder than statistical data and quantitative evidence. In the following two chapters I will illustrate the way in which I conducted embodied research with migrant women using both analogic and audio-visual means, that is, collage-making and digital storytelling.

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

When researching people’s perceptions of their own bodies – fat bodies, anorexic bodies, ill bodies, sporting bodies, dis/abled bodies, childbearing bodies, bodies undergoing plastic surgery, and so on, the body is already inscribed in the research inquiry. However, one of the aims of this book is applying the concept of embodied research to areas where the focus of research it not already the body itself. As I have argued in the previous chapters, doing embodied research means not only paying attention to bodily and beyond-linguistic ways of communicating but first and foremost looking at ways in which social relations are played out in the field; understanding and adapting research methods to power differences; asking questions about possibly extractive ways of collecting data and what a more ethical and less exploitative research looks like. In other words, it is about the ethics of doing research and how to best negotiate trust and disclosure in a respectful and safe ways. When I first engaged with these very questions I decided to experiment with a data collection tool I had not used before, collage-making, as I saw it as an appropriate way to engage two groups of mainly sub-Saharan African women who had previous experience of accessing mental health services. I did not feel that asking

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questions or posing open question as happens during a conventional focus group would be the right approach. On the contrary, I was concerned with leaving participants enough time to make safe choices about disclosure and group collage-making seemed a good option. 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. In my work, collage making has the function to engage migrant, refugee and asylumseeking women in order to elicit personal stories about individual experiences of sensitive nature, such as, for instance, accessing mental health services. Collage making is a relational contextualising strategy produced by the research participants themselves rather than selfproduced by the researcher/s and is therefore participatory. This particular approach to collecting ‘embodied’ data (that is, the representation or expression of something in a tangible or visible form) validates many aspects discussed in the literature such as collage-making being an analytic or representational form; a non-linear process; reveals implicit/unconscious understanding; moves from feelings to ideas; juxtaposes image fragments to create meaning; evokes intellectual and affective responses; creates ambiguity offering alternative insights (Butler-Kisber and Poldma, 2010). However, in my work, collagemaking is not necessarily a visual form of qualitative inquiry. It is rather an interpretive tool informing experiential research approaches, and as such it does not require a tout-court visual analysis, but instead uses the collage as a point of reference to talk about participants’ life stories as narratives that the process of collage making elicits. The process calls for consideration of what subject positions and what situated knowledges are at play during the focus group. In the approach devised here, the collage is an interpretive tool with the function of eliciting life stories in an open and participatory manner; its use is instrumental to producing embodied qualitative data rather than the starting point for analysing visual data.

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Why collage? As part of a mixed-methods research design for a project with migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women accessing mental health support in the voluntary and community sector in London, I carried out artinformed focus groups which required the use of collage making as a strategy for eliciting discussions over sensitive issues such as research participants’ mental health needs. When planning for the focus groups it was crucial to deploy a non-invasive approach in order to work with women in vulnerable situations talking about extremely sensitive issues such as their mental health. I saw collage making as particularly appropriate because of the arts-based, non-textual form of representation it allows; verbal explanations alone might otherwise be too narrow and not necessarily include broader life experiences. It is a relational contextualising strategy produced by the research participants themselves and is therefore participatory. Women of refugee, asylumseeking and migrant background were asked to reflect on their journey and focus in particular on their experiences of accessing mental health in the UK and subsequently were asked to compose a collage which reflects these experiences. When trying to source relevant literature to justify my approach I realised that not much is available on the topic of collage-making in research. Exceptions include the work of Reavey, 2012; Holbrook and Pourchier, 2014; and Mannay, 2016. I came across the work of Lynn Butler-Kisber (2007, 2010) who appears to be the author who has more extensively discussed the use of collage-making in qualitative research. Butler-Kisber and Poldma (2010) define collage-making as follows: ‘Collage, taken from the French verb, coller (to stick), is the process of using fragments of found images or materials and gluing them to a flat surface to portray phenomena’ (2010: 2). Elsewhere, Davis and Butler-Kisber (1999) provide a more extensive definition which emphasises the intuitive nature of collage-making as well as its ‘additive’ character: ‘A collage is a flexible composition that is assembled gradually and additively; as each new part is included, the intuitive relationships among the various parts are ordered and

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re-ordered until a convincing overall pattern or schema is achieved’ (1999: 2). In their work, Davis and Butler-Kisber (1999) trace a history of collage making as a form of artistic innovation developed in the 20th century. This way of artistic expression has the peculiarity of using images which are uncoupled from the original context in which they were produced and are re-composed on a new plane, proposing a reading that disrupts the linearity of text. The non-linearity of collage-making and the new context which is created is key for understanding why collage-making is an embodied method: collage has been compared to the ‘interior shapes of mental space’. It is not by chance that collage-making is one of the privileged mediums for art therapists. Collage-making functions as an analytical memo which is non-linear, unstructured and pre-conscious where intuitions are as legitimate and structured as logical thinking. In addition, because it involves ‘making’ as opposed to just ‘thinking’ it can be understood as a more bodily practice if compared with answering researchers’ questions or telling stories about one’s life experiences. Butler-Kisber and Poldma (2010) point to different approaches to collage-making as a means to generate qualitative data. The way in which I used collage in the two focus groups is reflected in the idea of collage-making as a form of elicitation, although ‘elicitation’ is used here as a process aimed at triggering memory and experience and not just as a means to elicit talk to be analysed discursively. The analytical focus, as will become evident in the next section, consists in the juxtaposition of some visual reference in the collage and the narratives used by the participants to describe it. Literature on elicitation in qualitative research tends to focus on photo-elicitation (Harper and Faccioli, 2000; Harper, 2002) and has been developed in the disciplinary fields of anthropology and visual sociology. There is wide agreement among scholars within these disciplines that images are symbolic representations which powerfully evoke deeper elements of human consciousness, especially when visual clues can be linked to memory. As Harper (2002) argues: ‘Elicitation interviews connect core definitions of the self to society, culture and

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history. This works corresponds to postmodern sociology’s decentred narrative; of the sociology of the body; and social studies of emotions’ (2002: 13–14). In this sense collage can be used as a way to carry out embodied research which elicits material and symbolic representation of research participants’ identities. Photo elicitation offers links with reflexivity in that it has been regarded as a way to subvert the authority of the researcher over research participants (Jenkings et al, 2008). This subversion of authority is particularly evident in collage-making where research participants have full control in the selection of the images and text they use to represent of their own reality. This is of course constrained by the kind of images and texts they are able to find in a limited amount of time and by the use of a pre-selected set of magazines that do not always allow for a full range of images to choose from. In the context of my study, collage-making was used to inform experiential research approaches and as such it represented? a point of reference for participants to talk about their life stories as narratives that the process of collage-making elicits. Collage-making calls for consideration of what subject positions and what situated knowledges are at play during the focus group. In the approach devised here, the process of making a collage itself selectively elicits life stories participants chose to disclose in an open and participatory manner.

Practising embodiment: collage-making with migrant women Not having used collage as a data collection strategy before, I was somehow apprehensive about organising a focus group which would successfully meet my research aims of engaging a mixed group of mainly African refugee, asylum seeking and migrant women into making a collage and speaking about their experience of accessing mental health services. Would the participants collaborate in doing what I was asking them to do? Would I be able to gain their trust and seal the confidentiality pact which is essential to any disclosure of personal information?

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Collage-making enables a reflexive approach thanks to its focus on a process and the kind of social relations this process entails, rather than just the outcome. Nast (1994) and Taylor and Wetherell (1999) argue that the subject positions of researchers and researched are never a priori and they unfold in the course of the encounter. In this sense, the interview itself has been defined as a performative space where identities are constantly re-negotiated. Valentine (1999) defines the interview encounter as a ‘positional space’ where both parties bring their individual situated knowledge and the interview itself as a ‘game of positionalities’. This is reflected in the role of the researcher in the interview process and reflexivity means acknowledging these different subject positions, how they are being negotiated during the interview and the ways in which these differences and negotiations inevitably affect research outcomes. The research questions for this project, its field of enquiry, context and geographical location, all presuppose that my research interlocutors were women belonging to ethnic minorities, who came to the UK as migrants or asylum seekers and are accessing or have accessed mental health services in the past. Asking refugee and asylum-seeking women to make a collage for the purposes of academic research needed careful negotiation of my own identity and social position prior to the start of the focus groups. I initially devised a methodology for the research project in question where I intended to conduct ‘traditional’ focus groups with refugee, asylum-seeking and migrant women to be recruited through the community organisations involved in the project. When filling out the research ethics form for the project however, I started wondering whether setting up a discussion about such personal matters would be the right approach for women who have mental health issues and may have been traumatised by life events such as torture, rape or may have seen their relatives die in their country of origin. Yet on the other hand, the research participants recruited through community organisations are used to working in therapeutic groups and exposing their personal problems in a group setting. It is undeniable that my position as an external researcher, the fact that especially the women

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in the second focus group did not know me and the one-off nature of the focus group might raise issues of trust. Moreover, my subject position as white European woman in her early 40s, educated, with a foreign accent and a different skin colour might create a further distance between me and the research participants in the group. With all these questions in mind I decided to budget for travel reimbursement for every participant and also offer a £10 reward as an incentive to participation. Yet, this may still not be sufficient to make research participants feel the work has been beneficial to them. For instance, when undertaking PAR (Participatory Action Research) projects, research participants get to benefit from the reflexive processes initiated by the action-research cycle and in many cases successfully manage to change their everyday practices according to social-justice oriented principles. But my project was too short and underresourced to use PAR. After dismissing PAR as a viable approach, I considered the way art therapists use drawings to elicit conversation and representations of clients’ inner world and I started delving into qualitative methodological literature to see if similar approaches have ever been used in qualitative research. To my surprise I found that college making had been used before, although in a different way, and this legitimised my idea of experimenting with collage-making as a way to produce embodied data. The experience of conducting the two focus groups was different. The focus groups took place in different community organisations at two different times one month apart from each other. During the first group, I was introduced by my collaborator in the project who leads a community-based Supporting Women Project, knows the women personally and introduced some of the women to me at previous events. As a consequence, when I explained the background of the project, asked for informed consent and established the rules for the group work, all the women (mainly from sub-Saharan African origins) seemed comfortable with me, did not have problems in taking part in what I was proposing (that is, making a collage and audio-recording their voice when describing what they had done) and had a positive and collaborative attitude. When I conducted the second focus group,

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the women (also mainly of sub-Saharan African origins) were familiar with the environment of the organisation but were not introduced to me by anyone. Given the lack of an introduction of my role to the group from one of the members of the organisation on the day of the focus group, research participants clearly found it difficult to situate me in the context of the organisation where the focus group was taking place. Moreover, I was not aware of the way in which the organisation’s members had introduced my role previously to the focus group and this created a slight discomfort in me which I might have inadvertently projected onto my initial presentation of the context of the research and the tasks participants were asked to perform. Nevertheless, they did cooperate, perhaps because of the incentive, perhaps because they were previously asked to do so by the organisation’s workers where they normally access group therapy or because I managed to convince them of the fact that collage-making can be fun and useful for reflecting on their own experiences. Making contact and establishing trust during the second focus group proved more difficult especially as many of the women arrived late, well after the time the focus group was scheduled to start, and this kept interrupting my initial presentation flow. After going through the introductory procedure twice, I then resolved to explain the project’s aims and tasks one by one to latecomers, while others had started making the collage. Although I felt slightly irritated by the fact that some of the participants were late, I tried to suppress this negative feeling and opted for a one-to-one briefing for the latecomers. Previous to the focus groups I had resourced some solid paper boards, a pile of glossy and lifestyle magazines, bottles of glue, scissors, two packs of crafty paper with also sequins and small haberdashery tools. The glossy and lifestyle magazines were previously collected in a random order and with no particular imperative in mind –except the repertoire of images they offered. They should have had some images of women from different ages and ethnic groups, several images of place from city to countryside, interiors as well as outdoor spaces and exotic locations. Some of the magazines were weekly inserts from popular newspapers such as the Guardian or the Evening Standard and

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other free magazines distributed in the London underground such as Time Out. As such, they represented multi-ethnic people and I was careful that they did not just have representations white people in them. In order to retrieve as many glossy and lifestyle magazines as I could carry, I posted a request on my Facebook page and two friends actively helped me in getting hold of the required material for the collage. In particular, a friend offered to collect some glossy magazines from local hairdressers and another friend offered several newspapers’ weekly inserts that he had at home. This provided a good mix of images and text. I also decided to add some craft paper and material such as sequins and fabrics I found enclosed in craft packages I retrieved from a pound shop ahead of the focus groups. As part of the guidelines for the collage-making, I asked the two groups to just cut out and glue onto the paper board any image or text which would in some way represent their ‘journey’ to the UK and their ‘experience of accessing mental health services’ once in the UK. I allocated one hour for the collage-making and just over one hour for recording the description of their work. As part of the task for the day was sharing the story behind their collage with the rest of the group, I addressed issues of confidentiality with regards to what was disclosed by other research participants within the group as well as anonymity issues when it comes to using the data. The question on the research participants’ migration history proved useful in order to give their work a sense of narrative and also a context from which to start in order to be able to talk about their experience of accessing mental health once in the UK. While the first group immediately understood what I was asking, the second group did not at first seem to understand what I had asked them to do. As most of the participants of the second group were not familiar with collage-making, I showed them examples of what I meant, including some pictures of the collages created by the first group. Despite the initial friction, the second group started working at the production of individual collages.

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Embodied qualitative research: examples from the field Initially the collage-making had been a shared experience where research participants joked, laughed, asked each other for help in finding images or text they were looking for. As they were busy looking for the images and text to illustrate their story, they did not share ideas on the content of the collage with each other or decided to make a shared collage. Instead, they spent about an hour browsing the magazines, chatting and passing the magazines to each other, borrowing scissors and glue from each other and collaborating in a purposeful yet playful manner. During the collage-making, I assisted them to make sure they had what they needed and at times helped them to find the kind of image they were looking for. After they had finished with their collage, I took the digital audio-recorder and asked them, one by one, to explain what they had done. Contrary to my initial expectations, some research participants – especially in the first group – tended to just talk to me with a low voice. This suggested they preferred to have a personal, one-to-one conversation with me rather than sharing their story with the whole group. I was receptive to this request advanced through their body language and responded accordingly by sitting close to the speaker and also interacting in a low voice. This attention to non-verbal communication of the research participants is also part of my approach of listening to the stories through bodies (rather than just about bodies) as highlighted by Chadwick (2016) and Frank (2010). This meant that the rest of the group had to wait for their turn in order to speak and were not engaged in listening to the talking participant except in a few occasions where, especially in the second focus group, the group listened and complimented other members of the group for the touching stories told. Paradoxically, the second group, whose trust was more difficult to gain, showed a more collaborative and mutually supportive attitude with their peers when it came to sharing the stories. At the end of the focus group, all the research participants were asked whether they wanted to keep their collage and they all decided to leave it at the organisation where the focus group took place, in case the opportunity for an exhibition arise.

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The analysis of the focus group data combines the narratives used by the research participants in order to verbalise what they did and some visual aspects of the collage that confirmed/contradicted these narratives. As in Bagnoli (2009) the visual data produced through the collage was not just an add-on to a text-based analysis of the personal stories evoked through the process of making the collage. On the contrary, the visual data in the collage contributed to make sense of the participants’ experience at different stages of the analysis. After transcribing the audio-recording and a close reading of the material I could proceed with coding the textual data and this enabled me to make links with the visual references in the collage. Both images and text were analysed in terms of the stories that were being told. The embodied representation of the stories found in the collage were looked at with consideration to the way key aspects of the narrative were represented on the canvas of the collage, paying attention to the way the space of the canvas is organised by the participant and comparisons between different collages were made. This approach is aligned with the work of cultural geographers who have sought to demonstrate how space and place become incorporated into the body through emotional experience (Bondi et al, 2005; Thrift, 2007). According to Bagnoli (2009) images can represent concepts in a condensed way. An analysis that constructs interpretations based on multiple sources allows participants’ own metaphors to be validated and used in the contextual reading of specific moments of the participants’ lives.

Focus group 1 Lale Lale is an articulate Turkish woman and uses mainly text rather than images to elicit the feelings she wants to represent in her collage, that is, of being labelled and discriminated against as a migrant in the British society. The emotional experience of feeling trapped and being labelled is entangled with her social position as a Turkish migrant in British society.

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Figure 1

When I came here I didn’t have any health problems, I was young and in good health. But at some point I experienced a lot of prejudice, I wanted to access therapy for my son and myself and at some point I felt very intimidated, I felt the therapist very patronizing and sarcastic, maybe it was my feelings I was projecting this onto him so this was disappointing for me. I didn’t feel like in a safe space it was emotional for me. I used the words blending in my collage as integration didn’t happen, so there is the word ‘broken’ ‘outbreak’ is about questions, it’s all fractured it is about things that have started but have been interrupted, feeling trapped, being labelled, loss … (Lale) As evident from the collage, Lale chose to cut out words rather than images to convey her experience. Clearly, for her words are more effective than images as they can express more explicitly and less elusively the emotions that she experienced. She selected and glued words such as ‘fall in’, ‘dark’, ‘blended’, ‘shock’, ‘drinking’, ‘eating’ and ‘laugh out loud’; her collage is multilayered and presents fragments of sentences, has sequins and is expansive. In order to see the collage in its entirety, some parts need lifting. From her narrative, it emerges

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that Lale is very familiar with the psycho-analytic process as she speaks about projections of her own feelings onto the analyst as she described him in a negative light. Both her narrative and her collage very effectively conveyed a sense of there not being enough space for her expansive personality as the words used instead of images in the collage are fragmented and trapped into the insufficient space of the canvas as her narrative on being labelled suggests. The alignment between her talk and the collage she produced suggests visual elicitation effectively creates embodied ways of generating data, where the nonverbal communication expressed in the collage is in continuity with the narrative used to discuss it.

Billie Billie strongly identifies with being a black woman as evident from the kind of images she chooses to represent herself in the collage. Her fear of being imprisoned is represented by an image of the ‘arm of the law’ hammering and a black man and a women being transported by two police-like individuals. She speaks about feelings of loss and missing her country of origin and her beloved ones and of being a refugee with uncertain status in a new country where she could be deprived of her personal freedom from one moment to another. Me I did not go in detention but I kept worrying that may be one day they will detain me. I had a negative experience accessing mental health because the wait was very long and it’s only charities that look after you, other than that you are in a limbo with no money but at least you had treatment. I was in a difficult situation because I missed home my children I missed everything but to see that at the end I managed to get accommodation, benefit and work. I am now British I started to feel well after I got my papers. This is the collage with the hammer and the police, arm of the law. They lost my papers and they couldn’t interview me they did not imprison me. (Billie)

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Figure 2

Billie’s narrative conveys fear of being imprisoned as she was waiting a response to her asylum application. In her narrative to illustrate the collage, Billie expresses gratitude for charities that ‘look after you’ when nobody else does. Her life in London is characterised by ‘not having money’ and the term that she chooses in the collage is ‘disrespect’ juxtaposed to the image of an attractive Black actress. The juxtaposition of the text and image in the collage combined with her narrative powerfully conveys feelings of nostalgia for home and the final resolution as she obtains her citizenship status. Like in the case of Lale, for Billie, the non-linear process of producing the collage powerfully translates feelings into ideas and represents the starting point for generating meaning which is embodied in the collage itself. This process contributes to positioning collage-making as an analytic

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and representational form revealing implicit understandings of one’s experience situated between feelings and ideas.

Focus group 2 Lucia Lucia recounts a story of having to flee her home country which was characterised by personal, family and social conflict. Figure 3

When I look ‘what I see in the mirror’ [refers to text in the collage she made] I see the experience of my life is like when we see people you would think we are equal but we are not equal because what I have been through … (Lucia) The text ‘what I see in the mirror’ found in the magazines elicits, in Lucia’s collage and narrative, the idea that what she sees when she looks at herself in the mirror is different from what other people can see because of the life experiences which have characterised her life.

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The body she sees when she looks at the mirror is simultaneously material and symbolic of the experiences that have shaped her life. Her collage evokes images of solitude, isolation and need for closeness and intimacy as evident in the sentence in the collage ‘love is almost all you need’. Lucia’s collage and narrative regarding the material and symbolic mirror through which she looks at herself resonate with Braidotti’s idea that the ‘materialism of the flesh unifies mind and body in a new approach that blurs all boundaries’ (2011: 2).

Donna Donna recounts a sad story as she was sent to the UK by her parents in order to gain an education. When she arrived to the UK, she was living with a relative who was supposed to look after her but life did not turn out to be as initially planned. I come on a promise of education and a better life but she … enslaved me that’s why I got this [image representing woman looking out of the window] she locked me in a room I was not allowed to go out or anything and all I ever wanted was to see my mum but it’s not possible and I am not allowed to talk to anyone not even my parents or anything so I just lived by myself and then eventually she died so I left her place and I met a guy and we became friends and I had a child, I have a daughter and she is three now, will be four in September and she became my life and she’s the only reason why I am alive today. Several times I thought like ending it but then I thought if I do what is going to happen to her she might end up in the same way I end up so that’s because of her I kept up living and I have this picture because I want to become this independent woman who can do almost anything by herself and doesn’t need help from no one. (Donna) In this quote Donna refers to the images she chooses as they elicited the memory of her being kept in captivity when she first migrated

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Figure 4

to London to live with a friend of the family. Although the blonde woman in the comics is not imprisoned, her looking out to the external world from an enclosed space evokes a memory of doing the same thing; this is, therefore, a powerfully evocative image of a traumatic experience. Another image Donna refers to is that of a model dressed in traditional African fabrics, which, in her mind, conveys the feeling of independence and not needing anyone. Notably, while Lale’s collage is crowded, Donna’s collage expands beyond the boundaries of the canvas. The assertive woman Donna wants to become is represented by the Black cat-walking model and by the words ‘I can do this’ yet this image and statement are situated externally to the space of the paper board she was given for the collage. Is this a dream she does not fully believe in as is too detached from the material reality of her life? The spatial organisation of her collage and the life circumstances

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emerging in her narrative would suggest this. However, Donna is a positive and resourceful woman able to draw the strength she needs from the love she feels for her daughter. All the narratives describing the collages have been elicited by selfselected images and text found in glossy and lifestyle magazines. The narratives that the collages elicited are all strongly evocative of the kind of life experiences participants went through. The action of actively selecting images and text, gluing it in a certain order, which is nonlinear, reveals personal understandings of those life experiences the research participant has been asked to address through collage-making. These become material, visible, and have a texture in the research participants’ chosen representation. The act of juxtaposing images and text to create meaning helps the research participant’s inner motion from feelings to ideas and the elicitation of certain feelings evokes intellectual and affective responses in the observer/listener. As evident from the narratives above, the selective choice of certain images and text does not just provide a material, visible and tangible representation of research participants’ life experiences. They also creates ambiguity, offering alternative insights and multiple identifications on different temporal and spatial scales and personal accounts of life transformations in the making. As the collage-making with migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women has demonstrated, subject positions of researcher and research participants (including the power relations in place during the research process), contribute to affect the research process and ultimately shape the research findings. I made use of collage-making as a form of elicitation for generating narratives and personal life stories on access to mental health services. The activity of making a collage made it easier to negotiate my position in the focus groups, especially as research participants were in vulnerable positions in terms of their migration and socio-economic status and, particularly in one of the focus groups, I was unknown to the group. Despite some initial frictions in one of the focus groups and the intrinsic ambiguity of the role of the researcher, individual subject positions were successfully negotiated during both art-based focus groups. I would like to emphasise the fact that

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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 who participated in the focus groups are strong, assertive and resourceful migrants who have been able to negotiate and embody their experiences of displacement in different ways. As I argued in the 2017 Qualitative Research article that this chapter is based on (Vacchelli, 2017), collage-making with refugees and asylum-seeking women accessing mental health services presents a wide series of advantages. First, collage-making is a less intrusive way of discussing personal and sensitive issues if compared with topic guides which are normally used in more traditional focus groups; focus group discussions could be intimidating when dealing with sensitive issues and might not encourage everyone’s active participation. Second, collage-making leaves research participants in control of the way they want to represent their experience and talk about it, offering time to think about what images to select and make decisions about what they want to uncover. Third, it is embodied as the spatial scale of the body is the starting point for the active creation of the collage through complex layers of elicitation, visual and verbal representation of one’s experiences. Moreover, collage-making is reflexive as the positional space of research participants and researcher is constantly negotiated in the context of data collection – where the kind of data produced depends on the social relations which are produced in the field. One of the disadvantages of the method deployed here is that, in many ways, it does not conform to the definition of focus group discussion. Art-informed methodologies such as collage-making are particularly well suited when conducting research with so called ‘vulnerable’ groups, yet they raise a question with regards to the boundaries of the focus group and the continuity between focus group and workshop when it comes to data-collection methods that are not just based on discussion but also on a range of activity-based and sensory activities. In this sense, the workshop has been largely overlooked as a legitimate qualitative data collection tool outside participatory approaches (see Caretta and Vacchelli (2015) on this

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specific question). Given the recent development of more embodied, affective, visual and activity-based approaches to data collection, more research exploring the workshop as a site for generating qualitative and embodied data would be highly beneficial for the field of qualitative research as a whole and for feminist research in particular.

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FIVE Digital embodiments: a two-day workshop with migrant women

Digital Storytelling (DS) holds particularly compelling methodological and epistemological characteristics for a feminist approach to research which is embodied, creative and participatory. This chapter draws on the research material and analytical insights recently published in the journal Methodological Innovations (Vacchelli and Peyrefitte, 2018b). In this chapter I aim to demonstrate that DS can be understood as part of a feminist approach allowing women to tell their stories in their own words through a guided creative process that includes coproduction of personal stories and – in so doing – further addresses the issue of power imbalance in the research process. Moss and Falconer Al-Hindi (2008: 150) have stressed the importance of ‘feminist praxis as a site of knowledge production’ in geography, particularly because of feminist methodologies’ emphasis on voice, power and emancipatory practices. DS has so far been adopted as part of the training of practitioners/ professionals in health or social work settings as well as an educational tool (see Alcantud-Diaz and Gregory-Signes, 2013; Dunford and Jenkins, 2017). DS has also been built into academic research projects with the aim to ‘[cross academic boundaries’ (Otanez and Guerrero, 2015: 57) (see also the work of Gubrium and DiFulvio

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(2011) on community health and girlhood studies and Hill (2010) on gender justice). Digital Storytelling has been defined as a kind of content creation which is crucial to the democratic agenda and as contributing to an ongoing definition of citizenship (Burgess, 2006). Jean Burgess uses the concept of ‘vernacular creativity’ in order to ‘describe and illuminate creative practices that emerge from highly articular and non-elite social contexts and communicative conventions’ where the term vernacular points to the ‘native speech of a populace against the official language but is now used to distinguish the everyday language from institutional or official modes of expression’ (2006: 206). This approach and its ethical positioning delineate a commitment and empathy with the ordinary and the cultural formations under study. DS holds the potential for ‘generative feminist geographies’ (Kern et al, 2014) as sharing and co-producing stories with one another has its roots in feminist activism and allows feminist researchers and practitioners to use women’s relationality as a starting point for social transformation rather than as a reason to silence their voices. The coproduction of stories and the relationality it entails moreover makes DS particularly compatible with feminist research, as it contributes to highlight identity and personal relationships as multiple, fluid and layered (Gonick et al, 2011). DS aims for the realisation of a 2–5-minute audio-visual clip built using the recording of the workshop participants’ voice reading the story s/he wrote. The resulting clip is a combination of principally still images complementing the recording of the participant’s voice telling the story that s/he has developed through a series of creative writing type of activities. One of the seven elements of a digital story has been identified by Jo Lambert (2013) as ‘the gift of your voice’. Digital Storytelling is achieved through a dynamic rapport of mutual support and co-production during the workshop aimed at helping participants to find their voice and tell a story which is important to them. Participants are also supported in transforming their story into an audio-visual clip that can be shared with the immediate group and disseminated further.

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The concept of voice is central to DS. Gubrium et al (2014b), who argue that the DS process constitutes a set of ethnographic data enabling participants to reconnect with, reconfigure and act upon their lived experiences. However, they question DS’ ability to fully represent research participants. Like Couldry (2009) they argue that voice is a complex site of conflict and critique the notion of voice as monolithic and unchanging, questioning its authenticity and prefer to focus on the nature of multisensory narratives engendered by the process of digital storytelling. Alexandra (2015) add that voice cannot be disentangled from political listening and hierarchies of voice enable and sustain the privilege not to listen. During the workshop, we acknowledged the multiplicity of voice’s roles, its shifting positions and its performative nature. Aware that digital stories make individual stories visible and visceral, we believe intimacy is a key aspect for understanding DS a as a feminist research approach. When Magali Peyrefitte and I piloted DS with a group of migrant women in London with the aim of exploring how the right to the city can be gendered, we were aware that these digital stories might help inform our questions about social inclusion and participation in the urban fabrics. Women are often discursively situated in the private sphere through the concepts of care and social reproduction. Research in the field of civil society organisations has demonstrated that these roles tend to be invisible. Martin (2014) defines women’s volunteer work in community organisation as the ‘hidden labor of social reproduction’ where both the work of some BME (Black Minority Ethnic) organisations and the work of volunteer women working within these organisation is made invisible and does not appear in statistics and in the record of funders. Following Lefebvre’s framework and adding a specific gendered dimension to it, we have called theses hidden spaces as ‘a/topia’ spaces’ (Vacchelli and Peyrefitte, 2018a) where the invisibility of these organisations and of the women working in them as volunteers is translated in an absence of voice. DS allows for these voices to be articulated in a process of co-production and then communicated.

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The Digital Storytelling workshop A key specificity of Digital Storytelling is the way it is facilitated through a two to three-day workshop and organised around the principle of the ‘Story Circle’ (Hartley and McWilliam, 2009). The image of the circle refers to the act of sharing stories in the inclusive and intimate space created by people telling personal stories while sitting in a circle around a bonfire. The act of sharing stories is also inscribed in a feminist approach as it helps build rapport through reciprocity (Hesse-Biber, 2014: 199). By combining a range of ‘activities, games and writing stimuli to develop trust’, DS is positioned within the feminist research methods tradition in that developing a relationship of trust is central to its ethos according to Glesne and Peshkin: ‘[R]apport is tantamount to trust, and trust is the foundation for acquiring the fullest, most accurate disclosure a respondent is able to make’ (1992: 79). During the workshop, the group was confronted with a shared experience of intimacy which helped to communicate personal journeys constituting individual trajectories of migration. In addition, we as researchers were able to draw on our own experiences as migrants – albeit in different circumstances – to further participate the shared intimacy of the ‘story circle’. Research participants were recruited via contacts Magali and I had established with refugee and women’s organisations in the course of previous work in this field. The workshop saw the participation of six migrant women working as volunteers, two academic researchers and one professional DS facilitator. We previously had to source internal research funding in order to run the workshop and make sure we could cover for the work of the DS facilitator and travel, meals and refreshments for the participants over the two days. In preparation for the workshop, the participants were asked to bring an object that is their favourite or has a particular meaning for them in relation to their experience of migration and work in the UK. This could be something relating to the work they did in their countries of origin, a qualification that they had gained, an item of clothing or something belonging to a

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relative who had particularly inspired them. Workshop participants were also asked to bring 15–30 personal photographs if they had them, somehow relating to the themes of work and migration. Participants were reassured that they should not worry if they did not have any as they would be helped in retrieving or creating images that would support their story. Most of the participants opted for personal objects rather than pictures. The workshop took place over two days, where the first day was entirely devolved to the writing and co-construction of the stories and the second day to the practicalities of creating a digital story; that is, recording the voice, sourcing or creating the right images and video editing the short clip using iMovie with the professional guidance of the DS workshop facilitator. In the initial steps of the workshop the members of the group were progressively introduced to one another. Reciprocal trust among the participants was established during the first day of the workshop through a series of guided exercises aimed on the one hand at re-connecting to ‘natural’ storytelling skills and on the other hand by working in small groups and getting to know each other. The encounters in pair that preceded the story circle were intimate precisely because we were faced with the difficult task of creating a story using un-connected and mis-matching words which were the same for everyone and the outcome of a previous group brainstorming. This first collaboration in pairs made us force the boundaries of what is considered a common kind of interaction as we had to tap into our inner source of creativity and negotiate our ideas with a stranger. For me, this meant starting to know her storytelling partner in a deep and personal manner, and immediately connecting with and trusting her imaginative, good-natured and enthusiastic personality. For Magali, the one-to-one experience of collaboratively writing a story contributed to ‘break the ice’ further in order to build rapport and trust. Through this activity and others during the first day of the workshop, intimacy is generated out of collaborative and creative encounters as well as originating from the sharing of personal stories. The facilitated trajectory involved in creating mutual trust and intimacy prior to sharing the stories raises important questions

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on the role of affect, mutual responsibility and care in the creation of a shared intimate sphere. Prior to the creation of a trusting relationship with the research participants through the DS workshop activities, we introduced the workshop as something we were doing for our nascent research project while offering the opportunity of acquiring further digital literacy (Gubrium et al, 2014a: 1606) and use of AV techniques mostly through guidance and supervision. Both of us felt that this was a difficult position to be in- we had to reassure our research participants of our ethical way of working while at the same time admitting to the fact that we were going to use the stories for our own research. We had to face the challenge of creating an intimate sphere based on trust according to this slippery and potentially dangerous trade-off. The fact that we authors/researchers were also participating in equal terms thanks to the guiding role of the DS facilitator helped us to gain the trust of the research participants. Ultimately, the creation of an intimate sphere was made possible by the researchers’ positionality as both outsiders and insiders to the story circle and their sharing of personal and affective stories of migration, displacement, belonging and work. From an emotional point view our positions of insiders to the story circle meant that in addition to taking responsibility for the outcome of the workshop and making and sure that our data collection process was successful, we were also simultaneously occupying the position of storytellers. This position made us experience the same vulnerability that our research participants probably felt in the act of opening up and exposing their personal stories to the group, a position that might have potentially jeopardised our authority as researchers in the context of the workshop. As Botterill (2015) argues, there are inevitable complexities to finding shared positional spaces and multiple intersectionalities cannot be reduced to characteristics such as national identity, race and gender. The fact that the space of the workshop is intersubjective and that knowledge is co-produced in several complex ways means acknowledging that researchers cannot ever be complete outsiders to the research process.

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DS as a programme for the production of a life narrative contributes to bring its participants into the public sphere via the dissemination of the digital story, however, this obviously depends on the use which is made of the stories. The extent to which the digital stories access an ‘intimate’ public sphere (Poletti, 2011) depends on the use of the stories which is negotiated between the researcher and the research participants and the way in which digital stories disseminated becomes central to understanding its function. In any case, the first phase of the DS process – that is, when the stories are co-produced and a kind of ‘intimate public’ is created through the sharing of universal themes such as life, loss, belonging, hope for the future, friendship and love – offers an experience of inclusion and community-building, promoting identification among strangers that leads to an experience of embodied sharing and belonging. Matthews and Sunderland (2013) interrogate the afterlives of these stories and suggest that through DS an abstraction of the storyteller’s voice from their physical body happens. The participant’s voice, after the initial abstraction is then re-contextualised into a new media. In aiming to situate DS within a framework of feminist research and practice, key characteristics that best define this approach as feminist and embodied have been identified: first, the dialogical production of knowledge and co-authorship with its roots in feminist activism and embodied practices. Second, narratives are identified as a specifically feminist approach (Gluck and Patai, 1991; Personal Narrative Group, 1991; Plummer, 1995; Cavarero, 2000; Erel, 2007; Oakley, 2010; Hemmings, 2011; Vacchelli, 2011; Brannen, 2013; Harris and Gandolfo, 2014; Nagar, 2013; Oikkonen, 2013; Hesse-Biber, 2014) and are used here to highlight the continuity between feminist work on narratives and DS. I will then offer some ethical considerations on the use of DS.

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DS as a feminist methodology and practice: dialogical production of knowledge and co-authorship Biographical methodologies are rooted in feminist practice. From a specifically feminist perspective, biographical methodologies have played a key role in feminist research especially because of their transformative potential allowing for personal stories to acquire collective meaning through the act of sharing them. Although first systematised with this name by Frigga Haug et al in the influential 1987 book Female sexualisation: a collective work of memory, the feminist practice of collective biography has its roots in the US and Western Europe consciousness-raising groups, where feminist activists in the 1970s used to experiment with transforming individual experiences of oppression in a political problem to be tacked collectively (Vacchelli, 2011). Collective biography (Davies and Gannon, 2006), which has been called elsewhere ‘memory-work’ (Onyx and Small, 2001), is a key example of co-production within a feminist framework whereby shared memories and emotions are constitutive of ‘texts for collective analysis’ (Kern et al, 2014: 839) and ultimately central in the development of a conceptual framework. As pointed out by Gonick et al: Each collective biography project entails its own specific developments of the method, although all renditions include the identification of a theme that group members investigate through writing their own related embodied memories. The stories are read aloud in the group and then revised based on comments and feedback by other group members. (2011: 742) Digital Storytelling (DS) presents some continuity with collective biography in that it is an approach devised for bridging the gap between theory and experience. Both DS and collective biographies can be considered simultaneously as a social practice and as embodied research. Like collective biography, DS reflects personal truths that are worked on through the embodied acts of telling, listening to each other’s stories, writing, giving each other comments and feedback

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within the group: in other words, co-constructing. Moreover, like in collective biography, in DS affect and embodiment play a central role in the shaping of the story. DS is situated in ‘an ethos of debates in qualitative research about what counts as knowledge, the location of the researcher and questions language and representational practices in research’ (Gonick et al, 2011: 742). Differently from collective biography, however, DS does not place as much emphasis on the role of memory in the social construction of the self. Also, it does not tend to focus on individual events described in detail by the research participants (as happens, for instance, in the memory-work variant of the method described by Onyx and Small, 2001) but, rather, draws on auto/biographical data as they are organised and recounted through a set of principally collective activities. As Gayle Letherby (2015: 2) argues, ‘in writing autobiography we reflect on our relationship with the biographies of others and when presenting the biography of others we inevitably refer to and reflect on our own autobiographies.’ Another approach that has been central in shaping reflective practices typical of feminist epistemologies is the voice-centred relational method of data analysis originating in the work of Carol Gilligan (Gilligan 1982; Paliadelis and Cruickshank, 2008). The aim of the voice-centred relational method is to set personal narratives accounts in relation to themselves, the people around them (including the researchers), and the broader social, structural and cultural contexts in which they are situated. As part of this method, after the first reading of the data the researchers record in a journal the personal responses highlighting the emotions the story elicited and comparing notes collectively on reactions and identifications with the stories. One striking similarity between this method and DS is the centrality of the research participant’s voice. Like DS and the collective biography method, in the voice-centred relational method of analysis, moreover, the researcher’s perceptions and reactions to the data are acknowledged, thus highlighting reflexive, embodied and relational aspects in the construction of the data. The Digital Storytelling approach plays a role in what Hesse-Biber (2014) has referred to as ‘uncovering the subjugated knowledge of the

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diversity of women’s realities that often lie hidden and unarticulated’ (Hesse-Biber, 2014: 184; italics in original) as in the case of the feminist approach to interviewing. The process of digital storytelling encourages even further the ‘researched’ to take an active role in the research process to the point that the denominations ‘researcher-researched’ can no longer signify the nature of this methodological approach. In DS, participants are trained to develop their own stories in a collaborative process. This is different from more traditional forms of in-depth interviewing. In the ‘social encounter’ of the qualitative interview, knowledge production is recognised as a dialogical process and yet the researcher still holds a certain degree of control as s/he usually leads the interview process (O’Connell Davidson and Layder, 1994: 122). In DS, personal narratives are borne out of a dialogical relationship among the group of research participants including the researcher/s. Within the known limitations of participation in research, to some extent DS works to equalise the researcher/researched participant roles thanks to its participatory nature which is evident in the co-production of personal narratives. Co-authoring allows for feminist alliance work to write against relations of power and contribute to enact social change, while also problematising dominant discourses and methodologies both inside and outside the academic realm. Richa Nagar frames storytelling and co-authorship at the point where academia intersects with political activism as ‘it allows co-authors from multiple locations to draw upon and scrutinise their multiple –sometimes conflicting-experiences and truths’ (2013: 4). ‘Co-authoring stories in/through feminist alliance work makes it possible to mobilise experience and memory work in ways that connect questions of feminist subjectivity with those of representation in organisation, leadership, and movement politics (5). Anne Harris and Enza Gandolfo (2014), write powerfully about feminist narrative collaborations and the poignancy of co-constructing personal and embodied narratives. They reflect on the recent trend in qualitative research that makes use of arts practice-led methodologies as a way to acknowledge research participants and researchers as situated and yet relational and intersubjective.

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Digital Storytelling presents a number of qualities as a participatory methodological tool that offers a space of dialogues and community building (Copeland, 2010; Back and Puwar, 2012; Gubrium et  al, 2014a,b). Copeland (2010) argues that ‘[d]igital storytelling is part of the tradition of participatory uses of arts and media for activism and social change’ (Copeland, 2010: 196). Magali Peyrefitte and I (Vacchelli and Peyrefitte, 2018b) argue that DS can be more distinctively situated in a feminist approach. Coherently with our feminist ethos, we decided to take part in the DS workshop as participants and share experiences of writing, telling and co-producing of the stories. This contributed to situate us in a more equal position with the research participants. The fact that we are both migrants and could share the doubts and difficulties we experienced in establishing ourselves as professionals in a foreign country (the UK) made this interaction and co-production more horizontal and genuinely mutual. Throughout the process of developing their individual stories, participants were able to gradually share them with other participants and with the researchers who were concomitantly developing their own digital stories. There are various instances in the DS workshop where knowledge production is evidently a co-production. When we finished writing the first draft of our stories, we read them aloud to the group who provided comments, impressions, and shared the feelings that the story had engendered. This was a key step in the development and refinement of the personal story in collaboration with the rest of the group.

The political within the personal: digital stories as narratives Narration as a biographical knowledge is interpreted as a verbal response to the question about the identity of the person involved in narrating and is therefore dialogical in nature. Moreover, ‘this takes on the meaning of a political action’ (Kottman, 2000: x). Cavarero draws on Hannah Arendt when delineating the idea of a subject as situated at the intersection between the discursive and the material: the subject is an ‘embodied existent’ made of flesh and blood,

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whose material existence is revealed through the narrating words of her personal biography (Kottman, 2000: x). With this assertion, Cavarero seeks to break the necessity of the discursive framework. Although narration cannot avoid the discursive frame, the corporeal experience of narration offers a material grounding to the strictly philosophical discourse. It is helpful to situate Adriana Cavarero’s work in an intellectual tradition that uses narrative practices as a political instrument of public exhibition (Vacchelli, 2011, 2013). Our experience of running a DS workshop confirms Cavarero’s view of narration. Migrant women who spoke about their experience of migrating and working as volunteers in London charities were compelling and individual stories could be understood in the broader framework of structural inequalities. The plurality of the narratives produced can also be understood and analysed through a theoretical trope that recognises collective instances in their diversity. The process of DS and its outcome (that is, the digital stories) can be read and analyzed in several different ways. During the workshop, Magali Peyrefitte and I were particularly interested in the ways in which the digital stories we collected are able to inform our understanding of the work trajectories of migrant women working in the voluntary sector in London. To an extent, the individual stories reveal instances of exclusion and resistance and they call into question existing legal and formalised discourses on refugees, labour migrants and marriage migration. While a dominant argument is that European societies provide an entirely new way to emancipation, we know that structures of incorporation into the receiving society may enhance their gendered vulnerabilities (Erel, 2007). This reading allows for understanding life experience not as a single category or event, but as a process at the intersection of gender, ethnicity and social class. Another dominant paradigm depicts migrant women as passive victims of modernisation through the patriarchal control of men in their ethnic groups. DS allows women to take their subjective experience as a starting point and has a potential to redress such representations, starting from the ‘personal’ of their individual stories. These stories, once disseminated, have the potential to shape collective

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identities (as in the work of Cavarero, 2000) where social movements and identity emerge in opposition to dominant notions of ‘foreigner’ which posits migrants as stealing British people’s work or exploiting their welfare state. Redressing cultural representations through DS helps to elaborate a new different resistant subject position. For instance, the digital story of Manuela3 tells her experience of migrating from Latin America to London with a spousal visa after falling in love with a British citizen with whom she was having a long-distance relationship. Her story questions her independent status as a woman who had to give up a successful career in Mexico to move to London. The kind of compromise she made led her to further interrogate her sense of home and belonging. Her personal tribulations, however, by their own expression, disrupt notions of migrant women as, at best passive, if not victims. She concludes in line with the way she entitled her digital story as ‘A life continued’: ‘And at last after our honeymoon, paperwork and the money that we had to get to pay for my visa, I am here with him, in London looking for an opportunity to feel again that professional women that I was once but here in the UK.’ Her story unveils a well-known scenario in which qualified women who migrate are unable to use their previous qualifications in the destination country due to language barriers and lack of social capital in the new migratory context. As in the story Manuela tells, de-skilling is the outcome that many Latin American women experience when they migrate to the UK (McIlwaine et al, 2011). Although her narrative is positive and full of hope, the disadvantage she is experiencing is evident and politically situated. Karima’s story presents another interesting case, as her compelling narration of everyday struggles and activism is testimony of wider structural issues and is exemplary of the fact that a personal story can also be political. In her story, the political even appears to supersede the personal as there is a strong identification of her personal story as an Eritrean refugee and her common experience of fleeing Eritrea 3

All research participants’ names are pseudonyms.

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to come to the UK with other women. Karima found it challenging to produce a personal account of her experience of war in Eritrea and especially having to translate this into a written form. Once we identified Karima’s discomfort, one of us sat down with her and helped her to write a story which could address as best we could her communicative need. Once the first draft of the story was on paper, Karima re-worked it several times until she was happy of the outcome. Karima produced a story in which her own individual voice is not as central; instead, the voice of the ‘we’, the ‘unheard voices’ of Eritrean women occupies centre stage. Her story is a powerful activist story speaking for the Network of Eritrean Women. Using a collective ‘we’, she questions the role of women in the liberation of Eritrea and posits: ‘women were the prime victims of the regime’s (post-independence) human right violations. Women can be seen but their voices never heard.’ In the UK diaspora, Eritrean women struggle together to keep their traditions and culture alive through awareness campaigns and intergenerational work. The message they bring with their political activism is deeply anti-authoritarian. DS provided Karima with a platform to send a powerful message as an extension of her activism and raise awareness – ‘so that history does not repeat itself ’. The stories of the migrant women that have participated in the DS workshop have very little in common with one another. Each story depicts a particular pathway inscribed in varying socio-economic and historical contexts of migration. In all cases, and in their diversity, these stories translate into a subversion of dominant discourses of migration. This is the collective potential of these stories as they develop a political strength through a personal account.

Some epistemological and ethical considerations Digital Storytelling presents an innovative opportunity for a dialogical production of knowledge in a feminist perspective. Poletti (2011), who is an advocate of this research practice, is mostly concerned with the ‘coaxing of life narrative in digital story telling’ (Poletti, 2011: 77).

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She acknowledges that narratives in DS are found to have different emphasis in correlation with how the site of narration is constructed (76) and warns against the risk of disembedding the stories from the discursive context in which they are produced. The ways in which both pedagogical and social relationships are produced within DS is central to their understanding and needs to take into account the context in which they were created within the site of the DS workshop. According to Poletti, having and presenting an intelligible life story is central to the functioning of everyday life at the level of social, political and individual’s identity. As advocates of DS in research we are, moreover, aware of the underlying ambiguity when it comes to writing autobiography. As Erel puts it: [W]riting a life story is always bound up with degrees of fictionalising: be it through allusion or use of different narrative genres into which the life story is moulded or through the slips of memory, the life as it was actually lived changes in the re-telling. To turn a life into a life story, moreover, coherence has to be produced, aided by a retrospective sense of direction, development or progression. (2007: 3) The life narrative expressed in the context of DS is embodied, performative, subjective and fictional. It makes a strategic use of emotions in order to coax the story in a certain direction according to the context in which the story was produced. In addition, it is the result of selective memory and complies with a shape or form that can make the story intelligible while mobilising feelings of empathy from the listeners. On the other hand, the understanding of members of the story circle will be also mediated by their own biographies and personal experiences, so will the interpretation and use of the digital story be shaped by the researcher’s aims. In DS, the storyteller is anchored to the imperative of keeping the audience interested and for the story to be intelligible and have a

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structure. According to Poletti, this already brings the practice of DS in the sphere of the public as the producer of the story is encouraged to think about how to construct their vignette in a way that s/he is coaxed for a ‘good story’, has a question, a direction, is able to satisfy, engage and surprise the viewer with some personal and emotional content. Although ‘emotional content is presented as a desirable element of the digital story’ (2011: 78), it needs to be treated with caution. The ‘open’ and supportive nature of the workshop meant that there was an element of unpredictability in the production of knowledge that the researchers have to comply with and learn to accept. During the workshop, participants were given loose guidelines on the fact that their story should have focused on their experience of migration and volunteer work. Some of the activities that preceded the writing of the story were designed in a way that could help this kind of focus. However, as evident from the stories discussed here, participants were free to prioritise their communicative needs. The researchers’ inability to fully control the outcome of the story represents both a strength and a weakness of DS as a qualitative research method. It is a strength in that, to an extent, the loss of control by the researcher emblemises the methods’ claim for being truly participatory and empowering for the participants. In most cases, the researcher in DS is just a facilitator who can at best express a preference on the direction of the story, has control on the process but ultimately has very little control over the story’s contents. On the other hand, some of the stories discussed point to a potential weakness of the method as a qualitative research tool aimed at addressing specific questions. For instance, in some of the stories a key aspect of the research question that is, the participants’ role as volunteers is not at the forefront of the digital stories. Indeed, in Alma and Antonietta’s narratives, their trajectories into volunteering do not feature in a clear way. For Alma, her charity work was envisaged as a personal quest and presented in her clip as a poetic echo of her grandmother’s altruistic and generous personality that she was trying to emulate. She was inspired by the Somali women she was working with as volunteer; by the sense of solidarity and mutual support they offer each other in a foreign country.

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Antonietta’s story offered a more elliptical narration of her route into volunteering as a search for home and belonging. Overall, issues of home and belonging emerge quite strongly in all of the participants’ narratives and the insights generated by all the stories collected during the DS workshop are very rich with regards to our broad questions on migrant women’s trajectories and on the gendered right to the city. However, the aspect of volunteering and the ‘hidden labor of social reproduction’ only clearly emerge in Karima’s and Manuela’s stories. Drawing on this experience, we contend that DS, as most participatory methods, needs to take into account the relational features of the process, the context in which the stories are created and consequently works better in an open and more inductive epistemological research framework. Participants can keep their digital stories and use them in other contexts if they wish to. This was particularly the case for Karima, who was interested in using her clip for political activism. At the stage of dissemination, Magali and I contended with the ethical issue of participants’ anonymity. This was anticipated prior to starting the workshop as participants were informed of the aims and objectives of the research but needed to be reiterated throughout especially as the stories were co-created in an inductive fashion. Another important consideration is that the DS process remains cooperative from production to dissemination to a certain degree. DS was used as part of an academic practice and dissemination also takes place through publications and other forms of public divulgence. While the researchers’ analysis and interpretations remain dominant, feminist researchers commit to an ongoing dialogue with their own ethical motivations. This is foregrounded by the intention to channel research participants’ voices as valid knowledge and highlight the political within the digital stories (DeVault, 1996). As highlighted by Gubrium et al (2014a), DS can be disseminated back and to a wider audience if desired. The final stage in DS can take place as a screening of the digital stories to the group. The event can be collaboratively organised with the participants who can choose to invite friends and relatives. Public screening of the digital stories will be the next stage

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in my ongoing practice of DS in order to provide an opportunity for dialogue within relevant communities and further co-production of knowledge. The pilot study with migrant women in London presented in this chapter has highlighted the intersubjective nature of the digital story, the role of different subject positions in the co-creation of the story and the importance of way in which the story is shared. In developing DS as a distinctive feminist approach, I draw on an established body of feminist literature dealing with epistemological, ethical and political implications with regards to the question of power relations between researchers and research participants (Cook and Fonow, 1986; Finch, 1992; DeVault, 1996; Sprague, 2004; Vacchelli and Peyrefitte, 2018b). As demonstrated by the experience of piloting a DS workshop with migrant women in London, a certain level of exposure of the researcher’s positionality and shared experiences is indeed constitutive of a relationship of reciprocity and trust. This is necessary to the success of the data collection as long as it does not simply create ‘the illusion of equality’ (Sprague, 2004: 135; italics in original) and is not exploitative (Finch, 1992).

Concluding remarks on DS as an embodied research approach A number of epistemological, practical and ethical concerns have been raised in this chapter, highlighting DS as a feminist research framework. I am situating digital storytelling in an intellectual tradition that starts with Hannah Arendt (2013) and includes Cavarero (2000) and other feminist scholars who have focused on the centrality of narration as a political practice (see also Vacchelli, 2011; Vacchelli and Peyrefitte, 2018b). Yet DS is more than just narration: the co-production which is at its core makes it a privileged terrain for feminist research because it has its root in embodied feminist practice. Storytelling and co-authorship can be understood as activist practices compatibly with the context in which the stories are created and how and where they are disseminated. Both the DS practice and its outcomes potentially contribute to challenge hegemonic power

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relations by problematising dominant discourses within and outside of academia. The process itself, moreover, emphasises the embodied, intrinsically situated, relational and intersubjective nature of research processes and invites for a reflection on this particular aspect of social research outside strictly participatory contexts. Co-production means, on the one hand, that the researcher takes on the role of facilitator, yet on the other hand s/he is active in the co-production of both the research participant’s story and their own. The outsider-insider role of the researcher in DS is reached through a delicate balance and negotiation of in-group relationality and trust. In this sense, the researcher(s) has/have to pay attention to the way in which the site of narration is constructed and this question goes back to Poletti’s argument on coaxing life narratives in DS. Underlying assumptions of authenticity in ‘giving a voice’ to marginalised groups, however, have been criticised. First, because the notion of voice is not fixed, is performative and engenders multisensory narratives as evident in the process of digital storytelling. Hemmings’s (2011) work also points to the fact that stories are driven by the positions that the teller occupies – or wishes to occupy – at the time of the narration. Second, because the relationship between researcher and researched in the research process inevitably situates the researcher in a vantage position whereby s/he is setting the agenda, guiding and controlling the process, analysing the data and ultimately presenting the life stories in different contexts (Erel, 2007). Poletti (2011) reminds us that the stories need to be embedded in the context in which they were produced and presenting them in different contexts would be a misrepresentation or distortion of their original meaning. Intimacy, and the affective relations it produces, contributes to mitigate the role of the researcher as an external agent and is a necessary starting point order to redress power relations in social research. During the workshop, the activities leading to the creation of a digital story have played a central role in diversifying migrant women’s voices and facilitating certain speaking positions rather than others. This is because the workshop was embedded in a research agenda. The kind of positions that emerged were situated at the intersection of the personal

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and the political through the coaxing of the stories towards areas that have a political relevance such as migration and work. These stories were realised through the mobilisation of emotions in the narrative text and voice, which in turn allowed for the outward projection of the participant’s voice through narrations that are, intrinsically, counter-storytelling, as they stand out against dominant discourses of migration and gender. In this sense, DS is an embodied approach and a powerful mean to address the materiality of living gendered lives. The audio-visual technologies involved in the method offer an opportunity for a multidimensional exploration of storytelling. This is in line with a growing methodological literature recognising the different ways in which people experience the social world. The digital stories produced by research participants are not absolute truths. On the contrary, they depict partial and intersubjective truths which are a result of different layers of co-production: the researchers’ agenda, the role of the DS external facilitator, the story circle and its multifaceted interpretations of the stories, the personal urge to produce a story rather than another, the role of the emotions that are mobilised in order to make the story palatable and the discursive strategies that are enacted when the story is presented in the public sphere. As such, DS is situated in continuity with a feminist body of work and ethos that aims for embodied, non-standardised and intersubjective forms of knowledge production.

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SIX Conclusions

Through the course of this book I have 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. Drawing in particular on feminist research, it pays attention to the embodied positionalities of researcher and research participants during the research process and questions the role of embodied research as a practice aimed at inscribing material and discursive dimensions of the body at each stage of the research process. The book also reviews the experience of voluntary and community organisations using embodied approaches to engage their service users, often of migrant origin, and grassroots organisations’ leading role in engaging local communities in effective ways. The imaginative grassroots work carried out by women and migrant organisations in London to engage service users foregrounds

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the opportunity to reflect on the overlaps and continuities with the work done by academic researchers who use participatory and creative methods to engage research participants. In the first part of the book, key examples of embodied, creative and participatory research in the field of diversity and migration are outlined and critically discussed. The second part of the book draws on my own experience of using participatory and creative research with migrant women in London. Here I offer some considerations on reflexivity highlighting how the subject positions of researchers and research participants (including the power relations in place during the research process) influence, shape and ultimately affect the research process. The site of narration is in itself constructed and disentangling the positionalities at stake is crucial for feminist research. My own positionality as a researcher was negotiated within the groups in the course of the two research projects discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 despite the intrinsic ambiguity of the role of the researcher in social research. The positional space of research participants and researcher is constantly negotiated in the context of data collection – where the kind of data produced depends on affective and social relations which are produced in the field. Compared to other data collection techniques used in qualitative research such as semi-structured interviewing or focus group discussions, collage-making allows for complex layers of elicitation, visual and verbal representation of one’s experiences where the body plays a central role. During the workshop, the spatial scale of the body of the research participants and their intersectional identities are at play in the active creation of the collage. Collage-making is itself a form of elicitation used to generate narratives and the work around the task of creating a collage made it possible to create a space and the necessary time for the participants to think about what they felt comfortable disclosing. This approach helped to make the data collection process a less intrusive way of discussing personal and sensitive issues, leaving research participants in control of the way they want to represent their experience. In this book I argue this is best achieved through embodied, creative and participatory approaches.

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Collage-making is a fitting example of embodied research as an artbased, non-textual form of representation. The process of engaging research participants in a group activity elicits verbal explanations which alone might otherwise be too narrow and not necessarily include broader life experiences. Offering time to think about what images to select and make decisions about what they want to uncover is key for leaving research participants in control of the way they want to represent their experience and talk about it. This is particularly important when working with research participants in vulnerable positions as in the case of the migrant women who participated in my research projects whose life precariousness was evident from their often uncertain migration and socio-economic status. This approach is preferable to a traditional focus group discussion which could be intimidating and might not encourage everyone’s active participation. Thanks to its emphasis on doing, collage-making is a relational contextualising strategy produced by the research participants themselves rather than self-produced by the researcher/s and is therefore participatory. Like collage-making, digital storytelling is an embodied research practice. This approach was piloted in the course of a two-day workshop with migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women in London where coconstruction of personal stories and the creation of an intimate sphere with the research participants contributed to create the conditions for challenging colonial relations in research while producing embodied knowledge. Digital Storytelling raises a number of epistemological, practical and ethical concerns which are unpacked in Chapter 5. In this chapter I argue that DS can be understood as a specifically feminist epistemology because of the features it exhibits, in particular the coproduction aspect which makes it privileged terrain for embodied feminist research and practice (Vacchelli and Peyrefitte, 2018b). Storytelling and co-authorship could be seen as a form of political activism according to the context in which the stories are created and how and where they are presented. As argued in Chapter 5, DS can potentially contribute to challenge hegemonic power relations by problematising dominant discourses within and outside of academia. This invites a reflection on the meaning of co-production when

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the researcher at the same time takes on the role of facilitator and is simultaneously active in the co-production of both the research participant’s story and her own. The simultaneously outsider-insider role of the researcher in DS is reached through a negotiation of ingroup relationality and mutual trust despite the contradictions inscribed in the initial trade-off of this unstable relationship. The very assumption of research ‘giving voice’ to research participants has been criticised because of the complex, performative and everchanging nature of ‘voice’ as the DS workshop has demonstrated. Voice, moreover, is a site of conflict, is hierarchical, its authenticity cannot be verified and is unable to fully represent research participants. Voice cannot be disentangled from listening, so who is listening and to what aim are important questions to keep in mind. The multisensory narratives created through the process of digital storytelling allow for a more embodied communication where the multiplicity of voice’s roles, its shifting positions and its performative nature are recognised. Digital stories make individual stories visible and visceral as the sound of the voice or a glitch in the voice can tell a different story from the textual transcription of the same story. DS is situated in continuity with a feminist body of work and ethos that aims for embodied, nonstandardised and intersubjective form of knowledge production. Both collage-making and digital storytelling have an intrinsic pedagogic potential that can be used in the classroom in line with critical pedagogies (Freire, 1970; Motta, 2013; Gachago, 2015). A growing methodological literature recognises the different ways in which people experience the social world and the proliferation of creative and embodied approaches account for the complexity of these multilayered experiences. The value of collages, personal narratives and digital stories produced during the creative workshops explored in this book does not lie in the extent to which these stories represent an absolute truth. On the contrary, the performativity of the research encounter and the need to coax life stories in the moment when they are told contribute to the depiction of partial and intersubjective accounts of one’s experience. Research findings are often the outcome of different layers of co-

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production and a negotiation of different interests which are at stake in the field: the researchers’ agenda, the role of external facilitators, the funders’ expectations, the multifaceted interpretations of the stories during the workshop, the personal urge to produce one story rather than another, the emotions that are mobilised in order to make the story palatable and the discursive strategies that are enacted when the story is presented in the public sphere. Furthermore, the proliferation of embodied and creative approaches in social research could be seen as the increasing acknowledgement and legitimisation of the intersectionality paradigm in academia, policy and practice. Different life experiences, positionalities and the sheer situatedness of one’s identity are better captured through multisensory and layered approaches able to take on board and redress the contradictions of social research and its inability to appreciate the ways that power relations affect its findings. In the policy arena, the women’s voluntary and community sector, for instance, is fighting against ideologically driven welfare reforms and is trying to demonstrate the need for specialist services able to use holistic approaches and engagement strategies when providing life-saving services to the most vulnerable women in society, that is, BME women (Vacchelli et al, 2015). Intersectional, intersubjective and creative approaches therefore are of paramount importance, not only as a research paradigm, but also in order to address the complex needs of BME women in the broad area of gender-based violence (such as domestic violence, honour-based abuse and killing, forced marriage, FGM, and in some cases polygamy) as the current work of refugee and women’s organisations in London demonstrates in an excellent manner. In academia, feminist scholars’ effort in situating knowledge and accounting for intersectional identities contributes to define feminist epistemology as an approach which is intrinsically political and is able to contain different sexualities, ethnicities, cultures, ages and other important social variables, connecting up questions in relation to power and construction of individual identity. In Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory (Braidotti, 1994), the philosopher Rosi Braidotti argues for an integration of post-

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colonial perspectives in order to fully understand embodiment and contemporary feminist theory. According to her materialist analysis, the embodied subject is disembedded from the classical epistemological framework which saw binary oppositions as a basis for the organisation of Western knowledge. On the contrary, through the evolution of these thinking paradigms and social practices, the intelligent materiality of the embodied subject was able to challenge the metaphysical layer of the dual thought which is now problematised within the social sciences. A series of intertwined quests on the embodiment of the subject and the body’s factuality is now being advanced as a novel epistemological field which is expanding and informing new and previously unexplored research approaches. The body is at the centre of a proliferation of discourses, ways of knowing, normative practices and normalisation which are simultaneously investing politics and science alike. According to Braidotti (2013), there is a new alliance being framed in the field of embodiment, that is, between the social and the natural sciences at the interface of discursive practices of psychoanalysis, ethnology and biosciences. Braidotti (1994) argues that modernity is articulated around two main discursive shifts about the embodied subject: first, the death of the subject based on old assumptions about the metaphysical balance between dual oppositions; second, the sliding towards a multiplicity of discourses on the embodied subject. The body emerges at the centre of this discursive field as a living organism, understood as the sum its organic parts. This is an empirical and material notion of the body, as every organism is the assemblage of individual parts and a complex ensemble of integrated organs whose interaction can be understood according to its functions, behaviours and so on, according to the bioscientific notion of the body derived from classical anatomy. On the other hand, the body cannot be reduced to the sum of its organic components and it still represents the threshold for the subject’s transcendence. The body is a libidinal surface, field of different affects, canvas for imaginary projections and ultimately the place where identity is constructed. Embodied research through participatory and creative methods is well positioned to capture these complexities and drive the challenge to epistemological boundaries of scientific knowledge production.

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INDEX

Index A

C

action research 32, 44, 55 activism 46, 81–2, 86–7 affect and post-phenomenology 19–21 Ahmed, Sara 21 anthropology, sensory 23 Arendt, Hannah 79–80, 86 arts-based methods 37–8, 44 collage-making 51–3 Ash, James 19 Askins, Kye 34–5, 36 autobiography 77, 83

Cavarero, Adriana 79–80, 86 Chadwick, Rachelle 13, 14, 58 citizenship 37, 44, 45–6, 47 co-authorship, digital stories 76, 78–9, 86–7, 91–2 cognitive maps 42 collage-making 49–50 examples from the field 58–68 with migrant women 53–7 reasons for using 51–2 collective biography 76–7 communities, using embodied methods to engage 33–7 creative approaches, embodied research using 8, 37–43 Creswwell, John W. 17–18 cultural geographers, affect studies 20–1

B Bagnoli, Anna. 59 biographical methods 76–7 Boal, Augusto 45 body-map storytelling 41–2 body-mind separation, Cartesian dualism 9, 16, 27, 33–4 body-mind unity, sensory methods 23 Braidotti, Rosi 16, 27–8, 64, 93–4 Browne, K. 27 Buckingham, Sue 35 Burgess, Jean 70 Butler, Judith 7 Butler-Kisber, Lynn 51–2

D Deleuze, Gilles 6–7, 28 dialogic narrative analysis model, Riessman 46–7 difference 3–4, 28 Digital Storytelling (DS) 69–71 as a feminist methodology and practice 79 epistemological and ethical considerations 82–6 migrant women’s workshop 72–5

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stories as narratives 79–82 summary remarks 86–8, 91–2 drama 45

Gilligan, Carol 77 Glesne, C. 72 Gubrium, K. 71, 85–6 Gonick, M. 76 grassroots women’s organisations 37, 89–90 Grosz, Elisabeth 5–6, 34 Guattari, F. 28

E embodiment 1–5 affect 19–22 feminist perspective 25–9 materialism 8–10 phenomenology 15–18 post-qualitative research 10–12 in qualitative research 13–15 the sensory 22–5 in the social sciences 5–8 emotional citizenry 34 emotions as data 21–2 emotion versus affect 20–1 empowerment 45, 84 epistemology 7 feminist epistemology 17, 93–4 new-materialist approaches 33–4 phenomenological 18 ethical considerations Digital Storytelling 82–6 research ethics 49–50, 54 ethnography 24–5, 35

H Hackney City Farm 35 Haraway, Donna 16, 27–8 Harding, S. 27–8 Harper, D. 52–3 Harris, Anne 78 Harris, Magdalena 22 Haug, Frigga 76 Hemmings, C. 87 Hesse-Biber, S. 77–8 Hochschild, Arlie 20 Holland, Janet 20 Howes, David 22–3 Hubbard, Phil 44 Hudak, P.L. 2, 8

I identity politics 3–4, 79–80 Ihde, Don 19 Inchley, Maggie 43 integration into society 36–7 intersectionality 2–4, 74, 93 interviewing 43, 54, 78

F Falconer Al-Hindi, K. 69 feminist geographers 7, 27 feminist perspective 25–8 Digital Storytelling 76–9 focus groups, collage-making 50–67 Forum Theatre 45 Foucault, Michel 25 Frank, Arthur 13, 58 Freire, Paulo 45

K Kindon, Sarah 41

L Lambert, Jo 70 Last, Angela 10 Lather, Patti 10–11 Ledwith, Margaret 32

G Gandolfo, Enza 78 gentrification narratives 40–1

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Letherby, Gayle 77 Lewicki, Alexandra 45–6 life stories in the context of digital storytelling 83 elicited from collage-making 50, 53, 66 multimodal narrative methodology 46–7 Lisiak, Agata 47–8 location, politics of 44 Longhurst, Robyn 42–3 Low, Kelvin 24–5

narrative(s) collage-making 58–66 digital stories as 79–82 life stories 46–7 participatory theatre 45–6 Nash, C. 27 Nast, Heidi 54 new materialism 8–10 Non-Representational Theory (NRP) 19

O O’Neill, Maggie 44 Ortiz Escalante, Sara 41

M Mannay, Dawn 39 Martin, N. 71 Mason, Jennifer 22, 24 Massumi, Brian 20 materialism of the flesh, Braidotti 38, 64 neo-materialism 8–10 Matthews, N. 75 Mendoza, C. 43 Merleau-Ponty, M. 16–17 MEWso (Middle Eastern Women support organisation) 36–7 migrant women’s workshops collage-making 53–67 Digital Storytelling 72–5 embodied research with 43–8 mind-body separation 9, 16, 27, 33–4 mindful body 23 Morén-Alegret, R. 43 Moss, P. 69 Moustakas, C. 18 multimodal narrative methods 46–7

P Participatory Action Research (PAR) 32, 55 participatory and creative approaches 32–3 art-based and creative approaches 37–43 research with migrants 43–8 voluntary and community organisations 33–7 participatory theatre 45 Participatory Video (PV) 40–1 Pedwell, Carolyn 21 performance art 42–3 theatre 45–6 Peshkin, A. 72 Peyrefitte, Magali 12, 36, 71, 79, 80 phenomenology 15–17 post-phenomenology and affect 19–22 two types of 17–18 photo-elicitation 40, 52–3 photography, use of 39–40 photo-voice 39, 40 Pink, Sarah 25 Playback Theatre 45

N Nagar, Richar 78

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Poldma, T. 51, 52 Poletti, A. 82–4, 87 post-colonial 11, 21, 33, 93–4 post-phenomenology and affect 19–22 post-qualitative research 10–12

urban ethnography 24–5

V Valentine, G. 54 Verbatim Formula 43 vernacular creativity, Burgess 70 video, use of 40–1 visual methods 23–4, 38–40 body-map storytelling 41–2 visual storytelling 46–7 voice-centred relational method of analysis 77 voice, notion of 71, 87, 92 Volatile bodies (Grosz) 5–6 voluntary organisations, embodied engagement in 33–7 volunteer work as a search for belonging 84–5 invisibility of 71 politics within stories of 80

R race 2–3, 21, 44 reflexivity, embodied 14–15, 18, 22, 24–5, 27 Reynolds, Tracey 44 Riessman, C. K. 46 Rose, Gillian 38–9

S Sandelowski, M. 14 Sense of Belonging, arts project 44 sensory research methods 22–5 Simpson, Paul 19 Spinney, Justin 18 Story Circle 72 storytelling body-map 41–2 visual storytelling 46–7 see also Digital Storytelling (DS) Sunderland, N. 75 Sweet, Elizabeth 42

W Wacquant, Loîc 35 Wang, Caroline 39–40 Wetherell, Margaret 21, 54 Whitehead, Anne 21

Y yoga 35–6

T Taylor, S. 54 theatre 45 Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) methods, Boal 45 Thousand plateaus, A:Capitalism and schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari) 6, 28 trust, building 73–4

U unity of body and mind 23, 29

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“Contributes a great deal to current discussion of, and debates on, embodied, creative, participatory and communityfocused research approaches… an essential read.” Gayle Letherby, Plymouth University

This book highlights the value of embodiment as a qualitative research tool and outlines what it means to do embodied research at various points of the research process. It shows how using this non-invasive approach with vulnerable research participants can help service users or research participants to be involved in the co-production of services and in participatory research. The author uses her own research with migrant women in London, whilst also considering other potential tools for practicing embodied research. The book combines theoretical groundwork with actual examples of application to think pragmatically about intersectionality through embodiment.

ELENA VACCHELLI

EMBODIED RESEARCH IN MIGRATION STUDIES Lived experiences and ethical implications Using creative and participatory approaches

ELENA VACCHELLI

Elena Vacchelli is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Greenwich, London specialising in migration and urban studies from a gendered perspective and has published a wide range of articles, special issues and policy reports on these themes. Her research interests include creative and participatory research tools for working with marginalised groups.

EMBODIED RESEARCH IN MIGRATION STUDIES

“A valuable resource for researchers, theorists, and students looking for frameworks and rich examples of creative and participatory approaches to research methods in community contexts.” Mia Perry, University of Glasgow

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