Navigating Ethical Dilemmas in Creative Participatory Research in Forced Displacement: Lessons from Ruptured Atlas, Part II
Note: The following post is the second in a four-part series about Ruptured Atlas, a trauma-informed, participatory creative research project that sets out to map the intimate odyssey of an uprooted community – the Yazidis of northern Iraq – through creative, collaborative storytelling. Click the following links to access Part One, Part Three, and Part Four.
Part II
Care and Power: A Trauma-Informed Approach
“I found myself talking about small details, like the objects I carried with me or the significance of certain locations, which I hadn’t considered deeply before.”
Ruptured Atlas researcher, 2025
Ghazi used Post-it notes to draw and map multiple difficult experiences he encountered in 2019 when he and his family attempted to leave the camps in northern Iraq and cross the border into Türkiye
Ghazi used Post-it notes to draw and map multiple difficult experiences he encountered in 2019 when he and his family attempted to leave the camps in northern Iraq and cross the border into Türkiye
Working with genocide survivors requires a research approach rooted in care. Trauma recovery stresses the need for safety, trust, and empowerment in trauma-informed practices. These principles were embedded into every aspect of the Ruptured Atlas project to ensure an ethical and supportive research environment. We followed Shawn Wilson’s Research in Ceremony[i] by avoiding extractive methods and making way for Indigenous research paradigms that emphasise relational accountability and storytelling as integral to knowledge production.
Transparency and participant autonomy were paramount. Narrative interview questions were shared in advance, allowing participants to revise or withdraw testimonies if needed, fostering trust and mitigating the risks of re-traumatisation. Creative methodologies such as drawing, visual and sound storytelling using photographs and short film clips, provide survivors with alternative means of expression that reduce the cognitive burden of verbal testimony. These participatory creative deep mapping methods enable survivors to represent their embodied experiences through an embodied spatiality, using a participatory creative deep mapping method that transforms personal accounts into collective spatial advocacy, challenging dominant geopolitical narratives and addressing structural injustices. As one participant explained, “Tracing my journey on a map brought back vivid memories of the struggles and resilience tied to those locations. It made me realise how much my story is connected to the spaces I’ve occupied.”
Research in conflict-affected environments often risks unintentionally reinforcing dominant political discourses, making it critical to centre survivor-led knowledge production as seen in creative autobiographical mapping work by Myriam Denov and Meaghan C Shevell with children born of genocidal rape[ii]. Even as participatory projects strive to flatten hierarchies, power asymmetries inevitably persist in research with vulnerable communities. The Ruptured Atlas project was a collaboration, but one situated within academic and institutional structures: funded by a UK research grant, led by a UK university-based scholar who happens to be Iraqi with lived experience of trauma and violence, and partnered with NGOs who are working on the ground in Iraq. Yet this setup still raises questions about who ultimately shapes the narrative and to what ends.
In any co-creative research, the researcher typically initiates the project, frames its objectives, and often curates the final outputs (whether a digital archive, exhibit, or publication). The participants contribute their stories and creativity, but do they have equal say in how those inputs are interpreted, presented and disseminated? Oral historians have long been anxious about the power differential between interviewer and narrator, observing that no matter how collaborative an interview feels, the researcher often reaps career benefits (publications, degrees, recognition) that far exceed any direct benefit to the narrator. As Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki candidly ask in their piece, Who’s Afraid of Oral History?, scholars gain prestige from powerful contributions to knowledge, “but what, feminists asked, did an interview do for a narrator?”[iii]. This imbalance can be difficult to fully erase. We confronted it by designing outputs meant to give back to the Yazidi community – for instance, creating a visual archive that Yazidis can share, and perhaps using the findings to advocate for the Yazidis’ cultural rights and reparations. Other outputs were in the form of a creative policy toolkit for advocacy for Yazidis and a shared co-authored paper. The project’s ethos of sharing authority implies that Yazidi voices guide the content, challenging any impulse to fit their experiences into preconceived academic theories. Yet, the fact remains that researchers hold editorial control and institutional platforms that participants typically do not. There is a fine line between amplification and appropriation of displaced voices; the former empowers, while the latter risks turning testimonies into intellectual capital for outsiders.
Power imbalances also play out on a broader geopolitical stage in research into forced displacement. Knowledge production about displaced peoples often mirrors the inequalities that caused their displacement in the first place. Critics of humanitarian scholarship[iv] point out that experts from affluent, Global North nations frequently dominate the narratives about communities in the Global South. Historical context makes this especially fraught in the case of Iraq. Yazidis suffered genocide at the hands of ISIS, a group that rose in the chaos following the 2003 invasion; that invasion, in turn, was led by Western powers whose academics now document the fallout. The dominance of Western institutions in research about Iraq thus demands reflection. The Ruptured Atlas project took steps towards a decolonising ethos by partnering with Sinjar-based organisations and local researchers, ensuring the project was not designed in isolation in London or Plymouth but in dialogue with those on the ground. Still, structural inequalities remain: English-language outputs typically have far greater reach and academic legitimacy than local efforts, a disparity rooted in the tragic destruction of Iraq’s own academic infrastructure over decades of war and sanctions. The project’s very existence within a UK university framework is a reminder of those inequities. This does not invalidate its importance, but it compels the researchers to continuously check their positionality. Whose voices are being amplified, and who might still be unheard? Are local scholars and community members given co-authorship and intellectual credit, or only thank-yous in the acknowledgments? Such questions might not have easy answers, but ethical research requires asking them. By remaining vigilant about power dynamics – whether in an interview room or the global knowledge platforms – projects like Ruptured Atlas can strive towards more equitable collaborations. They demonstrate that acknowledging power asymmetry is not a weakness; rather, it is a precondition for any honest attempt to share power in research.
[i] Wilson, Shawn. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Halifax Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2008.
[ii] Denov, Myriam, and Meaghan C Shevell. ‘An Arts-Based Approach with Youth Born of Genocidal Rape in Rwanda: The River of Life as an Autobiographical Mapping Tool’. Global Studies of Childhood 11, no. 1 (March 2021): 21–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610621995830.
[iii] Sheftel, Anna, and Stacey Zembrzycki. ‘Who’s Afraid of Oral History? Fifty Years of Debates and Anxiety about Ethics’. The Oral History Review 43, no. 2 (1 September 2016): 338–66 (p.347). https://doi.org/10.1093/ohr/ohw071.
[iv] Bullen, Poppy. ‘Who Owns the Story? Ethical Approaches to Humanitarian Narratives’. University blog. International Development LSE Blog (blog), 2025. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/internationaldevelopment/2025/03/03/who-owns-the-story-ethical-approaches-to-humanitarian-narratives/.
