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unD usdm
Our Approach
Our approach places the voices of refugees at the heart of the analysis. Our ethnographic and participatory methods emphasise the importance of understanding the implications of digital practices from the point of view of the people affected. While our research included interviews with expert participants, our starting point was to use methods that allowed refugees to articulate what a fair digital identity would mean for them. To address the project’s aims, we conducted a mixed-methods study that included semi-structured interviews, group discussions, participatory visual methods such as drawing, mapping, and poetry, and analysis of the technological systems themselves.
Key to our approach, are the participatory art workshops we organised with our participants. Our aim was to explore how participants envision an identification system that best serves their needs and supports them in the future. The sessions included group discussions followed by an invitation to participate in a creative activity involving drawing, poetry, photography or collaborative mapping. The drawings and graffiti wall activities displayed here responded to the following prompt: ‘What is your ideal identification system and what would it allow you to do?’ The drawings illustrate our participants’ everyday lives, their experience with biometric systems, their fears and struggles living without any legal identification, and their hopes for the future. Ultimately, the drawings foreground the values that should underpin identification systems according to our interlocutors.
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