Ethics and Integrity in Visual Research Methods

Savannah Dodd

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781787694200
• eBook ISBN: 9781787694217
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Ethics and Integrity in Visual Research Methods aims to unpack the multiple considerations for ethics and integrity that accompany research methods involving visual data generation and analysis. This volume focuses on the media of photography and film. Contributing authors cover a variety of topics, including: consent and dignity when working with vulnerable and marginalized populations; the limitations of participatory methods within a context of inequity and postcolonialism; the challenges of anonymising visual data; and the risks of sharing visual data online. The authors share their experiences of working with visual methods across a range of contexts, making recommendations for best practice. This volume is intended to be practical, and the key messages aim to be concrete and applicable for anyone embarking on visual methods research.

PART I

VOICE AND AGENCY

CHAPTER 1

DECOLONISATION, REPRESENTATION, AND ETHICS IN VISUAL LIFE STORIES FROM THE JUNGLE

Aura Lounasmaa, Cigdem Esin and Crispin Hughes

ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses ethics in participatory photography with focus on refugee participants and informal refugee camp setting. The chapter draws on ethics in participatory photography projects elsewhere and especially the experiences of photographers who work with these methods. The context here is the Calais Jungle camp, where the authors worked with a group of participants, who were residents of the camp, over several months to encourage photographing and documenting life in the camp and beyond, and to work on life stories that can be drawn from and inspired by these photos. The project, and hence the ethics in our work, were framed by the experiences of the refugee participants, and so at all times the authors needed to navigate temporality, violence, state oppression, lack of resources, human rights violations, language barriers, religious and cultural differences, national and supranational immigration policies, shame, and more. This chapter discusses how the authors navigated these ethical issues, the limitations of the approaches and solutions they found, and the lessons they learned, which can be applied to research using participatory visual methods with refugees.

Keywords: Ethics; refugees; photography; narrative methods; participative research; jungle

In 2016, the University of East London ran visual storytelling workshops in the Calais Jungle refugee camp. The visual life story workshops were part of a larger education project in the camp, through which we encouraged refugees to tell, share, and make sense of their life stories using multimodal narratives. The aim was to facilitate the creation of visual, verbal, written, and processual narratives, respecting their past, their history of displacement, and present conditions, in contrast to the misrepresentation in the media. The edited images and stories were exhibited in physical and online spaces, and many were collated in a book, co-authored by the residents, Voices from the Jungle (Calais Writers, 2017). Crispin Hughes worked on the project as a photographer, Aura Lounasmaa coordinated access to the camp and taught on the other educational projects there, and Cigdem Esin helped design the multimodal perspective and methodology for the project, together with Corinne Squire, who started the project (Esin & Squire, 2013). Various others helped run the projects, which took place over a year in the Calais Jungle, before it was dismantled in the autumn of 2016, and we are grateful for all of them as well as the participants for their contributions.

The project was not framed as research, as we did not wish to become ones who ‘take stories’ from the residents of the Jungle – already in the public eye, yet unable to set the limits of the representations that are made of them. Instead, we wished to come to the camp with an open mind, offering to those we met there our skills and knowledge through a university course, without any expectations or pressure to produce outputs from the project. Participation was entirely voluntary, and while some participants wanted to share their stories at the end of the project publicly, they did so as authors of their own work rather than as research participants. What we learned through the processes of setting up and running these workshops is applicable to research with refugee communities. It has also greatly challenged our assumptions about what research is, and how we might wish to go about it in the future. The team had worked in various participatory visual projects prior to the Jungle, and the political and ethical boundaries here posed a series of new challenges.

We will begin by explaining the political and psychosocial context of the Calais Jungle at the time of the projects. Due to its geopolitical location, developments in European migration policies, and the unique set-up of the camp, a very particular set of issues arose from working with the residents. Our approach is framed by narrative, and particularly multimodal narrative research and visual storytelling. This approach recognises the interrelations that constitute the narratives, including participants’ individual and familial stories, their experiences as refugees, as members of transnational communities, and the relations within and across the projects. Using multimodal narratives, a combination of written and visual narratives, within the context of these projects enabled us to facilitate opening up relational spaces for both participants and us. These spaces are shaped by multiple power relations in the field, understood within a Foucauldian framework to include productive consequences, where complex and multilayered interactions emerged. We will explore what these terms mean in the context of our project. Other theoretical issues important to consider here include decolonising methods and pedagogical practices. We also discuss existing research into the ethics of participatory research with refugees, especially in refugee camp contexts.

The following section of this chapter considers four main problems we faced with the project:

(1) The Dublin Accord (Regulation 604/2013 of the European Union and the European Commission) requires refugees to seek asylum in the first safe country they arrive in. The fear of being returned to France, if they managed to reach the UK, meant participants could not be safely identified as residents in the Jungle. This meant that recognisable self-portraits and authorship of the images and stories had to be erased.

(2) Even as participants had fled war, persecution, torture, and imprisonment, the Jungle had gained such an infamous reputation that many participants felt compelled to hide the fact they had ended up in this dire situation from their families: instead of using their photos to tell stories of the Jungle, they used them to represent an aspired new life in France. This made it difficult to negotiate common aims for the storytelling, and created issues regarding anonymity and representation.

(3) Ownership of photos, stories, and cameras remained with the participants throughout, but as each moved on and the Jungle was dismantled, staying in touch with some became impossible. Hence not all voices could be heard/represented. The ethical requirement for continuous consent carries to the present, and the future, and may have implications for both us and our participants that we are only beginning to see now.

(4) With all efforts to make the project participatory and decolonise the educational practices, issues of language competency, translation, and expert knowledge were present in the workshops. While the aim was to move away from the negative media representations, life stories were still shaped by those who elicited them.

The chapter will consider these questions with reference to existing research and the lessons we drew from our own experiences and exchanges with our participants to this date. We draw here from our reflections of the processes and experiences running the programmes, and from publicly available accounts and images, published online or in a book written by Jungle residents and edited by our team, Voices from the Jungle (Calais Writers, 2017). Lastly, we will share our reflections on the unresolved ethical dilemmas and issues to which this project alerted us, and make some suggestions for future participatory photography projects with refugee participants.

CALAIS JUNGLE

In the context of the Jungle refugee camp, the legal and political frameworks that limit refugees’ full participation in society also put ethical and practical limits on any type of project that was run with the refugee residents of the camp. In this chapter, we elaborate on reflections on the collaborative work we did with refugees, and the methodological choices should be discussed in relation to ethical decisions and positions we took while working with participants who have limited access to citizenship rights and information.

As the conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and various states in North Africa continue over years, a record number of people are displaced either internally, or across continents. This raises a great number of immediate needs to be met, which are often prioritised above the long-term needs to continue their lives in the settlement countries where they reside temporarily or permanently. Given the acute needs for survival in the camps and during their settlement period, social and educational needs may be viewed as secondary. The importance of education is emphasised for future reconstruction and stability for both conflict regions and post-migration countries (Butler, 2016). Yet, many refugees face barriers of recognition in terms of social and professional qualifications even after their settlement (Houghton & Morrice, 2008). The material conditions in refugee camps and the urge to survive often push refugees to adjust to power relations that shape their everyday lives, leaving their connection to their past and future aside.

Although Calais has been a place where refugees and migrants have gathered to try and cross the English Channel and reach the UK for many years, the recently elevated conflicts and unrest in the Middle East and parts of Africa have severely increased the number of refugees in Europe. In Calais too the number of people regularly awaiting passage across rose from some hundreds in early 2015 to as many as 10,000 in 2016.¹

We wish to point out here that we are using the term ‘refugee’ throughout this chapter to refer to participants of the photography workshops we ran in the Calais Jungle in 2016, all of whom were forced migrants and residents of the unofficial camp at some point between 2015 and 2016. The legal term refugee usually refers to those who have already received refugee status and legal protection from a state. This was not the case for most of our participants and students at the time of the photography workshops. Yet, the circumstances of the camp, the migration journeys, and the legal constraints of the participants framed the project in such a way as to emphasise the experiences central to their refuge-seeking in the narratives that were produced. The negative press coverage (Finnish Institute in London and the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, 2016), especially in the UK, led Al Jazeera among others to stop using the term migrant to describe those seeking asylum in Europe (Malone, 2015). The term asylum seeker would indicate that all participants had already sought protection, which also wasn’t the case at the time of the project, as some were still planning to seek asylum outside of France.

It was this possible future mobility which framed one of the major ethical and safeguarding concerns we had during the photography and writing projects. The Dublin regulation (Regulation 604/2013 of the European Union and the European Commission) stipulates that anyone seeking asylum in the European economic area must do so in the first EU member state they enter. If proof exists that a person has already passed through another member state, they can be returned to that state without the asylum case being considered. Often this proof is fingerprints taken by border agents, but other official documents or even photographs could become the required proof in some instances. Safeguarding the anonymity of our participants was hence a priority at all times.

The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 and 2016 was widely reported in European media. Calais Jungle became a favourite destination of UK press due to its proximity, easy access, and the sensationalist headlines it promised due to poor living conditions and clashes between camp residents and lorry drivers and police and civilians. Residents quickly learned to mistrust the press and others aiming to document lives in the camp. The Jungle also attracted research and other projects focussing on lives of refugees in temporary settlements, which have been proliferated also elsewhere by the rapid increase in populations crossing borders to reach Europe. Documenting refugees’ lives and practices has been part of several endeavours which aim to understand conditions of refugees and/or support them in their journeys (see, e.g. Sanyal, 2017). All these projects have been conducted in complex and sometimes difficult and dangerous conditions. Hugman, Pittaway, and Bartolomei (2011) underline the possibility of putting the refugee communities at risk of harmful research practices under such complex conditions even though such outcomes might be unintended. While following the baseline of ‘do no harm’ is recognised as a path to follow in work with refugees or other marginalised groups, it is essential to follow a carefully structured ethical-reflexive procedure in order to prevent any outcomes which could make the lives of these groups even more difficult.

MULTIMODAL NARRATIVES AND VISUAL STORYTELLING

Storytelling has the potential to enable refugee participants to make sense of their lives, to connect their past, present, and future while they are in the middle of a crisis. Telling life stories could also provide an alternative to the issue of representation where language and cultural difference remain as a barrier in a historical context in which refugees face hostility, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Ethics and Integrity in Visual Research Methods
• Part I. Voice and Agency
• Part II. Power and Inequality
• Part III. Context and Representation
• Index