Challenges and Opportunities of Biographical Creative Workshops: Migration and Memory Research in the Mediterranean and the USA

Creative methods in the social sciences have challenged the traditional dichotomy between body and mind and the epistemological supremacy of verbal and textual elements, fostering various forms of ‘extra-discursive turns.’ The fields of migration and memory studies have similarly benefited from this methodological innovation, as creative methods uncover aspects of participants’ experiences that might otherwise remain unarticulated. These recent creative research practices facilitate more nuanced and diverse forms of remembering, potentially revealing unexpected details of individual and collective experiences and generating unique memory assemblages.

However, the effect of creative methods is not merely to provide more effective, and ethically controversial, ways to ‘extract’ knowledge from participants. They can also facilitate a more radical restructuring of the research encounter, fostering reciprocity between participants and researchers, especially when both parties actively engage in the creative activities and share their biographical memories.

Based on the outcomes of two research projects on narratives, experiences, and memories of migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean and the United States (Horizon2020 ITHACA and Horizon-MSCA2021 MEMODIAS), in which both biographical interviews and creative biographical workshops have been adopted and intertwined, this paper proposes a reflection on some challenges and opportunities presented by creative biographical research:

- making silence materially and emotionally present even if not verbalized;

- managing the temporality of biographical accounts and creative activities in a way that allows us to welcome and hold together the various fragments of a biography, without forcing it into the linearity of a verbal narrative path;

- exploring the ethical and methodological complexity of the research encounter, taking into account the reflexivity of both participants and researchers;

- demanding responsibility for the social life of the artifacts after the research.