Abstract
Between March and July 2010, I coordinated a collaborative project with a group of ten people seeking asylum and living in a Direct Provision centre in Ireland. The aims of this research project were, firstly, to work collaboratively and creatively with people seeking asylum to explore the everyday subjective experiences of living within the Direct Provision system in Ireland, and secondly, to use the work created through this collaborative process to represent these experiences in ways which might challenge dominant representations and stereotypes, and to contribute to bringing alternative voices on issues around the asylum system into the public realm.
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Notes
- 1.
A campaign in 2012 to challenge the hidden nature of detention centres in Europe by attempting to access a number of these centres found, similarly, that access by journalists and members of civil society was denied. The aim was to test the possibility of civil society and the media accessing these centres, as well as to gather information on the ways in which they function and whether people inside can exercise their rights. Information on this campaign can be found at www.openaccessnow.eu.
- 2.
I discuss Foucault’s concept of the ‘microphysics of power ’ in more detail in Chapter 5.
- 3.
It is perhaps useful here to note the difference between ‘participatory research ’ and the traditional method of ‘participant observation’ in anthropological research, which can be defined as ‘research that involves the social interaction between the researcher and informant in the milieu of the latter, during which data are systematically and unobtrusively collected’ (Taylor and Bogdan 1984).
- 4.
In her essay ‘In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)’, Martha Rosler states that ‘documentary, as we know it, carries (old) information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful’ (Rosler 1981: 179).
- 5.
PhotoVoice here refers to the London-based organization, found at www.photovoice.org. This differs from ‘photovoice ’ as a term referring to this type of methodology.
- 6.
See also Nedeljkovic (2015, 2016, 2018a) and www.asylumarchive.com.
- 7.
I use pseudonyms for all participants throughout the book, in order to protect their identities.
- 8.
Theatre of the Oppressed is a series of theatrical methods and critique developed in Brazil by practitioner Augusto Boal, and described in his 1979 book Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal was influenced by the work of Paolo Freire and used theatre as a tool for social and political change. Theatre of the Oppressed is based on dialogue and interaction between audience and performer(s), using a dialectic rather than didactic approach to promote change.
- 9.
The relationship between image and text in this research is perhaps best described by Mitchell’s (1994) concept of image-text, one of three different kinds of relationship he delineates between image and text. The first of Mitchell’s relationships between image and text is named image/text. This is where either images or text take precedence, either one or the other containing the main narrative, the other ‘anchoring’ the meaning, in Barthes’ terms (1977). In the combination imagetext, images and text are synthesized, such as in certain types of postmodern photography, as described by Hutcheon (2002) for example, which ‘[investigate] the borders along which each can be opened, subverted, altered by the other in new ways’ (Hutcheon 2002: 114). The third relationship described by Mitchell is image-text, where ‘words and pictures are juxtaposed without either being reduced to or being placed as superior over the other’ (Warren 2002: 238). It is this third relationship which best describes the relationship between image and text both in creating and representing the material emerging through this research project.
- 10.
‘The Social Research Ethics Sub-Committee reviews research projects that involve human participants and personally identifiable information about human beings in order to determine if the proposed research is ethically sound and does not present any risk of harm to research participants (http://research.nuim.ie/support-services/research-ethics/SSRESC)’.
- 11.
Despite the growing uncertainty of the status of documentary photography , which Rosler discusses in her 2004 essay ‘Post-Documentary, post photography?’ (and which is also discussed by Ballerini 1997), she still defends it as an important and enduring form of social analysis:
So why continue to defend documentary? The short answer is, because we need it, and because it likely will continue, with or without art-world theorizing. As the division widens between rich and poor (and as art practices are institutionalized and academicized), there is less and less serious analysis of the lives of those on the wrong side of that great divide. (Rosler 2004: 240)
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O’Reilly, Z. (2020). The Politics and Practice of Research. In: The In-Between Spaces of Asylum and Migration. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29171-6_4
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