Desire-led futures of anti-colonial methodologies

Abstract

In response to the research-led, extractivist ways that we often research people going through the UK's asylum process, I sought to design a methodology that centred the honouring of aspirations and desires. Dubbing this a desire-led methodology, it looked to utilise art and music workshops to achieve this goal, as they allow for identity migration and the expression of a multitude of narratives. Throughout this endeavour, I reflect on the potential for an anti-colonial methodology that through researching with people and their desires could manifest itself in the future. I question the ways in which we have conceptualised owning an identity, and the idea of an insider/outsider, advocating instead for a complex and conscious relationality between people.

Introduction

In 2019 I conducted research at the Court of Appeal on asylum appeal hearings ¹ and I was left with the regret of not engaging with the people who experienced the asylum process. While it taught me how the court structures people's narratives, by constantly interrogating people's histories, identities and credibility, it did not enable me to understand how people going through the asylum process felt, negotiated and reinvented themselves. While I have some experience of alienhood, in which I grew up stateless, I do not have the experience of going through the asylum process in the UK. Starting my PhD in 2020, I wanted to engage with the stories, knowledges and challenges that people went through while also being able to honour their existence beyond the courts and the asylum process. To contrast the reductive narratives that the court and the asylum interviews craved, I convinced myself that I needed to craft a methodology that allowed people to be knowledge producers in multiple ways – and be acknowledged as such in the community. Otherwise, I reproduced the same creation of the ‘asylum seeker’ as a problem to be analysed – as a disbelieved subject to be interrogated.

The Home Office limits narrative expression through its interrogation of the person seeking asylum both in the initial and substantive interview, but also in the court of appeal for anyone appealing their asylum decision. These ‘interviews’ and ‘hearings’ perpetuate that the person seeking asylum is a security threat to be interrogated and neutralised. The methodology used in my research therefore needed to be (1) open to various forms of narrative expression and as the asylum process itself is designed to categorise people into narrow categories the methodology could (2) not limit people to their current legal identity of asylum seekers. Finally, as everyone would have experience of journeys of displacement, it also needed to (3) recognise that their migratory identities might be more complex than a linear trajectory from home to somewhere else. These three demands come out of the desire to research with people (Ingold, 2018), to inquire with them, which proved essential for understanding the impact of the asylum process in the UK.

The project focused on engaging with the experiences of people going through the UK's asylum system, and sought to counteract the ways in which their stories were confined to objects of institutional interest. By using art, it allowed for expression without immediate judgement on its validity, both as a way to analyse and as a form of dissemination. Art allowed for people's tales, reflections and introspections to stand for themselves without necessary translation into something else. Throughout this project relationality among us, people with experience of alienhood, rejected the confines of objectivity as the way to understand processes of injustice. Instead, we centred the recognition of our experiences for a more in-depth, nuanced approach to each tale.

This paper will focus on the methodology used to research with people. It will begin by outlining the methods guiding its execution, examining anti-colonial research, including the rejection of interviews as a methodology for this research, the rejection of the insider/outsider positionality and the centrality of migratory identities in developing this method. Finally, it will outline our workshops, their successes and flaws, as well as their continuously developing articulations through interactions with art.

Desire-led research

The terminology ‘desire-led’ only manifested itself at the end of the research period, by interacting with all the artwork produced; each piece contained a link to a desire. During the planning of the project and the duration of it, I envisioned ways to counter-narrate, without realising that the tool I utilised to counter-narrate was desire. While I did not limit any one group from participating, the caveat that it was art and music related meant that those attending the workshops organised had the desire to learn and express themselves creatively. Those who stayed formulated what they desired to specialise in and those who exhibited shared their desires with the community. Desire-led research, therefore, aims to centre people whose epistemologies have become marginalised and displaced by interrogating the injustices that they have experienced through their desires.

While pain and struggle have space to be expressed within this framework, the goal of desire-led research is to offer a space to express and develop the personal desires of people who might not yet be classified as part of a community. The discussions we had in the workshops were still led by research interests, which allowed us to understand how insidious the violence can be in people's everyday lives, but it did not facilitate the development of reparative knowledge. Desire-led methodology aims to both respond to a state of violence and acknowledge the knowledge that lies within the desires that are labelled as irrelevant. The artworks allowed for an experiential knowledge to guide us in responding to the violence that the court observations and discussions engage with. Once we identify and develop desires, the research should evolve to follow them, not just as points of inquiry, but also as ways to subvert the institutional violence that acts as a barrier to the desires identified in the research.

Within a research-led framework, we could research the conditions of manufactured destitution (Goodfellow, 2019; Mayblin et al., 2019; Webber, 2019). We could research the power dynamics within charity organisations (Grove-White and Kaye, 2023; Mayblin and James, 2018). We could research the court itself and how it violently extracts narratives, but apart from this research already existing, we also limit our research to the framework of the asylum process. The framework of the asylum process acknowledges expertise only through the surrendering of trauma, demanding painful tales but offering no restorative action. To research with people that are going through the asylum process is to extend the research framework to incorporate the migrations, desires and knowledges that are ignored throughout this process. Extending the framework displaces the asylum process, relegating it as a phenomenon in people's lives rather than framing people as objects of study within the asylum process.

Essential to reclaiming these tales of people seeking asylum and breaking the constant colonial translation of people's existence is the centring of desire. Within this framework of colonial narrative violence, desire allows for self-determination and accumulates wisdom through ‘flashes of self-understanding and world understanding’ (Tuck, 2010: 645–646). Tuck (2010: 645–646) adds that this desire-led wisdom links, generationally, across the past and futures:

It is in the way I can tell my grandmother's stories with as much fullness as I tell my own, a practice among many first peoples. I believe that our desire has expertise. In fact, I believe desire constitutes our expertise.

We experienced this connection in the artworks ² created throughout our workshops; the generational connections through desire-led spaces were as obvious as the hope of reuniting with a mother waiting in El Salvador, or the risk of taking your daughter through a border. It is also the depiction of a camel, a historically significant animal to many people, especially Muslims, connecting back generations and directly to the prophet. But most predominantly was the depiction of nature as the migrating self, either as a hopeful companion or a direct comparison to the migrating person. This naturalisation of the migrating self denies the borders created as authorities and instead emphasises the inevitability of movement and the purpose of the human to move. By centring the desire for life, movement is naturalised as the pursuit of life and centred over the understanding of movement as criminalised, turning people on the move into border crossers (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Gallery of artworks created during the project 1.

The narrative violence that people experience while going through the asylum process constantly controls their hopes, desires, bodily agency, and general emotions. This constant management manifests itself physically as reactionary responses to similar hostile environments. To recognise affect through the body in methodology (Hickey-Moody, 2023) acknowledges the management of people's emotions and hopes, then crafts ways to break out of those repetitive ways of extracting knowledge. This is where we utilise desire to imagine the existence of the self outside of this narrative violence that positions the person in manufactured destitution. It is not to say that desires themselves cannot be co-opted, colonised and managed, but to acknowledge that people's lives are governed by managing their desires, hopes and dreams. This acknowledgement needs to inform the methodology that is used when trying to research with people or we simply reproduce the same narratives that are demanded by the asylum process and manage people's tales into classifications (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Gallery of artworks created during the project 2.

By recognising affect we also recognise how people respond to the questions and environment that have managed them as ‘asylum seekers’. Utilising art and music as methods to break out of the conventional interviews and discussions also breaks out of established affects (Hickey-Moody, 2023: 90). To research with art and music is to research affect in its absence and its return, in how people construct their perception within a discussion and in the spaces of desire-led enquiry. It is in this juxtaposition that we find the ways in which affect has been managed into the body and the entrenchment of the border in the body when initial discussions and questions were had. Themes of gratitude, help from charities in the UK, the friendly people that they encountered, and the safety they felt here were eagerly given. Throughout the weeks, the different artistic methods of each of the artists emerged as a counter-narrative to the tale constructed through the asylum process.

The result of the 11-week long project was not how much help they had received in order to survive in the UK but what they desired for themselves. It was not a portrayal of suffering and despair but a portrayal of the hopes and dreams that were being stolen by the Home Office's demand of their time. While portraying pain is part of demanding reparations for a wrong committed, a crime, the works in this exhibition asked for specific dreams and hopes to be recognised. They were not part of an intangible painful experience but were specific, individual records of robbed dreams, futures and time. A desire-led record of these thefts leads to an individual portrayal of instances in which the manufactured destitution that the Home Office demands has robbed each person of experiences, emotions, time, hopes and dreams. Most importantly it also portrayed how desire, when allowed space, is kept alive through cognitive, desire-led, migration.

Honouring desire-led spaces

In order to construct desire-led research, we need to acknowledge the desires of the researcher and where they intersect and diverge from the desires of the people sharing their knowledge with the researcher. This potential dilemma is what has led to Participatory Action Research (PAR), Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Critical Participatory Inquiry (CPI) to emerge as responses to the disparity in what might be desired from a research project (Call-Cummings et al., 2023; Lenette, 2022). While PAR and CBPR are supposed to involve the community from start to finish, from the scope of what the problems are to identifying viable solutions, in some projects this has meant that the community only joins whilst in the middle of a project (Lenette, 2022: 43). CPI instead emphasises the epistemological stance that is necessary to take in order to engage in transformative research, first of all, that the identities of the researcher and the people participating can never be detangled from the process of knowledge creation (Call-Cummings et al., 2023). Transformative research echoes the writings of Fals Borda (2001), whose Investigación Acción Participativa aimed to ‘transform and re-enchant our plural worlds’ with community action. This, of course, would not be possible by centring the same oppressive knowledge production that erases the voices of the people in direct opposition to it (Fals Borda, 2001).

Following this reflexive and transformative path, this research project had input and collaborations with people going through the asylum process from the stages of executing the workshops to the final exhibition and later still through the art collective that we were all a part of. Throughout that collaboration each person had their own challenges with the asylum process that had to be addressed, recognised and in some cases solved in order for them to be able to participate in the project. This ranged from listening to their concern over their cases to answering questions over what the process usually looks like to filling out forms and drafting emails with them. These questions evolved throughout our workshops as new fears were constantly introduced by the current government. One being whether they would be sent to Rwanda because they were all still in the asylum process. As I was working for a charity at the time, dealing with detention under immigration authorities, I could answer some of those questions while drafting emails to their solicitors while they were in the workshops. By offering to be a point of contact if they needed someone to draft emails, translate documents received by the Home Office or if there were other emergencies meant that our relationships within and outside of the project were affected by each one's expectations of me. Following what Call-Cummings and Dennis (2019) called entangled self-assertion and Freire (2017) dubbed posing a problem we were, as a group, interrogating the asylum process whilst the majority were still going through it. The acknowledgement that people were going through the asylum process, whilst participating in this project that portrayed their desires to people, was also a commitment to engage with the issues that the asylum process would create for them.

Epistemological code on anti-colonial research

In the relationship between Indigenous communities and researchers from universities, established through colonialism, ‘research’ invokes the patterns of misrepresentation, extractivism and a pervasive focus on the demise of Indigenous communities (Bishop, 1997; Cochran et al., 2008; Poupart et al., 2000; Sinclair, 2003; Smith, 2012; Sue & Sue, 1998). This pattern starts out with the very questions that are posed to the people we do research with. In order to shift the power imbalance between the researcher and those that are researched, Taha (2018) advocates for a shift from asking questions to victims/witnesses to asking questions to experts. By allowing expertise and by extension knowledge to be in the hands of those we are researching with we also allow ourselves to learn from each other. Learning in this sense is not about ‘banking’ or extracting knowledge but rather ‘posing a problem’ and learning from one another's relationship to that problem (Freire, 2017: 52–53). ‘Banking’ recreates the assumption that the researcher is the authority on knowledge, suggesting that the questions that we pose are the right ones and that the duty of the person who answers them is to mould to those questions. If we would acknowledge ‘banking’ and replace it, as Freire suggests, with ‘posing a problem’ there is an acknowledgement that both parties have a relationship to an issue and that research is confronting it together (Freire, 2017: 107). The relationship between researcher and expert should be one of mutual learning.

The movement to decolonise research (Bishop, 1997,1998; Chalmers, 2017; Datta, 2018; Fanon, 1963, 2008; Fortier, 2017; Freire, 2017; Lorde, 1984) has offered different ways of conducting research, opened the gates for the researched to research, and criticised the power imbalance in the relationships created during research. While these are paradigm shifts, they are a long way from what Fanon (1963: 36–43) described decolonisation to be, a time in which we would take the ‘white man's values’ and ‘mock’ them, ‘insult them and vomit them up’ (Fanon, 1963: 43). The aftermath of this colonial cleanse is complicated, land sits central as a problem for the Indigenous, the migrant and the settler (Jadallah, 2024). Yet, the violent displacement of the settlers for the oppressed nation (Fanon, 1963: 159) or the advocating for a national identity (Arendt, 2000: 274) would not necessarily constitute a decolonisation. As Chatterjee (1993: 10) describes in his concept of ‘third world nationalism’, the liberation from oppressive colonial domination has led to the recreation of its governance under the guise of self-determination. In other words, the decolonisation that led some to call our timeline the post-colonial world was a replacement of who was dominating in certain territories but did not address the questions of territoriality nor the colonial world order. When considering an anti-colonial methodology, we need to acknowledge that we do not live in an anti-colonial world. I am therefore not claiming that this is an anti-colonial research project but rather this is a methodology with an anti-colonial future in mind. The object of research was not the people who had been subjected to colonial practices but the colonial practices themselves (de Genova, 2002: 422) and the rejection of the limitations that they impose. As Keshavarz (2020: 62) proposes I am ‘co-interrogating’ nation-states, nationalisms, justice and asylum with the people going through the asylum process in the UK.

In order to disrupt the extractivist research process, I decided to open up the way of producing, presenting and reflecting about knowledge to different art forms and music. This, as Lenette (2019: 27–28) describes is part of an arts-based methodology, however, the ways in which the very artworks became part of a group discussion also makes it an arts-informed methodology (Lenette, 2019: 31). While the two methods acknowledge the interlinking of knowledge and art, one is concerned in learning through the production of art, while the other is focused on the learning from finished art-pieces that may enhance the analysis. The aim of combining the two is to open up a medium to counter-narratives and emphasise the agency of the people going through the asylum process in the UK (Lenette, 2019: 31–32). I also utilised these two approaches in order to address the inequalities between the researcher and the participant, producing knowledge throughout the project and then discussing it, re-centring them as experts. The project itself was not conceived by the people later in it, but it was collaborative throughout the project, led by what they wanted to learn, create and later exhibit. By selling the artworks it helped finance materials to continue their profession and be recognised as artists in the community. This entire process is meant to produce a change in how displaced people can convey their counter-narratives and revalue them, not just in the academy but in the community as artists with individual perspectives. It also included people, with refugee status, as facilitators that were paid to be part of structuring these workshops with me.

Owning identities or why not interviews?

In order to be eligible to claim asylum in the UK you must be persecuted due to your race, religion, nationality, political opinion or ‘membership of a particular social group’ (UK Government, 2022). Through this process, identity becomes a legally discernible object that needs to be proven and not just a matter of self-determination. Identity becomes conflated to physical properties through biometric registers preoccupied with concrete, ‘hyper-empirical’ categories of identities (Ajana, 2010: 239). Scientific and medicalised methods of trying to discern LGT (Lesbian-Gay-Trans) identities (Chivers et al., 2010; Fassin and Salcedo, 2015; Howes, 1995; Kobelinsky, 2015; McGuirk, 2018) or resolving age disputes involving people seeking asylum who claim to be underage (de Donno et al., 2013; Deitos et al., 2015; McLaughlin, 2017) but are doubted by the Home Office representatives, who have tried to provide irrevocable, physical proof of identities. Physical scars are also used in order to corroborate the narratives provided, medicalising them through full body check-ups (Peel, 1998). Surrounding these ‘hyper-empirical’ identities is what has been called a ‘culture of disbelief’ and of denial (Souter, 2011) that demands evidence to corroborate stories and identities. The observability of stories has continued to play a central role in identifying ‘true’ asylum narratives in the eyes of the court. Truth is equated to passing these arbitrary tests, identities need to conform to the presumption of what they are and provide physical evidence in order to be constructed as truth. A true narrative is therefore not what the person has been through but what the Home Office and the court can, or is prepared to, classify the person as being. Equating physical traits, such as beards, dress, scars, or the lack of them, as evidence of being an economic migrant or a refugee. However, this ignores the very salient question of what an identity is. Arguably, as Atkins (2004: 347) states, ‘who someone is’ is a conglomeration of perspectives that ‘structure and unify a life grasped as it is lived’, but as who is conflated with what in the asylum process the self is asked to become an object with a discernible authenticity (van der Ploeg, 1999: 40). Through the workshop spaces, the recentring of who we are was posed as a contrast to the ways in which the asylum process rapidly translates the question ‘who are you?’ into ‘what exactly are you?’. The structure of the interview serves a specific goal, of finding an object, a what, and in the case of the Home Office: its authenticity, as it prods the subject being interviewed trying to uncover the true meaning of what they said or finding inconsistencies to follow up. Over the course of several interviews there can be a discerning of a pattern that can be called a finding. While interviews as a research method have acquired reflexivity and care (Herron, 2022; Roulston, 2010), it is still essential to interrogate why an interview is needed? Particularly in the context of constant and hostile interviewing.

As this project was concerned with the who, and what happens to the personal relationship to that who when labelled an asylum seeker, I wanted to create a space in which a who can emerge. A space in which the relationality with each other creates a who. The workshops are intentionally called ‘who we are’ in a suggestion that the assumption that the self is an individual process needs re-examination. Wilson (2008: 80) explains the ways in which Indigenous people are Indigenous through their relationship not just to each other as a community but to the land and their ancestry. While many displaced people are also Indigenous and therefore are deeply tied to a land, many of us are tied to geographical and identity migrations. However, the relationality that Wilson describes (2008: 84) of asking someone ‘where are you from?’ as a migrant is to find out your relationship to another place, to this place, to the state and to the citizen. Ultimately trying to find out your relationship to each other and if your narratives intersect. The same question from a White, natural-born citizen, elicits the question ‘why are you here?’. Relationality acknowledges that our personal histories are deeply tied to wider relationship patterns, in which we might have been targeted precisely due to our perceived belonging to a group, a history (Mantova, 2017) or having an ‘identity’. Through biometric identification, having an identity has become even more salient, where a ‘sameness of body’ is assumed to identify a ‘sameness of personality’, creating documentation that literally enables you to own your identity (Ajana, 2010: 242).

However, this sameness is not a fact but a cooperation between the national imagination (Anderson, 2006), scientific methods and legal frameworks. The creation of an identity is based on relational descriptors of our relationships to the structures already fabricated in the world, not a natural category we can own statically throughout our lives. Relationality is key to any process of identification, including the physical; the way we position our bodies: in how we walk, sit, move or touch are all relational behaviours with the understanding that we are someone specific to others around us (Connerton, 1992: 73). Interviews were therefore lacking in trying to tease out the relationality that built up a who, especially if recreating the dynamic of researcher and researched, one asking questions and the other answering them.

Insider, outsider: relational consciousness

The insider researcher is characterised as belonging to a distinct community, a history and socialising within those limits that are supposedly inaccessible to outsiders (Fay, 1996; Jadallah, 2024; Jones, 1970; Merton, 1972; Messerschmidt, 1981; Narayan, 1993; Paris and Winn, 2014; Stocking, 1968; Tachine and Nicolazzo, 2022). This is enabled by flattening people into a group based on one characteristic that they have in common. Critique against this identity flattening can be found in the question of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) but also in the ways that static labelling creates unreflexive positionality statements that serve more as diversity box-ticking exercises than an excavation of where our knowledges were shaped and how it has impacted our relationships to the people that produce knowledge with us (Bang and Vossoughi, 2016; Boveda and Annamma, 2023; Jadallah, 2024; Zembylas, 2025). Instead, the problem of labelling a researcher an insider becomes apparent when our identities are contradicted or complicated in relationships to people we are researching with. Identity and belonging cannot be conceptualised as the property of the researcher to use as currency but must be cultivated through a reflexive relationship with the people you are researching with (Forster, 2012). The experiences of mixed-race anthropologists, those researching lower economic classes, migration, or even the fact that we are academically trained can alienate us from the communities that we are supposed to be ‘native’ of (Barrett 1999; Jacobs-Huey, 2002; Lal, 1996; Narayan, 1993). Relationality, in response to reductive identity ownership, emphasises our responsibilities – to reflexively examine our relationship with colonial practices and with the people affected by them (Jadallah, 2024; Tynan, 2021).

Reflexive relational positionality

In excavating my positionality, I found myself grasping between contradicting and battling relationships. My positionality is a multitude; I am descended from migrant settlers in Cuba, I am descended from working class brown Peruvians. My mestiza identity involves me both as a tool for the settler colonies of the Americas and as someone with responsibilities to the Indigenous people on the lands that nurtured my ancestors. Anzaldúa (2012: 102) unpicks these battling relationships by presenting mestizaje as a transnationalism, an existence that is torn away from a homeland, cultureless and yet deeply cultured in the way that it reimagines the future by acknowledging her past. The cultural, colonial collision that is mestizaje (Anzaldúa, 2012: 100) embodies the insider/outsider existence in the ways that we belong to both and neither (Barrett, 1999). I am descended from border-crossers and undocumented people. I am a natural-born alien. I grew up in förorten ³ alongside other border-crossers. I am constantly in a migration towards becoming an artist. I own a Swedish passport. I am queer. I am middle class. Since I am perceived as a woman this allowed me to interact with women going through the process more easily, being invited to women only gatherings but also having to navigate the policing of women's bodies in multicultural spaces. Women-only gatherings allowed for other narratives to be told, hijabs could come off, stories of their husbands and children shared without having to police what men might think of them – it also invited unsolicited advice of how people should parent or how they should treat their husbands. I will, however, not talk about these gatherings, they were instrumental in finding facilitators for the project and understanding the power dynamics between different charity organisations but were closed spaces not meant for the public.

My existence in relation to nation-states and to others has always been a negotiation of rejection and marginalised inclusion. When planning my fieldwork, I did not think that I would still be relatable, eight years after gaining citizenship, nor as an academic, nor as a descendant of Latin Americans as we are often erased from the conversation of people seeking asylum in the UK. I found, unsurprisingly, that my positionality both enabled and hindered me. My collision with nation-states was a point of unification, being Latin American was not a surprise to those going through the asylum process as our cases are not uncommon in the UK. Not having a single homeland was a point of confusion for some and of understanding for others. Anzaldúa (2012: 41–45, 99–105) speaks of a mestiza consciousness, an entity that is all of her identities. I will speak of a displaced consciousness that acknowledges the constant relabelling of its identities. Of having to understand the epistemic injustice and white ignorance (Fricker, 2007, 2016, 2017; Mills, 2007, 2015) of its narrative never being taken as reality and adapting to it. The borderlands (Anzaldúa, 2012) that we embody as exiles in Europe is one of constant submission to identities that we supposedly own (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

The journeys that brought me here.

Journeys present and absent

As a person and a researcher, I would describe my journey as on hold for most of my life. When I then describe where I am from, I describe the journeys that brought me here, I describe my mother's journey from Cuba, I describe my father's journey from Peru and I describe my journey from Sweden. Partly because giving the impression that I was a natural-born citizen of any of them would be a lie, partly because I had to naturalise from the status of alien, waiting and ‘earning’ my rights as a citizen. Once you pay for citizenship you own it, but you do not belong to it. I own a Swedish passport; I am not Swedish. I developed this point of view, of owning a citizenship but not belonging to it, from sharing the journey of getting citizenship within spaces of alienhood and immediately receiving the responses of when people were themselves in Sweden.

My time in Sweden pulled me closer to certain Iranians and various Arab speakers, as they had tried to gain asylum in Sweden first but were so heavily discouraged by the Swedish asylum system that they left for the UK. One man used to welcome me as ‘Sweden!’, since I could not speak Arabic, I only found out later, when Jawad translated for us, that his daughter had also been born stateless in Sweden, he asked me how I had solved it, I said I just had to wait. We used to sit and talk about how Scandinavian systems treated foreigners. We did not relate to each other because we spoke the same languages or came from the same places but because we had been waiting for the same rights as citizens. These were the spaces of alienhoods, in which we related to each other because our narratives included each other; the waiting rooms we had experienced, the cold bureaucracy, the exclusion and open hostility. We looked at citizenship as an opportunity but also as an oppressive construction. Our journeys were not just from point A to B but from oppression to opportunity, crossing the border from alienhood to citizenship, only to be left with the knowledge that someone else was left waiting.

Who We Are workshops and collective

The Who We Are project was designed to co-produce knowledge with people who were going through the asylum process. It was particularly tailored to the experience of subjectification within the legal system in which you become an asylum seeker that is distinctly different to the citizen. When researching the experiences of migration, particularly the experience of migrating into the legal identity of an asylum seeker, the methodology needs to acknowledge that there was an existence and a timeline left behind, a journey towards asylum, and an existence during the process of asylum. This acknowledgement opens the possibility of migrant identities, identities that have changed, are currently changing and have multiplicities of existences. In other words, a methodology that recognises the transnational, legal, personal, and generational relationships that make up the identity of the person seeking asylum. Ideally, as an anthropologist, these relationships would be experienced in a place with people enacting their everyday relationships: an ethnographic methodology. I decided not to approach refugee and migrant charities as spaces of ethnographic research but as a space of mediation between the people who utilise their services and me. This decision was made to not limit the identity of the people seeking asylum to asylum seekers and to not limit the narrative of people seeking asylum in the UK to their relationship with and within charity organisations. Mediation would also not allow for a relationality between us to grow, as they were spaces of labelling and containment, stifling any ethnographic endeavour outside of the relationship between people and the charities. Yet, charities’ role of mediation is valuable in safeguarding people, aiding the research, and providing contexts to the situation of the people seeking asylum in Hull.

From December 2021 to April 2022, I spent at least two days a week at different refugee and migrant charities in Hull, cultivating relationships and understanding the relationships already existing between the organisations. I recruited two facilitators who would help me realise the project, the first one was Zarah whose grandparents fled Palestine after the Nakba ⁴ to Jordan, she had later also lived in Morocco, Oman and Saudi Arabia. In the middle of the project, she had to leave for Jordan and introduced me to Maryam who would take over as facilitator. Maryam was from Tunisia and had waited seven years to get refugee status in the UK. The decision to recruit facilitators and music teachers from the same centres that I was regularly going to was due to their accessibility, they were people that we were already familiar with, and they added another migrant identity perspective into the research. Relationships could then develop between actors who already were familiar with each other but in a different space, removed from the charities that labelled them as volunteers, asylum seekers and service users/providers.

The initial planning for these workshops took into consideration that there might be people who preferred familiar relationalities. I planned to have a women's only group as well as a mixed group, particularly having witnessed how much more open women gatherings were and how sometimes the tales shared were only shared in the absence of men. I also planned on dividing the workshops into language specific ones, to limit the translation work. When reaching out to organisations and facilitators I did not get an enthusiastic response from women's only charities as they dealt with other forms of trauma such as domestic abuse and worried about engaging the women in a project in which they did not see the women gaining anything from it. I then invited everyone to the workshops, something that might have lowered the participation of women in the project but also allowed for whole families to attend together. When the workshops started in February 2022, I decided after three weeks to scrap the language division as not enough people were attending the Spanish specific workshops, and we had issues getting the Arabic group set up as Zarah tried to encourage people to come. I was left with 15 people who would come and build cross-cultural relationships between each other. The sharing of their narratives, particularly their artworks, were met with questions, curiosity and a desire to learn from each other. In between each workshop they had sketchbooks they could bring with them and at the end stages, closer to the exhibition date they brought their artworks from the workshops home and back in order to finish them on time.

All the people I recruited were interested in art or music, while it was not a requirement the workshops were advertised as creative, attracting people who had an interest already. Because of the limitations and opportunities that my language skills gift me I ended up attracting a group of people from El Salvador, since we could communicate directly in Spanish and most refugee centres did not have a designated Spanish interpreter, making me the Spanish interpreter. The people who I recruited at the refugee centres were not people with large established communities in Hull. While those from El Salvador told me that there were about 26 families from Central America in the processing centre that they had been in, the focus on their community in Hull was not present in the refugee charities that I went to. Two Salvadorian families went through the entire project with me, one of them had tried to establish themselves in the US, Sonia and Rafael with their two children, before trying to come to the UK. One of the artists, Ines, in the collective was a single mother who was often greeted with unsolicited questions about her life, including that she had a weird accent for being from the Gulf. Sirvan had gained a reputation for being difficult around charities and other locations in Hull but was key in motivating all of us in the project. I still had some participants who were established in their communities but none of them stayed in the project until the exhibition. In total I met 15 people: 11 adults, 2 children and 2 babies, all contributing to the project (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

The journeys present.

It was with the initial three criteria of: (1) Openness to different forms of narrative expression, (2) Not limiting people to their legal identity of asylum seeker, and (3) Recognising their complex migratory identities; that I developed seven weeks of workshops, each of them introducing different ways of speaking about the experiences of refugees, asylum seekers, Indigenous people and exiles – centring their narratives as ontologically favoured. Alongside these workshops there were art materials and music classes as I acknowledged that narratives are not just oral or written but can also be manifested in artworks and music pieces. The art and music sections would also allow for multiplicities and migration of identities as the identities of artist, musician and teacher could be developed throughout the weeks.

Workshops

Once the people I met in the charity organisations came to the workshops, hosted at the Wilberforce Institute, where my office was located, they would be presented with a consent form in English or Spanish. If needed, they would also sit down with the Arabic interpreter to make sure they understood what the project was about. The workshops started out with an hour of discussions surrounding themes of migration, exile, refugeedom and asylum in Britain. During that hour the group was acknowledged in their expertise on the subject and encouraged to respond to each other, disagree or agree with how the theme was presented and asked for feedback on how they would like the workshop to go and what could be improved. These sessions were recorded and later transcribed. In this sense the workshops were co-produced and co-narrated, each participant's experience was taken with the same interest and opportunity for further discussion as any literary piece, academic take or artwork we were discussing. After the discussion everyone was welcomed to participate in music classes or do art while reflecting on a couple of questions that were born out of the themes we had each week.

The workshops ended up stretching from February 2022 to June 2022, culminating in July 2022 with the art exhibition. The workshops were presented as the Who We Are Project, a project that wanted to explore identity in creative ways. As the workshops progressed some would find their interests in learning music, some in art and slowly they would start to become artists and musicians. Becoming artists was a process that took the entire project. It was important to highlight their work in a concrete, tangible way as the identity of artist was only really cemented for those who chose to participate in the exhibition. Having third parties calling us artists, hanging up our work, treating us as a collective enabled those identities to be fostered and believed in. It also enabled me to have contact with my fellow artists both as artists and as people who were going through the asylum process. The artworks were first born out of reflecting on the discussions, then explained in a group, then presented to the curator and later described again during the exhibition while answering questions from people who were not in the project. Throughout, the sharing of their art alongside their narratives repelled the idea of authenticity and instead invited a discussion based on their narrative that positioned them as an authority.

The contents of the workshops, that were supposed to feed the discussion and fuel the reflections while doing art and music were all authored by exiles, migrants, Indigenous people or dissidents who spoke on themes of migration, home and identity through art. These presentations were supposed to recentre the narratives of peoples’ whose tales have been marginalised in the nation-state narrative. However, this format was not a success for everyone. A Salvadorian couple, Victoria and Pedro, who attended the workshops found the format of introductions and discussions to be boring and unmotivating. Victoria expressed that she had come to learn art and there was no art teacher there. Despite trying to encourage her and her daughter to present for the exhibition they decided not to. She did not express her disappointment to me personally but commented this to other coproducers. I consider this a limitation of my own planning and my failure to anticipate the need of a more structured class with skills being taught in order to build confidence. In my theorisation of restructuring teaching to be about learning together I failed to consider the ways in which people might need transmissions of skills to be clearly expressed, or at least differently expressed. In response both Victoria and Pedro refused to write any letters and never left their sketchbook with me. Refusals within research are necessary in order to humanise the research, particularly in exploring what academia is offering and if research is the necessary intervention (Tuck and Yang, 2014). If academia, or more accessibly: if I was not offering the skills that were wanted nor the solutions that are needed, the right to refusal must be allowed to express that and teach future projects how to adapt better.

Art and music

In the end we provided the exhibition with 26 individual art pieces, one sketchbook with six drawings and Luis provided music throughout the evening. Every artwork was up for sale, and we sold 13 pieces. After the exhibition opened, we were invited back to the University, to speak about our artworks. One of the questions that were asked from the public was how we had managed to transmit what we had thought or felt to the canvas. This was not the first time we had talked about the problem of transmission. In our first workshop we had acknowledged the problems of transmitting through geographical and language barriers but in practice Sonia, Victoria, Aram, Luis and Rafael had all expressed the struggle of creating what was thought during our reflections. Skill, immediacy and completely opposite interpretations of their artwork, but that art can still transmit a feeling, allowing for the interpretation of the piece by somebody else, was the answer that Ines, Luis, Rafael, Sirvan and Sonia gave. In what follows I provide more details on these three aspects that were a common topic of discussion throughout the 11 weeks, as we all had to negotiate our desires with the limitations and abilities that our skill, time (immediacy) and other potential interpretations of our art imposed on us.

Skill, to create something in the world is to allow it to be perceived by others, to force an acknowledgement of the art in front of them. As O’Neill (2008) writes: ‘Art makes visible experiences, hopes, ideas […]’. However, there is a danger in the ways in which ‘refugee’ art has been researched, where artists who have become refugees elsewhere have to conform to always being ‘refugee’ artists if invited to exhibit (Chatzipanagiotidou and Murphy, 2021). This may override their skills as artists and preface their experiences as refugees to be the only source worthy of becoming art. On the other hand, there is a lack of allowing the person with the experience of seeking refuge the opportunity to become the artist depicting their experience (O’Neill, 2008). The problem of skill is very clear, firstly because we are not talking about the academy of art or music, past nor present, the criteria for skill that we have acknowledged in this project is that of expression and transmission. Although, unsurprisingly, the artists in the project did develop their own materials and skills to achieve these expressions and narratives. Materials such as toothbrushes, cleaning sponges, steel wool, spoons, drinking straw, paper balls and cardboard toilet rolls (custom cut) were all employed (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Materials created by an artist at the workshop.

While the music teacher allowed for musical skills to be developed the art section was always more of a discussion with me, in which I could advise on how to mix certain colours or what materials they might need or use but I never set out to teach art. At the other end of the spectrum, one of our artists, Ines, came with skills already, creating glass paintings before the workshops and during it. The confidence was there, as was the skill, our workshops did not enable any visible or quantifiable identity migration for her, as she was already an artist for years. I had to quickly adapt to the materials that she needed, something that would continue to be the case throughout the workshop as people specialised in different areas of music or art; Luis needed a DJ deck and different pencils for his drawings, Claudia needed fineline pens, Sonia, Gloria and Rafael needed more acrylics, Pedro needed his guitar fixed, and Rafael and Luis needed their saxophones fixed by the end of the workshops. For those who did experience an identity migration throughout the workshop this came hand in hand with material, practical and performative experiences that followed their desires. Learning to play an instrument, making art, displaying it, being called an artist or musician outside of our circle all contributed to the identity migration away from ‘asylum seeker’. The relationality between art, skill and self comes with a material cost and needs to be budgeted for if identity migration is ever to truly be enabled.

Immediacy, the urgent need to manifest art into the world is due to the ways in which it is often conceptualised as the direct expression of an emotion or a sensation through kinesthetic motion, something that traditional methodologies do not deal well with (Minogue and Jones, 2006). However, throughout the workshops there was also a very clear need for time: time to reflect, time to plan, time to create and time to transform the space. Immediacy in this sense comes in the middle of conditions that require time to be set up. But what immediacy also considers is the forms of mediation between the producer and the product (Williams, 1977: 159, 161). Both in what alienates the artist from the art, but also what artistic means better translate the intentions of the artist to the artwork. The importance of the person being in direct contact with the right medium to exhibit their intentions comes from the desire to prevent their narratives from being alienated from themselves. It was also a medium that did not need to have words, while poetry and storytelling was not discouraged the usage of art such as drawing, painting and music allowed for the immediacy of communication without needing translation or language skills.

Interpretation, art has its roots in storytelling (Lenette, 2019: 28), the type of storytelling that allows for the ‘driest’ of reports in which the story can be relived anew for many years (Benjamin, 2015: 89–90). Benjamin describes this through Herodotus’ story of King Psammenitus, which describes what happens but the very confusion of why it has happened allows for the story to acquire many meanings, interpretations and accepted ambiguities. Artworks allow for this reflective space (Lenette, 2019: 34; O’Neill, 2002: 80) and through these multiple potential meanings the story behind it is safeguarded from the scrutiny of whether it is truthful. It also allows for the artist associated with the art to have full authority over its intention and interpretation. Although most of the artists in the collective agreed that our artworks should have multiple meanings depending on who was seeing them, we also had specific descriptions attached to each of them. The Q&A that was staged for us to answer questions allowed us to understand what people interpreted from our work but also allowed us to be experts on our own art, allowing our migration into artists to be recognised in the wider community.

Conclusion

Throughout the planning of this research, its execution, and its aftermath there has been three main ethical considerations: (1) Openness to different forms of narrative expression, (2) Not limiting people to their legal identity of asylum seeker and (3) Recognising their complex migratory identities. My methodology, based on community art methodologies, and the call for a different form of knowledge production is one response to these ethical questions but is by no means the only answer.

Desire-led research aims to understand and deconstruct the violence of the asylum process from the appeal court hearing to the experiences of the people going through that process. Confronted by political apostasy (Warren, 2015) it creates a space where people could assume new identities of authority. This allowed for new narratives to emerge that went beyond the narrow scope of the asylum framework through reflective practices, cognitive migration, traditions and emotions. The juxtaposition that emerged between the asylum process demanding a sociolegal subject to classify, and the desire-led workshops revealed various layers of neglect when it came to people's personhoods. The asylum process reduced the person to their most basic necessities, and the charity sector follows this thought process as it seeks to fill in the gaps that the Home Office created within its manufactured destitution. Instead desire-led research asks people exposed to this violence what lies beyond it, in ways designed to subvert the violence but also to acknowledge that within their desires lies knowledge of the ways in which we can imagine futures of reparative justice.