This chapter picks up on the methodological issues raised in Chapters Three and Four and documents a research trajectory conducted over a 10-year period using ethno-mimetic research, PAR and PA methods with new arrival groups and communities situated in the asylum-migration-community nexus.

Chapter Three stressed the benefits of working in participatory ways using arts-based research with refugees and asylum seekers to: represent lived experiences; claim a voice; raise awareness of relations of humiliation, exclusion as well as inclusion; and challenge exclusionary processes and practices. I suggested that such methodologies can support the articulation of identity and belonging for those situated in the asylum-migration nexus and that this is vitally important to the development of dialogue, a recognitive theory of community, cultural citizenship and social justice.

The research discussed in this chapter includes a series of Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB)-funded research projects: ‘Global refugees: exile, displacement and belonging’ (1999-2001); and a linked AHRB-funded research exchange (1999-2001) ‘Towards a cultural strategy for working with refugees and persons seeking asylum in the East Midlands’; Making the Connections: Arts, Migration and Diaspora Regional Network (2006-08); and a knowledge transfer fellowship ‘Transnational communities: towards a sense of belonging’ (2008-09). All were conducted in partnership with migrant groups and four community arts organisation in the East Midlands region. All of these projects are underpinned by the principles of PAR and PA that include a focus on inclusion, participation, valuing all local voices, as well as being interventionist, action-oriented and interpretive. All illustrate that in the collaborative process between migrant, artist and social researcher, a ‘thick’ (Geertz, 1973) ‘understanding’ (Bourdieu, 1996) of the lived experiences of processes of migration, belonging and transnational communities emerge that challenge identity thinking. This brings an approach to knowledge production as collaboratively made, not found, which also loosens the knowledge/power axis involved in knowledge production and ‘expertness’, and sidesteps the thorny issues raised by Tyler (2006) and Salverson (2001) in representing the ‘other’ (see Chapter Four).

Committed to fostering an interpretive role that includes creating spaces for the marginalised/subaltern to speak for themselves, the combination of art and ethnography, as ethno-mimesis, enabled the production of a more sensuous understanding of social relations and lived experience through the inclusion of visual, poetic, performance texts in the research process.