Arts-Based Research and Art as Action in forced migration offer a vital alternative to traditional methodologies. Scholars, advocates, activists and community members can bypass language barriers, circumvent the pressure of interrogative interviews, and capture complex, embodied traumas or events that are difficult or impossible to verbalize, let alone document. Art as action uses interactive frameworks that position displaced individuals as active knowledge co-creators. In Participatory Action Research (PAR), communities collaborate directly with researchers to define the questions, create the art, and determine how data is shared. In Research-Creation / Practice-Led Research, researchers treat the actual creation of art as a valid method of inquiry that generates unique forms of knowledge. Inherently centring decolonial frameworks, these intentional methods are designed to challenge Eurocentric academic structures and the institutional dehumanization of refugees and displaced populations.
Specific techniques include Body Mapping, tracing a participant’s life-sized body outline on canvas, layered with visual symbols, exploring physical and emotional memory, trauma storage, and somatic experiences; photovoice, which provides participants with cameras to capture their daily lives and surroundings, highlighting hidden geographies, systemic barriers, and community strengths; digital storytelling, which combines short audio narrations, photos, and
music into brief videos thus granting full control over personal narrative and self-representation; ethnodrama, which transforms interview transcripts or shared testimonies into theatrical pieces, thus confronting border regimes, maps power dynamics, and humanizing statistics; and communal creations such as choral works, murals, interactive exhibitions, which rebuilds collective identity, fosters belonging, and tracks and rejuvenates cultural identities. Arts-based approaches to forced migration utilize an “ethics of care” that shifts the focus from traumatic extraction to agency and ontological safety. The enterprise also generates powerful counter-narratives that showcase complex subjectivities, resilience, and personal histories. This perspective recognizes that creative expression acts as a live mechanism of political mobilization, legal subversion, and structural resistance.