Dignity as a method. Pluriversal dignity approaches in place-based visual research on migration and its implications for governance

Abstract

In this article, we propose building on the concept of ‘pluriversal dignity’ as a method integral to visual research conducted through a place-based approach to migration. We draw attention to the lack of a consistent definition of ‘dignity’ and the fact that it is context-dependent, as this is where, in our view, its potential lies for visual, place-based research on migration. In fact, for migration scholars, the potential for encounters between different epistemologies is greater. This is even more relevant when adopting a place-based approach to migration – which encompasses all movements within a specific place, their effects and the ways in which they contribute to the open, processual construction of that place. Furthermore, we believe that applying pluriversal dignity to visual research can prove effective in offering counter-narratives, stimulating collective processes and possibly, participating in the visual governance of migration. We then propose a practical application of this multi-voice negotiation to visual production in the context of a research project focusing on the potential of mobilities in what have been called ‘left behind areas’. The project explicitly aims to produce counter-narratives emerging from these areas. We suggest that, to build a dignified archive, it is necessary to (1) contextualize dignity in the field, (2) share and negotiate responsibility for a dignified research process, (3) embrace the processual dimension of dignified research that starts with the research design and continues through to dissemination, (4) and accept the use of fragmented visual representation to embody a pluriversal dignity that can inform the governance of migration.

Introduction

Visual portrayals of migration have been overtly used to regulate human mobility, both historically and in the present day (Ahmed, 2014; Chouliaraki and Stolic, 2017; Franko, 2021; Mannik, 2012; Martiniello, 2017; Massari, 2021, 2026; Moralli et al., 2023; Musarò, 2017; Piantoni, 2023). In this article, we build a case for using dignity as a method for producing images depicting migration and we reflect on how images produced through research can contribute to the governance of migration. More specifically, we explore different ways of engaging with the concept of ‘pluriversal dignity’ within the specific context of place-based, visual research on international migration.

The concept of dignity is grounded in religious, philosophical and legal debates, often intersecting them. It laid down the groundwork for creating the Declaration of Human Rights after the atrocities of World War II and is still present in contemporary public and academic debates. Despite the considerable amount of literature focusing on dignity, there is still no consensus regarding its definition. Dignity conveys ‘a simple command to all of us: that we (individually and collectively) should value the human person, simply because he or she is human’ (McCrudden, 2013: 2). What exactly this valuing entails, however, is liable to change according to the context of the interpretation. Therefore, the meanings assigned to dignity by various individuals and bodies are often contradictory and mutually exclusionary. For some, this blurriness of definition is a shortcoming (Moyn, 2013), while for others it is an opportunity (Scott, 2013), and we will return to this dynamic further. Against the vagueness of the definitional capacities of dignity, some authors suggest looking at it in functional terms, i.e. its political and legal purposes, and its capacity to invite dialogue in the face of disagreement (McCrudden, 2013: 12–15). While debates over the various aims of dignity as a concept are ongoing, dignity, as tied to the human being, can never be ultimately and universally defined, McCrudden argues that ‘there is something irreducible about the human person that cannot be fully captured’ (2013: 52). He continues:

This means that there is always going to be a need for discussion, the likelihood of disagreement, and a certain under-determination. The very nature of what we are talking about – the human person – means that we should never presume to be able to specify dignity beyond contestation (McCrudden, 2013: 52).

In this contribution, we do not aim to establish a universal definition of dignity. Instead, we draw on its context-dependence, as we believe this is where its potential lies for visual, place-based research on international migration.

By adopting a place-based approach, we start from the assumption that understanding the impacts of mobilities on place, and their contribution to place-making, cannot be achieved by studying singular mobility types. Instead, it requires examining heterogeneous forms of dwelling and diversity that are enmeshed in place for the whole population. However, this does not mean that the research is place-bound, as flows intersect in place, allowing an understanding of places ‘through each other’ (McGarrigle et al., 2024). Humanistic and feminist geography have contributed significantly to this ‘placial’ or ‘spatial turn’ in social sciences in general (Appadurai, 1995; Massey, 1994), and in migration studies in particular (Çağlar and Glick Schiller, 2018). The placial turn has also played a substantial role in ‘demigranticizing’ migration studies, and ‘remigranticizing’ social sciences (Amelina, 2022; Dahinden, 2016). Hence, a visual place-based approach seeks to make visible a wide range of human and more-than-human mobilities intersecting within a single place, as well as their connections to other places and flows. This perspective is central to our proposal.

A dignified visual representation of migration has been addressed by other researchers as a ‘humanistic representation of migration’ (Gilligan and Marley, 2010) focusing on depicting migrants within the same spatial and temporal frameworks as non-migrants. Similarly, the concept of image-thinking (Bal, 2022), as adopted by Coffineau (2023), for the ethical visual representation of migration, is described as offering ‘an opportunity to get to know the subject and their reality’ through image-making (Coffineau, 2023: 58). Cambre and Lehmuskallio (2022) likewise sought to offer diversified counter-narratives of migration ‘by grounding images in the social contexts of embodied stories and experiences’ (Cambre and Lehmuskallio 2022: 8). Others have acknowledged the need for specific ethical considerations and the development of research ethics tailored to visual research in migration studies (Nikielska-Sekuła and Desille, 2021; Desille and Nikielska-Sekuła, 2023), suggesting that visual research ethics are context-dependant and situated (Pink, 2021). Along the same line, Piantoni (2023) has argued for an ‘emancipatory counter-visuality’ as a guiding principle in his own photographic work. We contribute to these debates by expanding our previous work to explore the potential of the concept of dignity in visual research on migration and by incorporating it into broader ethical frameworks. Drawing on the concept of ‘pluriversality’ (Escobar, 2018; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018), developed mainly within Latin American thought, we suggest that ‘pluriversal dignity’ might serve as an entry point for constructing comprehensive and situated research ethics for studying migration through visual means, collaboratively with participants and from a place-based perspective.

We begin by theorising ‘pluriversal dignity’, before examining how visual governance shapes migration within place-based research, exploring how researchers either reinforce or challenge visual narratives. The second part of the article focuses on reflections around an ongoing research project that anticipates the collaborative production of images to counter stereotypical portrayal of migration in European non-metropolitan areas. Specific experiences from the project offer practical approaches for employing pluriversal dignity as a method in visual, place-based migration research, opening up discussion on how this approach can challenge established practices of governing migration through visuals.

The pluriversality of dignity in international migration research

The concept of pluriversality (Escobar, 2018; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018) is grounded in the view that different orders of worlds have existed across various places globally and among diverse social groups. Pluriversality offers a decolonial alternative to the dominant, modernist worldview centred on individualism, capitalism and anthropocentrism. Emerging primarily from Latin American decolonial thought, it rejects the universalising tendencies of Western modernity and instead affirms the co-existence of equally valued worldviews, knowledges and ways of being. Rooted in local epistemologies and practices of autonomy, pluriversality emphasizes relationality, territoriality and radical interdependence. As both a concept and praxis, pluriversality bridges North–South scholarly divides by grounding theory in grassroots movements and creating space for a world that accommodates diverse worlds. However, as Quijano (2000) rightly acknowledges, colonialism has left enduring marks on the organisation of contemporary societies, which he terms the ‘coloniality of power’ – the dominance of Eurocentric knowledge production, cultural practices and the perceived superiority of those who are labelled as (Western) Europeans over other peoples and their life worlds. Quijano contends that the coloniality of power outlives colonialism itself, as it is inscribed in the very structure of all modern nation-states, shaping social hierarchies and the dynamics of privilege today, and thereby creating systemic barriers to exercising pluriversality. Consequently, pluriversality involves epistemic disobedience – a refusal to conform to Eurocentric modes of thought – and seeks to delink from the ‘coloniality matrix of power’ (Quijano, 2000).

Pluriversality has significant implications for the concept of dignity, underlining that cognitive understandings of what dignity entails differ across social groups and regions. This is because the very notion of humanity is not understood universally, and hence what dignity means for particular humans is not universal either. In line with Scott (2013), we regard this ‘muddiness’ (McCrudden, 2013: 12) of dignity as a conceptual strength, allowing for the contextualization of its meaning within the research field. This is especially important in the study of international migration, where the potential for encounters between diverse epistemologies is higher.

This paper adopts a perspective of the pluriversality of dignity – implicitly recognizing a multiplicity of cognitive understandings of what dignity entails across social groups and world regions, and advocating for the negotiation of its meaning within the research context. However, we remain conscious that reaching an understanding of dignity that acknowledges the pluriversality is challenged by the continuity of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000). We argue that a pluriversal dignity approach can bring a useful perspective in researching international migration for two reasons. First, research on international migration often involves encounters between different (and evolving) epistemologies represented by migrants, researchers and the places where the research is conducted, even if they are still constrained by the coloniality of power. A fixed, singular concept of dignity would have to favour one of these epistemologies in a similar way to official ethical guidance, usually tied to the institutions the researchers represent and the places where the research is done. Instead, the pluriversal approach to dignity allows the negotiation of its meanings as part of the researched situation, giving research participants agency over what they consider dignifying, and potentially challenging official ethical guidance. Second, both the people participating in the research (including the researcher), as well as the places where the research is conducted, are characterized by their positionalities (Anthias, 2008; Massey, 2013a, 2013b). Potential cross-positionality contacts between people and places in the research situation may involve clashes of conflicting epistemologies that translate into different understandings of dignity. There is often a temptation for researchers to impose epistemologies they see as securing ‘better’ moral standards and protection for ‘vulnerable’ individuals (Frers, 2021; Piemontese, 2021). Additionally, gender frequently plays a role in fieldwork encounters and, together with the choice of places where data is collected, may influence the dynamic between dignity and indignity within the research process. These tensions, often closely linked to the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), can lead to misunderstandings about what constitutes dignified research and for whom. One way of dealing with these issues is to acknowledge them while entering into negotiations over the meanings of dignity in the field. Such negotiations, between the ways dignity is cognitively operationalized and exercised by the parties involved, is the foundation of an ethical research process. To secure this, we suggest adopting pluriversal dignity as a methodological approach.

Pluriversal dignity as a research method

When we speak of dignity as a research method, we refer to a process starting at the early stage of the methodological design of the research and taking into account a pluriversal understanding of dignity from the very beginning. This further shapes all methodological choices before, during and after the fieldwork. While this might sound similar to the ideals of the ethical research process, we argue that treating pluriversal dignity as a method extends beyond traditional ethical frameworks in research planning, while serving its purpose. Typically, formal ethical guidelines and field-appropriate ethical good practices are established within the epistemologies of our institutions and the research fields we work within. They may or may not overlap with the epistemologies of all the parties involved the research situation. Instead, a pluriversal dignity approach requires learning the epistemologies of the research participants and researched places to include the epistemologies of all the research parties as a cognitive foundation for the research design. This approach therefore supports a research design requiring field reconnaissance and adapts the methodological choices to the people and places where the research is planned. While some scholars already practice this, it is neither standardized nor universally required. Such flexibility in the research process is not always allowed by the funding bodies. As a result, researchers enter the field with inappropriate pre-conceived methods that may not suit the context of dignified research. Instead, a contextualized, pluriversal approach to dignity would allow for methodological choices that do not violate the situated dignity, nor impose the researcher’s or their institution’s understanding of dignity on people and places that do not share the same epistemologies. This is a challenging task, sometimes requiring researchers to balance the life worlds of the participants, the ethical guidance of our institutions and the narrations of our research presented to funding bodies. Yet the difficulty of the task should not deter us from pursuing it. The negotiation of the meaning of dignity continues at all times throughout the research process – including methodology design, data collection and analyses, and the dissemination phase, which often involves a choice of what to publish, also regarding images, and what should be left out (Nikielska-Sekuła, 2021).

Dignity in image production within the research context has been discussed by some researchers (Langmann and Pick, 2014). These discussions were included within the broader research ethics debates regarding visual methodologies (for a review, see Clark [2012], introducing a consensus that the ethics behind visual research should be contextualized in the socio-spatial circumstances they are conducted within. As pointed out in the introduction (Pink, 2021), this stance is not new and is referred to as ‘ethics in motion’ (Frers, 2021: 91), dignity in context (Langmann and Pick, 2014: 9), and a situated approach to image-based ethics (Clark, 2012). Following these developments, we propose a pluriversal dignity approach in visual methodologies as a way of extending and deepening the contextualized view of visual research ethics that is sensitive to power hierarchies coming from inconsistencies in individualized and regional epistemologies. We believe that the concept of pluriversal dignity allows delicate issues of aesthetics, visual representation and self-image of people and places to be approached in a dignified manner through constant negotiations of the meaning of dignity in the research context (extending to the dissemination stages). Pluriversal dignity, while useful in all qualitative research, gains importance when visual methodologies are at stake. The fieldnotes and interview transcripts can be filtered through the academic language the researcher uses to convey the findings, while photographs, if displayed, stand as they are, even if the captions and context help navigate their interpretation. Our job, as researchers, is to secure the dignified display of the scenes these photographs depict, but not by imposing our ‘high’ ethical standards in a neo-colonial manner (see Frers, 2021), but rather by establishing what dignity means here and now for all involved into the research situation, exactly through enforcing pluriversality.

Producing images with/against visual governance: A place-based approach

Massey’s progressive ‘sense of place’ (1991) has been a central proposal to theorising the links between international migration and place. Massey incorporated the extroverted nature of places and their relations with wider networks, social relations, movements, and communications, defining places as ‘articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings’ (Massey, 1991: 28). Similar claims have been made in other disciplines and eventually permeated migration studies: migration scholars started looking at places as interconnected and fostering translocal perspectives (Gielis, 2009).

The Re-Place project, scrutinized in the following sections, builds on these theoretical developments, harnessing a place-based approach to mobility that encompasses all movements in a specific place, along with their effects and the ways in which they participate in an open, processual construction of the place. However, it is worth noting that the places selected for the project’s fieldwork are those termed ‘left-behind areas’. This has specific implications: Willett and Lang (2018) show that the representation of individual and collective identities of local residents of left-behind areas becomes marked with the stereotypes of the underperforming. ‘Physical and intangible infrastructure is not enough to explain the persistence of peripheries. With echoes of Fannon’s Post-colonialism (2008), peripheries become or remain this way because of negative images which affect how core individuals, businesses and organisations interact with the stigmatized periphery, and how peripheries perceive (and therefore reproduce) themselves’ (2018: 3). This points to the crucial role of images in maintaining a peripheral identity of non-metropolitan areas, and therefore on their governance. Stabilized representations of non-metropolitan areas are filtered through an urban/rural dichotomic bias that replicates negative perceptions, a bias that researchers find hard to escape: ‘we make choices of long or short frames, still or moving images, which reproduce a romantic idea of the authentic countryside and its counterpart, the busy city, even though the same actors pass through them. In the rural spaces we have crossed, we have tried to represent feelings of emptiness and absence which kind of strengthen (maybe disproportionately) the need to leave and find life in bigger cities’ (Desille and Nikielska-Sekuła, 2023).

Additionally, the Re-Place project focuses on a plurality of migration experiences in these left-behind areas. Migration experiences too have been subjected to stabilized and consensual representations (Massari, 2021, 2026), such as the visual consensus of ‘what a refugee looks like’ (Mannik, 2012). As Martiniello (2017) and Chouliaraki and Stolic (2017) have argued, media images have been crucial in shaping the narratives of exiles and, substantially since 2015, of the ‘migration crisis’, as well as in pushing forward polarized military-humanitarian visual politics of operations in the Mediterranean Sea (Franko, 2021; Musarò, 2017) and later at the EU-Belarussian border (Nikielska-Sekula, 2025). Most of the visual production linking place and migration has only served to reinforce this dichotomy. For a project researching migration in non-metropolitan areas, this might result in a ‘double mediatic uncritical approach’ which ‘contributes to underrepresenting the presence of people on the move in peripheral areas, but […] also reduces its complex narrative into simple dichotomies and distorted images that have an effect on welcoming processes’ (Moralli et al., 2023).

Visual methodologies have primarily attracted social scientists who have adopted a place-based approach. Geographers, in particular, have justified their visual work precisely because it has the potential to explore space-people relations (Hawkins, 2014). Even more recently, and following non-representational theory, Jacobs and Palis, who coordinate the Film Geographies platform, have advocated for the use of moving images that treat places as characters with agency and voice. Across various disciplines, visual methodologies have been used to explore the links between space and the body, as well as between processes and their representations. In the particular field of international migration, visual methodologies are helpful to ‘challenge the omnipresent categorisation of migrants and the places associated with migration in dominant development discourse and policies’ (Kochan, 2016). For example, they help reposition non-metropolitan areas as significant sites of migration settlement.

In the particular case at hand, we suggest that visual methodologies are not only powerful when it comes to studying the relations between space, people and their movements; they also participate in migration governance. We position visual methodologies at the intersection of visual communication and migration policy (Massari, 2023; Massari, 2026). Even before the sharp increase in the production of migration-related images during the 2015 so-called refugee crisis (Cambre and Lehmuskallio, 2022), Ahmed (2004, 2014) had already foreseen the power of texts and images in generating emotions and governing/framing migration and race politics. The mid-career thesis of Piantoni (2023) is very insightful in this regard: he theorizes the two concepts of territoriality and visuality, arguing:

photographic images — by their indexical and iconological nature — serve as vehicles for representations that visually and spatially convey the fields of action of actors involved in migration governance. While visual power is not the power to act (on the part of these actors), its influence is exercised through the perceptions (and emotional states) triggered by universal and cultural motifs.

Additionally, Músaro (2017; 2019) has produced insightful work on the use of images in migration governance in Italy and Spain. Músaro demonstrates the power of migration-related images to shape the governance process, and integrate humanitarian and security responses within a common ‘emergency frame’, aligned with Ritaine ‘dramaturgy of migration’ (2010), or de Genova’s adaptation of Debord’s ‘spectacle’ (2014). Visuals in Músaro’s case studies have successfully framed migration as a particular policy/governance problem, much like textual discourses have done (Penninx and Garcés-Mascareñas, 2016).

Ironically, a rather prolific field positively linking the governing of migration, place-making, and the visual are local diversity policies (Desille, 2019, 2022, 2024). Here, municipalities overinvest in soft policies connecting a new place identity with (migration-led) diversity, and often reinforcing neoliberal and neo-colonial processes. Massari’s (2026) contribution to this SI suggests that people on the move are never the producers of visuals depicting their own experiences: ‘As Rajaram observed, refugees continue to be denied the possibility to produce political narratives, while the account of their experience remains a prerogative of Western relief agencies, through which “refugee lives become a site where Western ways of knowing are reproduced” (Rajaram, 2002: 247)’ (Massari, 2026). Within the realm of local diversity policies, the individuality of migrants may seem restored through video clips and other portraits of migrant individuals (Desille, 2024). With this view, certain groups of migrants join the potential candidates of the ‘creative class’ needed to increase the attractiveness and competitiveness of cities, while others – poorer, racialized, etc. – are excluded from these processes. In that sense, these productions represent a simplistic (and even perverse) idea of re-subjectivation, the opposite of our proposal. Instead, we wonder how to negotiate the multiple overlapping epistemologies and the tensions they create along space and time. How do we adopt a pluriversal dignity as a method in our place-based, visual work?

Both authors of this paper harness visual methodologies in our work. We too produce (and circulate) images. However, we intend to produce what Piantoni (2023) terms an ‘emancipatory counter-visuality’ leading to the formation of an alternative territoriality. Based on Mirzoeff’s work (2006), Piantoni extends the role of visuals through the mediation of social relations via photographic images. This process extends beyond the social realm to include spatial and political aspects, which he calls ‘geopolitics of the gaze’ (Piantoni, 2023: 85). This is quite different from what local diversity policies might encompass, but we argue that researchers alone cannot assess what is a dignified image, unless a space for discussion between visual researchers and participants of these research projects is available during fieldwork.

Talking about left-behind areas in Germany, Willett & Lang (2018) have argued, ‘peripheries do not have to accept unhelpful, unflattering or untrue representations on their behalf’ (2018: 5). How, then, do they express their disapproval? For these effects, various scholars have operationalized collaborative modalities for image production. When collecting shots from individuals attempting to cross the border in the Balkan region, Augustova (2021) entered a process of negotiations in which images were shot by her interlocutors and were pre-selected before being shown to the researcher for photo-elicitation. ‘Small victories’ (including changes in local policies) were also obtained while scholars who have actively engaged with residential displacements have produced visuals ‘exposing housing injustices, politicising the lived experience of gentrification-induced displacement and countering stigmatising representations of council estates and residents’ (Strasser, 2024). More crucially, Moralli (2024: 13) argues that:

Participatory visual methods can sustain processes of collective learning, constant social interactions, and knowledge co-construction; in doing so, they can ultimately promote social change through alternative socio-spatial representations by reshaping the existing distorted imaginaries of human mobility (Mitchell et al., 2017). Such social change can pass both through the research as a relational and pedagogical space, and through the co-production of epistemologies that bring original viewpoints (Piemontese, 2021; Zavala, 2013).

In general, there is evidence that images – whether artistic or research-driven – when created in line with the principle of collaboration can offer a more complex portrayal of migration experiences and counter-narratives (Bacon et al., 2021) that can stir collective processes (Massari and Molho, 2024).

In that sense, as Massari (2026, this issue) suggests, not all agents will have a similar reach or impact on visual governance. However, visual disruption aimed at fostering ‘emancipatory counter-visuality’ (Piantoni, 2023) can emerge as part of larger collective and political movements. This does not mean simply handing the camera to a person with migration experience or focusing only on ‘positive’ stories of movement. Instead, it involves actively cultivating a process towards adopting a pluriversal understanding of dignity.

Creating a dignified ‘living archive’ of migration

Introducing the research project

The Re-Place project, launched in 2023, explores the complex issues faced by peripheral non-metropolitan areas, which have been subject to contrasting narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic. While some view these areas as struggling and left behind, others see them as offering a higher quality of life compared to big cities. Adopting a place-based approach, we study the dual function of places as areas of origin and destination, focusing on heterogeneous forms of dwelling enmeshed in place. The overall objective is to mobilize participatory research in non-metropolitan left-behind areas (for a critical approach of ‘left behindness’, see McGarrigle et al. (2024)) to examine how spatial (im)mobility affects origin and destination areas and how it can be harnessed to promote local alternative development, cooperative building of human capital, wellbeing and sustainability across contexts. The project is focused on twelve non-metropolitan areas throughout six European countries: Germany, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, and Spain.

The team draws on existing archives produced by a variety of stakeholders in the places under study, including by participants. On top of existing images, the team aims to produce and archive new images in the selected areas, which is done with the participants to foster counter-narratives of movements in non-metropolitan areas. When collecting or creating images (still or moving), we are interested in the subjective relationships that audiences – participants, us and the researchers – have with these visuals, the meanings attached to them and their potential to offer a dignified representation of local experiences.

In the following sections, we present examples from the Re-Place consortium’s research practices, analysing them from a place-based perspective that considers how migration can be governed through the creation of a living visual archive. This approach highlights the opportunities that a pluriversal dignity approach offers for visual narrations of migration as part of the governance processes.

Towards a dignified archive

Contextualising dignity in the field

Let us start with a small vignette. At the beginning of June 2024, during exploratory fieldwork in one of the areas selected for the case study, I (Desille) was wandering around with my camera in one of the villages within the council, a few kilometres away from a national border. Official statistics indicate that the foreign residents make up about 6% of the population in this council, with significant numbers of migrant individuals from the UK and from India. The UK individuals represent a trend of privileged migration, while the presence of Indians reflect an increase in non-European migrant recruitment for agricultural work. These new migration trends occur in a council that has lost 75% of its population over the last century (see INE, 2022), with many residents moving toward the capital or elsewhere in Europe. Despite this decline, and contrary to how non-metropolitan areas are usually portrayed, the sense of place of residents in the area is very dynamic and constantly impacted by its external relations (Massey, 1994). While walking along a narrow street up a hill, I spotted a piece of work gear drying on a rock. I thought to film for a few seconds. That same evening, I wrote:

A few turns away, laundry hangs on the wall. I ask a man if I can film. His friends come out. They are seven Indian men from the north of India, working in agriculture and construction, they tell me. Sobreiro! (cork trees) one explains. They’ve been here for a year and a half. A van will pick them at 4 to work. I tell them it’s Sunday. They reply that they work everyday, that work is hard, and not well paid. What’s next I ask? Back to India they say. (field diary, June 2024)

The camera proved useful in triggering a conversation. It led to a negotiation of what I could film, but also to elicitation, and hence the negotiation of situated dignity. I remember that they asked me what I did for a living and we had a short conversation about why I was filming, and whether my work was different from journalistic work. For me, the clothes acted as a symbol of the hardworking conditions, and were ‘self-explanatory’, the presence of a human in the picture was not required in order to ‘see’ humans, hence the anonymity of the picture was enough to ensure dignity. However, my interlocutors did not consider their lives in this place as dignified. They showed me the house they inhabited with a movement of the hand, telling me that seven of them lived inside. They still invited me in for coffee, however, perhaps in the hope that I could somehow make their claims visible. The question I took away from this field encounter is ‘What do I do with the image of the clothes now?’ I wondered whether our conversation was an act of negotiation between various ideas of dignity, allowing for pluriversality between me – the researcher – and them – potential participants – to be negotiated.

Who is responsible for a dignified research process?

Sometimes a shortcut to dignified visual research is taken by employing the convenient idea of handing the camera to the participants and assuming that they will dignify themselves. There are traps here – we should not burden people with securing their own dignity or dignity in general, but should share this responsibility with them. This was well portrayed in Piemontese’s (2021) research on homeless Roma minors in Italy and Spain. His research methodology initially assumed handing the camera to the participants to access spaces the researcher could not have accessed, to gain insight into their life-worlds and grant agency over the images of their lives. It quickly became clear that handing the camera to participants is not enough to secure equality between the researcher and the researched in search for a dignified research process. The economically vulnerable position of these youths, as well as their lack of previous experience in collecting research data through visuals, required much more than merely handing over the camera. A pluriversally negotiated dignified approach imposed on Piemontese’s financial commitment, oriented on providing a salary for the work delegated to the participants and providing training on research data collection. The pluriversal understandings of dignity were negotiated through the research practice. Similarly, an approach of ‘handing in the camera’ to the participants, allowing them to ‘dignify’ themselves, did not prove feasible in our past work. I (Desille) repeatedly wanted to have a more horizontal production of videos with participants to my research, when shooting Je suis partout et nulle part à la fois [I am nowhere and everywhere at once] (Desille, 2021), and Be careful what you wish for (Desille, 2025). However, they did not want to take the camera. For them, I was the one with time and a purpose; they wanted ‘their stories told’, but they did not accept the burden of the work and the decisions around what dignified research meant.

These examples brought important conclusions for the project exposed here and were incorporated into its visual methodology. New images for the evolving archive will be collected through a collaborative video-making process, which begins with a common discussion oriented on deconstructing the meanings of dignity that all parties bring to the research (including research participants). Together, they will develop a common language to express what dignified research means. This stage takes into account the fact that the researchers had numerous opportunities to understand what impact images may have, and that the participants in the study should have the same opportunity. All this will lead the team to distribute the roles in the collaborative data collection process that acknowledges the comfort, dignity and different talents of the people involved. This does not mean that a discussion is necessary prior to each image being shot, but rather that a space is created that recognises the pluriversality of the representations we intend to convey. In this way, the project participants – researchers and researched – will be able to produce dignified research without leaving the burden of dignity on the participants only. The decision of which visuals will be included, and which omitted in the archives, informed by the shared understanding of situated, pluriversal dignity, will play a role in countering the narratives of non-metropolitan areas, altering the ways in which visuals are used to govern processes in these places, including those involving migration. In this context, a decision about what to do with a photograph of the clothes taken during the ethnography described above may have a direct impact on the ways in which migration in the context of left-behind areas is governed.

Processual dimension of a dignified research

The camera’s click does not mark the start or the end of the concerns around dignity in visual research. Securing dignified research is a long process that begins at the research design stage and never ends, as once images are publicly displayed they start living their own life, travelling across various contexts. Over time, their meaning, as well as the meanings of situated dignity, may change. While we cannot fully control this process to its very end, we need to secure it at the stages we can supervise and predict the consequences of image display in the future.

The Re-Place project under scrutiny was built following a quest to employ pluriversal dignity at every stage of the research. The project involved the making of a video trailer, under the leadership of the communication partner of the consortium. A group of consortium members was constituted to represent a variety of experiences from Eastern to Southern Europe, from communication officers and designers to researchers. The activity was internal, taking place at an early stage of the project, so the participants were excluded at this stage. The scenario for this animated video triggered a series of debates on how to represent left-behind areas and mobilities. For instance, an image showed the transformation from an abandoned industrial building to a co-working space. While it was one possible exit from economic decline, it reduced the potential contributions of mobility in those areas to attracting the creative class. We asked to add more paths of development in the film frame. A second example was that of forced migration, featuring the image of a family with a woman wearing a headscarf fleeing a collapsing urban area. We decided to change it to show a wider diversity of forced displacement, yet we still wanted to represent veiled women in the film. At our request, the representation of a woman wearing a headscarf was including at another moment of the film, when the contribution of migration was displayed, rather than in a situation of forced displacement. Situated dignity, negotiated among the participants to this activity, provided a counter-narration to the visual narratives of migration.

We acknowledge that this vignette corresponds to a limited experience, especially since the group, despite some diversity, was mostly constituted of highly educated individuals. However, other similar experiences have proven replicable in other settings (Desille et al., 2026). Interestingly though, the deliberation process was impactful for the future works for all participants. It raised awareness of how we use images, which will have implications for the production of all images of the project, as well as of future projects by any of the 40 participants involved, along with the students invited to reflect on the video trailer. In that sense, the collective process can have multiplying effects, leading to change, also in respect to challenging visual narrations of migration and the ways they are possibly (re-)used for governance.

Fragmentation of visual representation and pluriversal dignity

Attempts to open the hegemonic visual discourses to counter-narratives of migration may lead to creating new mainstream depictions of migration, different, yet still reductionists – revealing certain epistemologies that stand behind them and rejecting others. The reality is always more complex, suggesting that instead of dominant versus counter-narratives, we should rather focus on a multiplicity of visual narrations around migration, which may sometimes contradict themselves. It is never possible to represent the full visual story of people and places. A pluriversal dignity approach to research and their visual outcomes requires remaining open to such visual polyphony.

In the Re-Place guide to visual data collection, Desille (2024) wrote: ‘A story does not need to be coherent to be seen as “acceptable”: narrative visual fragments are instead “true iconographic breakaways: a way of telling one’s story by circumventing the violence of the narrative injunction” (Bacon et al., 2021).’ Narrative fragments rather than biographical performance can be a powerful resistance to this injunction. Moreover, speaking of oneself is hardly free from collective narrative patterns, since much of our references, representational system and visual culture are anchored in specific spaces and cultures (Desille and Nikielska-Sekuła, 2023). Stories, including visual stories, can never fully render the ‘historical subject’, like with any research in social sciences (Trencsenyi and Naumescu, 2021). Hence, the construction of personal stories and their reinterpretations by the researcher are not solely reserved for visual research.

Preventing ourselves from imposing certain ways to tell stories or show them visually is a way to recognize pluriversality, as much as it ‘values the knowledge put forth by people as a vital source of expertise’ (Wang and Burris, 1997). The pluriversal dignity approach requires accepting the fragmentation, especially if a more expected, rounded and polished version of visual narration would involve imposing researchers’ epistemologies or violating dignity. In fact, dignity is not always about showing, but very often also about refraining from showing some aspects of the researched situation. The role of the researcher is to do it in a way that satisfies the quest for dignified research without distorting the findings.

Indeed, governing migration through visuals is very often embedded into a fragmented image of migration. It uses visuals to tell the story quickly and efficiently. In these instant portrayals, there is no time or space for complex narrations of various aspects of migration. Instead, governing is oriented on extracting fragmented information and creating a persuasive message around it. Producing a complex story may not prove an effective counter-point to instant mass media representations of migration and/or left-behind areas: an overly complex story will not make it to the media. With this in mind, we should produce visual fragments in a way that prevents them feeding into harmful narrations.

Some words of conclusion: Images in archives and (future) governing

This article discussed several instances of the practical application of a pluriversal dignity concept in the framework of place-based visual research specifically designed to counter stereotypical portrayals of migration in non-metropolitan areas. While doing so, it aimed towards building tools for the participatory governing of migration and contributed to the methodological and ethical discussions on the use of images in research methodologies, both in migration and non-metropolitan contexts.

However, linking visual research with a place-based approach to mobility triggers three main worries, all related to the production of images and their potential impact on the governance of the very phenomena we seek to analyse and deconstruct. First, as previously noted, people moving into and out of left-behind areas have often incorporated the stereotypes associated with these places, and participated in the reproduction of stereotypes connected to them (Willet and Lang, 2018). To mitigate it, a deliberative process of ensuring dignity before images are produced is important to encourage all parties to avoid reproducing and reinforcing stereotypical visuals. Second, the choice of areas studied in the project was made based on the diversification of mobility experiences. Collaborative image production therefore rests on the fragile assumption that people living in the same place will engage together in this process. This was not always verified by the literature: conflicts between groups sharing a living space exist (see Moralli et al., 2024). Moreover, researchers must be careful when they reuse existing analytical categories, as this can lead to reinforcing polarisation between groups (as in the case of labour migrants vs privileged remote workers), even if it helps simplify the complexities of the fieldwork. Third, the research areas chosen also followed a ‘geography of discontent’, and recorded a higher rate of support for anti-system parties in the regions we studied. This raises the concern that certain stakeholders might exploit the project’s evolving archive to show that their communities are being ‘invaded’, or that they are ‘losing their local identity’. To mitigate this risk, fragmented visual narratives must be selected and distributed with caution about how they might be used in future.