Decolonisation, Representation, and Ethics in Visual Life Stories from the Jungle

Abstract

This chapter discusses ethics in participatory photography with focus on refugee participants and informal refugee camp setting. The chapter draws on ethics in participatory photography projects elsewhere and especially the experiences of photographers who work with these methods. The context here is the Calais Jungle camp, where the authors worked with a group of participants, who were residents of the camp, over several months to encourage photographing and documenting life in the camp and beyond, and to work on life stories that can be drawn from and inspired by these photos. The project, and hence the ethics in our work, were framed by the experiences of the refugee participants, and so at all times the authors needed to navigate temporality, violence, state oppression, lack of resources, human rights violations, language barriers, religious and cultural differences, national and supranational immigration policies, shame, and more. This chapter discusses how the authors navigated these ethical issues, the limitations of the approaches and solutions they found, and the lessons they learned, which can be applied to research using participatory visual methods with refugees.