“This Is Evidence”: Photovoice by Undocumented South Asian Male Migrants In Greece

Image taken by an undocumented Bangladeshi worker, Manolada to show back muscle stress “This will let the people learn how we live our lives here.” These words from an undocumented Bangladeshi migrant man working in Greece sum up the impetus behind a multi-media social justice project of Photovoice that Dr. Reena Kukreja has been collaborating on with 3 groups of Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani migrant men in Greece. They have been using their cell phones to take photographs, record videos, and narrate their stories about their migrant reality. This project has been awarded SSHRC’s Connection Grant for a curated multi-media exhibition, to be held in Greece and Canada, and for the development of an interactive website repository of images, videos, and migrant life-histories. Partners for the exhibition in Canada include the Isabel Bader Centre for Performing Arts in Kingston, the International Migration Research Centre in Waterloo, and the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Migration and Integration, Ryerson University in Toronto. In Greece, Harokopio University and Generation 2.0, an activist group, are the exhibition’s partners. The exhibition will allow the audience an immersive experience of the migrant men’s lives through reconstructed migrant housing; photographs and videos taken by the men; 360-degree videos and drone footage; life-histories; interactive maps showing migratory trajectories and sites of migrant labour; ambient sound from migrant work and housing sites; and multi-lingual handouts describing the collaborative project.