Trapped in Ceuta: Reflexive tactics and methods in Participatory Filmmaking among cross-border women

Abstract

Recent scholarship has promoted reflexivity in migration research using visual participatory methods. However, the perspectives of cross-border workers living as undocumented migrants in borderlands have been understudied using these methods. Adopting a reflexive approach to Participatory Filmmaking (PF), this article critically engages with the co-production of knowledge amongst thirteen Moroccan cross-border women living and working irregularly as domestic workers in the Spanish city of Ceuta, North Africa. Empirically grounded in a 3-month PF workshop conducted during the closure of the Moroccan–Spanish border following the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown, it explores the application of specific methods and tactics of data collection and analysis based on researchers’ and participants’ reflexivity to reveal some of the local colonial legacies that emerge when approaching this methodology from a Eurocentric gaze. To this end, I first established an ongoing, transparent dialogue aimed at unlearning, from the participants’ perspective, how to critically interrogate each facet of PF’s data collection and analysis. In this endeavour, decisions about the rationale for recruitment, practices, visuals, and technologies employed, participation, consent, and canons of technology and representation were negotiated to produce reflexive autoethnographies while avoiding exposure. Secondly, I consider specific reflexive tactics and methods of co-analysing data with participants to challenge specific categorizations while embracing decolonial feminist views. In doing so, I argue for a more reflexive approach to PF to redress existing power inequalities at the intersection of technology, representation, and voice at the heart of borderlands. It can be achieved by transforming methodological analysis into decolonial action and response.

Doing Digital Migration Studies:

“…for scientific or public purposes. For instance, the personal data may be pseudonymized, while the participants may decide not to appear in the films, to hide or blur their faces, or to use only their voices (see Gutiérrez, 2023). In the Madrid workshop, no one's face was shown; in Vitoria-Gasteiz, one of the protagonists is framed with his back turned and wearing a hooded jacket.…”