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<p>In this article we ask: how might the significant turn towards creative modes of knowledge production bring together researchers, participants and audiences to disrupt bordering technologies that dehumanise asylum seekers? We focus on videos taken by asylum seekers in Darwin who express their everyday experiences of encountering and transgressing borders. As researchers, we use experimental editing techniques to make these transgressions visible in a society with a white majority culture. We argue, however, that these video techniques often work to privilege our creative agency as researchers, even though the aim is to illuminate different temporalities and visualities of the global refugee crisis. This article problematises this agency and attends to ethical dilemmas by revisiting the juxtapositions, montages, fades, distortions and vortexes we use to centre asylum seeker lives. These visual techniques are an attempt to respond to xenophobic nationalism and racially discriminatory immigration policies through forms of digital activism that transgress standard ‘borders’ of representation and the self/other borders of public debates. In our demand for social and cultural justice, we are inspired by work that uses the affordances of digital technologies to dismantle the rigidity of sovereign borders.</p>
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In this article we ask: how might the significant turn towards creative modes of knowledge production bring together researchers, participants and audiences to disrupt bordering technologies that dehumanise asylum seekers? We focus on videos taken by asylum seekers in Darwin who express their everyday experiences of encountering and transgressing borders. As researchers, we use experimental editing techniques to make these transgressions visible in a society with a white majority culture. We argue, however, that these video techniques often work to privilege our creative agency as researchers, even though the aim is to illuminate different temporalities and visualities of the global refugee crisis. This article problematises this agency and attends to ethical dilemmas by revisiting the juxtapositions, montages, fades, distortions and vortexes we use to centre asylum seeker lives. These visual techniques are an attempt to respond to xenophobic nationalism and racially discriminatory immigration policies through forms of digital activism that transgress standard ‘borders’ of representation and the self/other borders of public debates. In our demand for social and cultural justice, we are inspired by work that uses the affordances of digital technologies to dismantle the rigidity of sovereign borders.

Transgressing borders with participatory video technologies: Reflections on creative knowledge production with asylum seekers in Australia

Borderlands Journal

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

In this article we ask: how might the significant turn towards creative modes of knowledge production bring together researchers, participants and audiences to...

Transgressing borders with participatory video technologies: Reflections on creative knowledge production with asylum seekers in Australia

Published Online: Apr 17, 2020

Page range: 8 - 36

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/borderlands-2019-009

Keywords
Darwin, knowledge, video, borders, refugees

© 2019 Michele Lobo et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Transgressing borders with participatory video technologies: Reflections on creative knowledge production with asylum seekers in Australia

Published Online: Apr 17, 2020

Page range: 8 - 36

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/borderlands-2019-009

KeywordsDarwin, knowledge, video, borders, refugees

© 2019 Michele Lobo et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Keywords
Darwin, knowledge, video, borders, refugees