How can we use creative methodologies in our research, analysis, and dissemination to contest the inhumanity of every day border practices and rehumanise discourse around asylum seekers in the UK? In this presentation, researcher Dr Charlotte Sanders and PhD candidate Sudip Sen present two examples of how they have used storytelling as a creative method towards this end.
Sudip presents one example from his mixed-media anti-racist creative practice to communicate the ways in which racism is reproduced in the media, in this case critiquing the terms of the Rwanda policy debate on phone-in radio. Sudip draws from the Russian formalist concept of ‘ostranenie’ (defamiliarizing the familiar, making strange) using naïve narrators, juxtaposition and misnaming/not naming to affectively engage audiences differently on questions of justice for refugees and racism. He emphasises the media as a commodity and that creative methods are not merely a means to communicate pre-existing research, but form a part of the analysis itself.
Charlotte presents her short animation which uses voice actors to share asylum-seekers’ experiences of food provisioning in UK asylum ‘contingency’ hotels, where the inadequacy of food is causing chronic and acute declines in health. Sanders explores how audio-visual forms like this disrupt the role of researcher as ‘expert’ and the mediator of their interlocutors’ voices and perspectives. As such, creative methods can facilitate the direct and unfiltered communication of those in struggle against border power, and support a decolonial commitment to non-extractive research.