Methodological Approach

As one participant said, “we moved our lives here seeking safety and now under lockdown our lives moved online”. Our research methods also moved online – a challenge and an opportunity at a time when physical distancing is being accompanied by intensification of social interaction by digital means. In this project then, necessarily, we use digital tools to engage participants in the research which is a creative and a documentary process.

Arts-based methods

In fostering forms of digital creativity, we deploy arts-based methods as a way of investigating changes in social life. To date, participants have said how, through the project, they are making meaningful uses of their time and they often express a new sense of purpose after the trials of isolation.

The use of digital tools for artistic and creative expression allow for the observation, analysis, and interpretation of the experiences of Covid 19 in an interactive space. We create digital spaces. We also benefit from local and transnational digital spaces and networks. A good example, is the Kid’s Saturday Art Club that was developed locally in Swansea, South Wales as part of this project. Children and their mothers gather together on zoom to participate in drawing, calligraphy, painting and craft work. This club nestles within the larger support network of Swansea Asylum Support group and Swansea Asylum-Seeker’s Women’s group. In these ways we operate very much at a local level and at a distance.

We are also working very much translocally. Migrant diaspora and transnational communities that have long been enabled by as well as mobilised digital technologies for a variety of purposes. Such digital communities have already established social norms, practices, traditions, migration histories, stories, conflicts and uses of language and metaphor. In some respects, these features are comparable to those of geographically defined communities. As researchers we are able activate these translocal connections. Friends and family from the Syrian and Iranian diasporas have made compelling contributions to this project. A good example is the video, Lonely Streets in the gallery.

Online fieldwork offers new ethical challenges. We must make sure that all members of any digital groups or community know they are being studied and have access to data we produces. Protecting the identity of participants is paramount in the case of asylum seekers and refugees and other vulnerable.

While we focus on migrant groups of diverse statuses (including asylum seekers, refugees, migrant workers, undocumented/destititute/homeless migrants) we pay special attention to particular sub-groups to get at specificities. For example, according to the Mental Health Foundation, their first monthly poll in March 2020 found that the most anxious group under conditions of self-isolation at home, were generally 18 to 24-years old. This group found it next to impossible to self-isolate away from family and especially from their peer networks. For this reason, we aim to include younger refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented people in this study. But at the same time, we are very mindful of the fragility of young people and will go to every length to ensure confidentiality, privacy and anonymity.

We also include women, who dominate front-line care and “essential work” professions in the COVID-19 crisis (two thirds of front-line workers in the UK are women, most are low-paid, many from minority and socially excluded communities of migrants). We curate and document their creative responses, asking: How do young people at home and women in care professions experience and respond to the demands of this crisis?

Through our extensive networks of working with migrant and refugee women, children may get involved in the project but we are mindful that their faces should never be shown. We have a great deal of experience of working with refugee families using multi-media so, for example, to ensure anonymity, we would during the curation process, combine a child’s drawing for example with their voice over talking about the picture that they drew and what it means to them. For women, we give guidance to record only their voices or for a family member to film them from the back or in silhouette or show only their hands shown with voice over. We are keen to encourage participants to use objects to narrate their stories and this is an excellent way to create rich but safe and secure stories.

Ethics

Identities of all participants will be anonymised as the default practice in the project. No faces will be shown, and all names will be anonymised making it impossible by any means to trace back the identities of the participants. This will be the case unless the participant expressly wishes to be named and visible as indicated on the consent form. For example, it may be that, in a small number of cases, the participant is an artist who expressly wishes their artwork and name to be made public. In such cases a careful assessment will be made as to whether the participant fully understands and appreciates the risks of any personal identifiers being publicly disclosed.

Anonymisation will be built into the creative and curation process so that drawings, objects, hands, texts or silhouetted images are accompanied by voice over, music or soundscape to avoid recognition.

Any personal or sensitive data will be safely stored in the private mode in the database which will only be accessible to the six project researchers and to the project and data manager who oversee that all the data is carefully and securely uploaded and check that the file naming and storing is carried out in full accordance with the plan.

In a small number of cases, digital items may come from Syria or Venezuela or Sri Lanka or Congo or another country because these items have been created and shared via transnational family networks. Due diligence will always be carried out to ensure that any data coming from outside the UK or EU is checked and that we have informed consent that it be transferred to the UK for storage at our personal account at the Open University’s ORDO archive.