Who gets to tell stories of forced displacement and with what consequences? This blog post explores the promise and risks of storytelling in research and advocacy, unpacking how narrative practices are entangled with vulnerabilities and hold potential for resistance. By tracing dominant discourses and outlining principles for ethical, power-aware storytelling, it offers a starting point for rethinking how forced displacement is narrated and by whom.
“Narrative is intimately connected to refugeehood, in part because asylum and refugee status hinge on stories; on their reception and evaluation as well as the ways they resonate with broader cultural discourse on identity and belonging.” (Saltsman & Majidi, p. 2524)
In her work on storytelling Kerri Woods (2020) refers to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s assessment in 2016, that the frequently referenced “refugee crisis” is, in opposition to common claims of governments, not one of numbers but of solidarity. She thereby points to the importance of narratives in shaping how social phenomena are perceived by the public. And further, how these narratives determine which policies are deemed appropriate and justifiable in response to migration. Woods argues that the enhancement of solidaristic attitudes is not an addition to productive migration policy discourse but rather forms its basis.
Building on current debates on research ethics, this blog post aims to explore chances and risks of including storytelling approaches into research and advocacy practices to reorder power in narrative spaces. First, the implications of dominant gendered discourses around vulnerabilities in forced displacement contexts are addressed and second the need for counter-narratives highlighting agency is established as foundation for ethical storytelling. Agency as a key focus point is understood here as the ability of individuals to take action, influence the trajectories of their lives and keep ownership of their testimony, despite structural constraints stemming from global inequalities, colonial legacies and historically grown systems of intersectional oppression. Based on these observations, key guidelines for power-sensitive engagement with storytelling methodology are identified: The notions of a “level telling field” and the “ethics of listening” are leveraged to outline conditions under which storytelling initiatives may enable discursive empowerment. These are then further complemented by principles of harm-prevention and the need for a restructuring of research and advocacy spaces from a relational viewpoint. Acknowledging the need for broad means of expression beyond written testimony increasingly recognized in research on displacement, participatory video methodology is discussed as an approach that allows adherence to the outlined principles in displacement contexts.
Storytelling practices are creative endeavours involved in describing a coherent sequence of events, often centred around a protagonist’s struggle and pursuit of a goal. They are distinct from narratives by their lower level of abstraction, making use of concrete events and characters. Such practices to make lived experiences graspable have gained popularity intended to humanise discourses on forced migration movements and followingly built solidarity with migrants in general and asylum-seekers in particular. An increased attention to migrant stories has sparked debates surrounding conditions under which storytelling can be ethical and may enable the distribution of solidaristic counter-narratives. Some scholars argue that ego documents can disrupt the “regimes of representation” which those who create their own accounts of migrant life trajectories are subject to.
Testimonial injustice & the predatory stage for stories
But to map the space in which stories can unfold their theoretically ascribed potentials and to identify their boundaries, one must be aware of the context in which stories on displacement enter the public. This context, especially in countries of the so called “global north” is one in which displaced people’s voices face testimonial and epistemic injustice before they are even uttered. But even in global south settings, internalised colonial beliefs of superiority of “western” knowledge regimes lead to a systemic scepticism or indifference towards personal stories of displaced people. These injustices constitute a climate in which knowledge shared by marginalized groups is devalued and their credibility questioned by default. This “credibility deficit” serves an important function for governments to justify hostile bordering practices and disadvantages displaced people’s voices systemically. Metaphorically speaking, displaced people’s voices enter a stage filled with traps and selectively malfunctioning microphones. This stage takes diverse forms, for example asylum hearings, NGO reports or media and artistic representations of displaced people’s lives where testimony appears. The architects of these spaces hold power and perpetrate discursive violence. Among them are obviously right-wing populist actors, nationalist and protectionist governments or other actors following exclusionary ideologies and instrumentalising “the migrant” as rhetoric figure to mobilize followers.
But the possibility of exerting violence is not limited to those intending harm, it is woven into the very fabric of displacement discourses in humanitarian aid, social activism and academia as well. In these domains it often occurs in the form of paternalistic “advice” on how an asylum seeker should tell their story or a selective approach to choosing stories for charity campaigns, making the aid organisation, NGO or researcher a mediator of displaced people’s voices, manipulating accounts of lived experiences, willingly or unwillingly, to fit an organisational agenda. In this process, the displaced person becomes a vehicle for a message, however well intended, and inevitably loses layers of their complexity as a human being with many-fold agency. Kihato (2007) describes this reductionism in campaigning on displaced people’s stories as a form of violence that traps asylum-seekers in a contradictory state between hyper-visibility of their displaced-being in the public eye and invisibility of their holistic lived experiences. Cabot (2006) fittingly uses the analogy of the migrant in their own captured narratives as “ghostly” figure.
Centering displaced people’s experiences as epistemological project must therefore not only enable more speakers to enter the metaphorical stage, but rebuilt and extend it, both in scope as well as its perceived legitimacy as a force of meaning-making. For this purpose, scholars explore how the idea of a level playing field from economic theory is applicable to the narrative realm as a level telling field. This concept helps visualise inequalities in power structures as well as pathways to equalise the stage for displaced people’s stories. While level playing fields in economics describe conditions in which competitors embrace fairness as a principle of an ideal free market, level telling fields are ideal-typical discursive spaces that ensure fair dialogue and mutual recognition among stakeholders by centering ethics of listening. The core principles of a level telling field according to Gebauer and Sommer (2024) include a commitment to human rights, common standards for assessing claims and, most crucially, sincerity as necessary condition for a serious, open-ended exchange of experiences and opinions. But it is not only the epistemological nature of the mediation processes of asylum-seekers’ stories that is worthy of critical questioning, but the very content of these curated “snapshots” of experiences because many of them are made to appeal to a gaze centred on “pure” suffering as proof of deservingness of aid.
Narratives of vulnerabilities in forced displacement contexts
Closely connected to judgement of deservingness is the vulnerability discourse in contexts of forced displacement. “Vulnerable groups” have taken a central role in academic as well as policy discourses and vulnerability is so omnipresent that it is often assumed there is no need to clarify its meaning. This lack of definition and acknowledgement of its discursive function leave room for harmful instrumentalization of the social, bureaucratic or technical category “vulnerable”, especially in the policy realm. Because creating a hierarchy of vulnerability among forcibly displaced people by e.g. country of origin, age or gender while simultaneously directing pity and saviourist attitudes towards those rendered “highly vulnerable” builds a foundation for denying the human rights of those asylum-seekers which are deemed “less vulnerable”. It further reinforces the notion that the power to categorize and judge asylum-seekers lies outside of acts of self-identification and instead with the bordering regimes they encounter.
Moving from the policy level to the conceptual realm, ideas of vulnerability as “inherent trait” based on individual features are widely rejected today and it is understood that vulnerability is an enhanced risk created and determined by power structures and social orders of a given regional and cultural context. Nevertheless, some understandings of vulnerability that connect it to reduced (coping) capacity deny displaced people agency. They cement patriarchal standards of invulnerability and independence, from which displaced individuals deviate once they are described as vulnerable. This othering, through a constructed status as “deviation” from the hegemonic ideal of masculinity has a deeply gendered nature and allows for power imbalances to prevail. It further serves to legitimize infantilizing, benevolent or saviorist discourse on forcibly displaced people, thus preventing the emergence of a level telling field. To avoid reproducing these imbalances in storytelling practices, it is important for researchers and practitioners to understand negative and disempowering connotations of vulnerability as product of masculinist ideology that allows the implicit subordination of those given the label “vulnerable”. To challenge these connotations, Gilodi et al. (2024) call for a counter-narrative that disrupts the disempowering conceptual opposition between vulnerability and agency. Following Butler’s understanding, telling stories of vulnerabilities, complexities and contradictions in forced displacement contexts, which are voiced deliberately, can be read as a power-sensitive resistance strategy that has transformative potential.
From reporting vulnerabilities to highlighting agency – Key guidelines
To safeguard storytelling approaches from the risk of limiting this transformative potential, I have synthesized central ideas from related work that can serve as a frame for non-exploitative storytelling. These ideas can be understood as layers – spanning from the nature of narrative landscapes to modes of interaction, positionality of individual actors as well as to means of expression on the micro-level.
Envisioning a level telling field and cultivating a reciprocal gaze
Assuming that the very core of ethical storytelling is the acknowledgement of the multitude of perceptions and experiences beyond victimisation, there cannot be one comprehensive playbook for narrative methodology in forced migration contexts. Nevertheless, against the risk landscape outlined above, there are some key principles emerging from scholarly debates that, drawing on Gebauer and Sommer (2024), aim to “level the telling field” by centring mutual recognition of storytelling agency by all individuals, groups and institutions taking part in the creation and exchange of testimony. In a similar vein to Gebauer and Sommer’s ethics of listening, the activist and artist Francisco-Fernando Granados calls for the cultivation of a “reciprocal gaze” in storytelling that understands it as joint effort of all involved actors. The “reciprocal gaze” acknowledges all actors’ respective positionalities and informs a power-sensitive, dialectic co-production of meaning.
Ensuring holistic non-violence and the right to opacity
The shared essence of guidelines for research ethics within Forced Migration Studies is the goal to enable displaced people to present themselves and their experiences in self-determined ways, upholding dignity and agency. More precisely, this includes: The right to not speak about their experiences, to select the content and extent they want to share and to select the means through which they want to construct and curate their stories. In short, ethical storytelling practices are intended to reduce the discursive, cultural or symbolic violence perpetuated in the process of making stories and articulating them and, in consequence, to inflict as minimal harm on the storyteller as possible. This means keeping in mind not only the timeframe of the publication but its possible impact on the storyteller’s life and social network in the future. Some researchers argue that, while harm-reduction remains essential, the aim for reciprocity as key research ethics principle exemplified above by Granados’ concept of the reciprocal gaze, needs to go beyond mere “no harm” considerations. Thus, taking these criticisms into account, ethical principles must be understood from a power-sensitive and procedural but also outcome-aware perspective, thereby taking the continuum of violence and its multidimensionality in displacement contexts seriously.
Reconfiguring roles and relations – Leveraging action research
For research procedures, a large body of decolonial and feminist scholarship has pointed to the intellectual harm and epistemic violence of the hegemonic system of knowledge production that manifests itself in the exploitation of global south settings for data extraction without due acknowledgement of theory building from places beyond “western” academia. Additionally, when moving one step further in the research process to concept operationalisation and empirical research design, forcibly displaced people mostly remain mere subjects without decision power in the modelling of the research methodology. Acknowledging this risk of an exploitative dynamic, action research has become a framework to navigate these challenges and try to return something to the communities it engages with. Participatory research approaches in Forced Migration Studies specifically aim at creating a reciprocal relationship between scientists and recognize displaced people as experts of their lived realities. They try to challenge traditional academic norms by including knowledge of people with experience of displacement from the onset of a research project which decisively shapes which questions are asked and in which ways. Storytelling within this frame can serve as a methodological tool for participatory research that facilitates the co-creation of research endeavours because stories carry both affective and cognitive elements and allow a nuanced exploration of systemic conditions on the micro level without taking away the power of the storyteller to shape their way of participating and sharing.
Staying true to the “participatory” aim – Means and Best Practices
Ethical storytelling further concerns how answers to these co-created questions can be articulated. Broadening the means of storytelling, for example by providing opportunities to use visual, digital, oral or sound-based documentation methods, can be one way to reduce the restrictions of norms of knowledge/narrative production commonly imposed on displaced individuals by global-north oriented research and advocacy communities. Participatory video methodology and participatory filmmaking have proven to be promising approaches to agency-centred storytelling with marginalised and displaced individuals and communities. In the frame of the research project „Cartographies of Mobility Cinema in the Hispanic Atlantic“, participatory video workshops such as a two-year project involving individuals with connection to displacement experiences in the Basque Country, can serve as valuable examples for projects challenging dominant border epistemologies “from below”. Here, all decisions regarding e.g. levels of participation, technologies used, topics, genres, ownership, film locations and so on have been collectively deliberated by workshop participants.
Conclusion: Not every spotlight is empowerment – a call for non-exploitative storytelling
Ultimately, while stories of displacement often enter the public on a predatory stage that is eager to exploit displaced people’s testimony, the act of making sense of one’s personal experiences in relation to systemic conditions always bears the potential for resistance to narrative regimes. This potential lies in the ability of self-authored storytelling to preserve contradiction, ambivalence and complexity, allowing experiences to remain resistant to categorization. In turn, it challenges external or institutional authority over the meaning of forced displacement, acknowledging community wisdom over the expectations of global north centred humanitarian aid systems or migration policy architectures.
As the preceding discussion demonstrates, the principles of ethical storytelling are relevant to every step of a research or advocacy project. Krause (2017) captures this responsibility by expanding the dual imperative proposed by Jacobsen and Landau (2003). To avoid that knowledge remains with powerful interest groups, the triple imperative urges researchers to adhere to academic standards, share their findings with humanitarian and political actors and further insists on accountability to the research participants, recognizing them as key stakeholders in how their stories are told, circulated and used. The recognition of this triple responsibility opens up further research avenues for investigating diverse factors connected to levels of experienced self-efficacy in art-based narrative practices as well as a deeper exploration of the question of how coordinators of storytelling initiatives can uphold their end of the reciprocal relation, i.e. providing true value for the targeted communities according to their needs and wants.