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Abstract
The life stories of migrants are increasingly being told, as part of the work of cultural organizations, and websites are well suited to making such life story projects accessible to the public. However, by using the lives of real people as raw material in a public forum, Web projects raise important questions about the terms on which participants are given a voice. This article focuses on a Danish website which depicts the life stories of migrant men through written texts, audio clips, and photographs. It presents a detailed analysis of the life story of one young man from a Muslim background who has openly declared himself an atheist. The article examines his experience of having this somewhat sensitive story made public. The religious aspect inevitably positioned his story in relation to broader political debates about Muslims in Denmark. Since migrants' stories often touch on highly politicized issues, it is crucial that their stories are not co-opted by societal discourses which they do not themselves support.
Acknowledgements
This article is part of the research project, Changing Borderlines: Mediatization and Cultural Citizenship, supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research (Culture and Communication). The author would like to thank Abdullah, Elisabeth Andersen, Güzel Turan, Niels Ole Finnemann, Lise Paulsen Galal, and the two anonymous reviewers.
Notes
1. The projects can be found at, respectively: http://www.kvinfo.dk/side/539/ and http://www.kvinfo.dk/side/829/. Some of the stories are also available in English, at http://www.kvinfo.dk/side/674/article/87/ and http://www.kvinfo.dk/side/674/article/71/.
2. While a thorough analysis of the intersection of gender and migratory backgrounds might have been an obvious choice, given KVINFO's focus on gender research, this is not the aim of the present article.
3. In 2005, Harden made a series of portraits of young men from different ethnic backgrounds relaxing in one of Copenhagen's parks, and she won an award for one of these pictures. She has travelled widely and has, for instance, portrayed Syrian women (Kühlmann and Harden Citation2005).
4. Since the publication of these classic works, different strands of discourse analytical approaches to social psychology have been developed. For overviews, see Hepburn and Wiggins (Citation2005), Potter (Citation2005), Wetherell (Citation2007), and Benwell and Stokoe (Citation2010). In this article, I draw on the early joint works of Potter and Wetherell as well as on Wetherell's later conceptualizations of positioning and personal order (Citation1998, Citation2003, Citation2007). These later works are often referred to as developing a new “critical discursive psychology”.
5. Wetherell (Citation2007) acknowledges that this approach is at odds with other traditions of discourse analytical social psychology, especially discursive psychology, which rejects the idea of having access to a person's mental state and stresses that discourse analysis cannot move beyond his or her own descriptions (671).
6. The life story interviews in the project are, in accordance with Danish law on the protection of sensitive personal information, not publicly accessible for 70 years. As a researcher, I could possibly have got access to this material, but an analysis of this interview was not the aim of the present article.
7. Abdullah's life story in text, audio clip, and accompanying pictures can be accessed at http://www.kvinfo.dk/side/829/?personId=82.
8. All quotations from Abdullah's life story and my qualitative interview with him are shown in my translation. They are translated as directly as possible. The original Danish quotes are either shown in brackets in the text or can, in the case of longer quotations, be found in the appendix.
9. Abdullah is referring here to the Danish branch of the Islamic political party Hizb ut-Tahrir.
10. The Danish text is “Op med humøret – ned med militæret”, and a more correct translation of the first part would be “Cheer up”. However, the translation I have chosen better captures the play on words.
11. According to Andersen, project manager, other participants in the project enjoyed the photo shoots and asked for private copies of some of the pictures. However, this doesn't alter the fact that Abdullah felt he was not given much control over his visual representation.