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

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.