About the project

Portrait of my mother: drawing under lockdown.
Copyright holder: Amir Jafari

Cov19: Chronicles from the Margins is a participatory project co-created by a group of researchers who have experience of forced migration and/or have worked and lived with refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented people. We got together just before lockdown in the UK in mid-March 2020 out of a concern for the problems facing those who are marginalised by the ‘hostile environment’ of UK immigration and asylum policies. The public rarely hears about their experiences in their own words and on their own terms. We wanted to change that.

At the start of the Covid19 crisis, the common refrain in media, public and policy discourse was that the virus does not discriminate. But it does discriminate. Asylum seekers, refugees and the undocumented are in many cases exceptionally vulnerable, both to the virus and to the effects of preventive measures, and so the particularities and distinctiveness of their experiences need to be documented.

Making masks fun.
Copyright holder: Nidhi Shah

This is not a claim of “refugee exceptionalism” – the idea that there is something completely unique about the experiences of this group, or that all who belong to the group have the same experiences. Of course, there are vastly diverse experiences, and they may be shared with many others: especially people who are BAME, poor, have fragile social networks, insecure or no housing, and so on.

This project focuses on people who are contending with migration regimes at the same time as with the Covid19 crisis. We investigate its impacts in the wider context of European and UK migration and asylum policies, as these affect people who have often been scarred by war, conflict, and trauma, but who are often also highly resilient and creatively and artfully resist their marginalisation.

Anguish.
Copyright holder: Andrea Ibarra-Abreu

The research findings will contribute to the work of asylum and refugee advocacy and support organisations, and help resist migration policies based around deterrence, destitution, detention and deportation. We deploy multimedia creations and accompanying analyses in order to seek social justice and recognition of rights for all.

Through participatory, creative methods, we chronicle Covid19 from the margins in collaboration: as co-researchers, co-collectors, co-creators, co-curators and co-producers of knowledge. Since lockdown we have been inviting asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented people in our networks to share their stories. The images, sounds and texts shared with us on smartphones reflect myriad experiences – problems and opportunities, activities and hobbies, new learning and pleasures, hopes, dreams, fears, reflections on time, love, discord, courage, isolation, deprivation and desperation.

We are co-creating a rich archive of digital cultural artefacts, images and voices, so that those who are often invisible or silenced can be seen and heard. This public intervention challenges the conventional politics of representation. It documents acts of artful and creative resistance to marginalisation, and resilient responses to multiple overlapping crises that they experience. Together, we are documenting contemporary history, each of us giving insights into how we are responding to Covid19.

The hundreds of digital objects shared with us often took the team aback and made us marvel at the courage and strength, imagination and personal expression of collaborators. The spirit of solidarity has inspired a politics of hope for the future at a time when hope seemed lost. Everyday acts of creative communication enabled by smartphones have been key to establishing and sustaining personal and collective resilience under lockdown. Creative expression defines a sense of self, anchors the individual in the moment, strengthens existing communities and forges new ones. 

We aim to create online and travelling exhibitions, artworks and multimedia outputs to contribute to public and policy debates, and to support workers in NGOs and charities, educators, teachers and academics. We hope to raise awareness and deepen understanding of how Covid19 is affecting asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented people in all aspects of their lives, in the UK and in their international, diaspora connections.

Many of our collaborators live parallel lives in more than one country. For children and young people, their focus may be more on life here in the UK, where digital poverty denies many of them an education during lockdown. Many adults, such as Syrian, Kurdish, Eritrean, Sudanese, Somali, Iraqi, Iranian people in this project, inhabit global digital diasporas that have generated new forms of creative life under Covid.

As a team we have debated at length issues of ethics and representation, as we worked through a lengthy and rigorous ethical committee process at the Open University. We will write extensively about this and the many other methodological, theoretical, policy and practice issues in our blog section. For now, please note that all materials are anonymised, unless explicit informed consent is given. The material that is shared is stored on a secure database at The Open University in order to safeguard privacy, anonymity and confidentiality.

In order to strengthen the comparative dimensions of our project, the Open University, UK and the International Institute of Social Studies in the Hague, Netherlands are partnering on this project and this opens up further horizons for international collaboration.

We look forward to seeing this project unfold and hope that for those visiting this website, it will inspire, unsettle, provoke us all into moving the margins to centre stage and imagining a better future together.