Exploring the Challenges of Family Migration in Contemporary EU Mobilities through a Collaborative Documentary: Benefits and Potential Risks

This paper discusses a collaborative project undertaken with an Italian NGO for a video-documentary on migrants who moved to the UK as part of a family/couple project entitled Better Together? Migrating as a family in Covid and Brexit times. The transformative aim of the collaborative project was to bridge the gap between research and practice, highlighting the challenges of family migration while simultaneously documenting their ordinariness and resilience. The audience for the project were policy makers, the general public and would-be migrants. The documentary highlights the challenges and opportunities of family migration (broadly understood) and the strategizing that that involves. It also shows how forced immobility (imposed by Covid and the hardening of borders) affected transnational relationships and impacted participants differently, mainly according to their generation/life course stage. The project was collaborative throughout, from the development of the focus and interview guide based on both the academic’s previous research projects and the knowledge of the NGO, to the dissemination of the documentary which took place in both academic and non-academic settings. The documentary combines migrants’ stories with insights from the practitioners who advise migrants in a rapidly evolving policy context. The paper will describe how the project was developed and implemented reflecting on the creative potential of such collaborations. It will also highlight the main challenge we encountered, namely the constraints posed by institutional rules around ethics and the different time frames operating in the academic and NGO worlds.