De-Centering Knowledge Production in Migration Research through Participatory Filmmaking. What Is Data, What Becomes Output?

In our contribution, we aim to engage with questions that came up during a participatory video project with young migranticised people. Together with an experienced filmmaker, a workshop series was designed and realized to teach a small group of participants basic filmmaking skills and enable them to shoot their own short documentary film. In preparation for the workshops, we as the research team agreed not to treat the final films as data to avoid a re-essentialization of our participants’ self-representation and to allow for their artistic expression. However, resulting films are disseminated in scientific and public settings and used to engage stakeholders to translate our participants experiences and topics of concern.

In this paper, we engage with the broader themes of dissemination, as well as the lifespan and impact of creative content and its potential for engaging participants and stakeholders. This brings about deeper considerations of how we define stakeholders in the context of participatory research and how one arrives at a collaborative understanding of this issue. As such, we move the discussion to themes of inclusive methodologies and participatory engagement, as applied to issues of dissemination, research translation, and transfer.

Some of the question we wish to address are: What do we conceive as data in participatory artistic research projects? How do we frame, disseminate and work with the material created within collaborative research settings?

This paper is based on the ongoing project “Life Strategies of Young Migrants in Ageing Societies” with research conducted in Poland, Switzerland, Austria and Germany.