Navigating Ethical Dilemmas in Creative Participatory Research in Forced Displacement: Lessons from Ruptured Atlas, Part I
Note: The following post is the first 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 Two, Part Three, and Part Four.
“My ultimate dream is for all Yazidis to return to their homes in Iraq, under the protection of the United Nations, the governments of Iraq and Kurdistan, and all the nations to recognize us (the Yazidis) as a minority in need of protection. We need support to rebuild our communities and ensure that future generations can live in peace and security.”
Omeed, Ruptured Atlas researcher, 2024
Omeed’s home after their return post the clear-up and renovation
Researching genocide survivors presents profound ethical complexities, requiring a careful balance between responsibility, care, and the implicit promises made to participants. Ruptured Atlas[i], a trauma-informed, participatory creative research project, provides an opportunity to reflect on the ethics of working with survivors, the challenges of navigating power dynamics, and the importance of prioritising both participant and researcher well-being.
The Ruptured Atlas project set out to map the intimate odyssey of an uprooted community – the Yazidis of northern Iraq – through creative, collaborative storytelling.
By embracing participatory mapping and trauma-informed methods, this initiative sought to trace and document not only the scars of genocide and displacement, but also the resilience of those who endured both. It follows how survivors continue to navigate the ongoing repercussions and aftermath of their forced exile. On the surface, the project aspires to serve as a “sanctuary, a beacon of hope” for a marginalised minority, using person-centred co-design to provide creative tools for advocacy and preserve displaced people’s heritage and identity. Yet, noble intentions do not exempt such projects from difficult ethical terrain. Indeed, Ruptured Atlasoffers a case study in the methodological challenges and moral dilemmas that shadow participatory research with those who survived atrocities such as genocide and, ten years on are still forcibly displaced in IDP camps in the north of Iraq. This five-part series explores the making of the Ruptured Atlas project and the ethical terrain we navigated.
In the first part, I reflect on some of the key questions that animated the project. The approach taken throughout recognises survivors as the authority of their own experience. In the second part, I introduce care as methodology, grounded in a trauma-informed approach. Part three considers our responsibilities to participants and to ourselves as researchers. I then examine the limits of research impact in part four, before concluding with reflections on the making of the Ruptured Atlas project and the lessons we navigated together.
Throughout this piece, you will hear a few of the Yazidi participants’ voices, our researchers, reverberating across the ethical geographies of the project. The Yazidis are an Indigenous ethno-religious minority in northern Iraq, primarily based in the Sinjar (in Kurmanji, ‘Shingal’) region and the Nineveh Plains. Their distinct identity is shaped by Yazidism, a monotheistic faith rooted in ancient Mesopotamian traditions, and by strong cultural ties to the Sinjar Mountains, which serve as both a spiritual sanctuary and historic refuge. Prior to the 2014 genocide, around 400,000 Yazidis lived in Sinjar and nearby villages like Kocho and Tel Qasab, where agricultural and pastoral livelihoods were common. Despite centuries of persecution, including Ottoman massacres and Ba’athist Arabisation, the Yazidi community has maintained its cultural and geographical resilience. On 3 August 2014, ISIS launched a systematic campaign of genocide against the Yazidis, marked by mass executions, sexual slavery, and forced conversions.
Part I
Participation and Safeguarding: A Delicate Balance in Creative Research
“I stopped rooting myself in place and instead my belonging is more associated with people. I learned the hard way that losing one’s place is such a traumatic and disorientating experience, so I now connect more with loved ones regardless of their locality.”
Maysaa, Ruptured Atlas researcher, 2024
Left: Maissa’s drawing of their day of forced displacement as they headed towards the Sinjar Mountain
Right: Maissa’s map of her purse, through which she described the journey of her family’s displacement on the 3rd of August 2014
How can creative researchers visualise and amplify the voices of the displaced while safeguarding against harm? Who ultimately wields power in the co-creation of knowledge? what responsibilities do researchers carry toward their participants and themselves in bearing witness to trauma? And, critically, what are the limits of what research can achieve in the face of entrenched injustice?
At the heart of the Ruptured Atlas project was a commitment to participatory research, inviting Yazidi survivors to collaboratively map their journeys of home, displacement, and return. In theory, this participatory ethos embodies a “sharing of authority” between researchers and community, valuing the Yazidis, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith puts it in her Decolonizing Methodologies[ii], not as subjects but as co-authors of their own history. Such an approach can be profoundly empowering. It creates space for marginalised people to assert their agency and preserve personal and collective memories on their own terms.
The project unfolded over three phases. In Phase 1, we ran a series of seven online mapmaking workshops, each lasting three hours and combining technical training with creative practice. These covered: 1) Co-Creation of an Ethics Protocol, 2) Deep Listening & Interviewing, 3) Drawing & Cognitive Mapmaking, 4) GIS Storytelling (pinning certain locations on OpenStreetMaps), 5) Photographing & Filmmaking, 6) Sound Recording, and 7) Sharing, Editing & Multimedia Storytelling. Each workshop included space for discussion and questions, but the main focus was on hands-on skill-building. Participants created and submitted creative outputs between workshops. From this cohort, we invited 15 individuals who had engaged deeply in Phase 1 to join Phase 2: a storytelling phase centred on extended narrative interviews guided by pre-shared, co-authored questions. This phase produced a rich collection of creative data made by the Yazidis themselves. In Phase 3, we worked collaboratively to co-edit and curate this material into story-maps based on their input, shaping the final Ruptured Atlas.
In practice, Ruptured Atlas workshops encouraged participants to craft “personal spatial stories” and imaginative mappings of their experiences, blending testimony with creative expression that began with a co-writing session of an ethical protocol for the project. This method aligns with a broader humanistic trend in oral history and ethnography that seeks to “close the distance between researchers and the researched”[iii], fostering trust and collaboration rather than extractive inquiry. By designing research with rather than ondisplaced and marginalised communities, the project aimed to honour the dignity and autonomy of those who so often are spoken about but rarely listened to.
Participatory research with trauma survivors – in this case, survivors of genocide – requires extraordinary care. Empowerment and expression must be balanced with safeguarding to avoid causing further harm. The very act of recalling and mapping experiences of persecution, forced displacement, and loss can risk reopening wounds. Ethical guidelines in working with survivors of violence increasingly stress a trauma-informed approach: participants should remain in control of their own narratives, and researchers must be attuned to signs of distress. In practice, this might mean, for example, steering away from probing into the most painful memories unless a participant volunteers them, or allowing individuals to dictate the pace and depth of sharing. In her work on post-genocide Rwanda[iv], Susan Thompson emphasised her choice for refraining from asking questions about the traumatic experiences endured by Rwandans to keep interviewees “in control of the conversation”. Ruptured Atlas heeds this principle by adopting a person-centred methodology, creating an environment where Yazidi contributors can reveal only what they feel ready to, in whatever form (narrative, drawing, photograph, video clip, artefact or map) they prefer. We facilitated interview sessions with sensitivity, sometimes choosing not to ask questions, and placed no time limits on their duration, referring to them instead as conversations. Interviewees asked us questions, such as, how can our voice as participants impact Western policies? (especially around migration), or, would the outcome of the project be seen by politicians from either the Kurdish or the Iraqi governments? and started their stories from wherever they wished, turning the tables of the researcher/researched power dynamics and acknowledging that silence or avoidance can be as meaningful as disclosure in a trauma context.
The ethical tightrope here is clear: researchers must enable voice and catharsis without unintentionally retraumatising participants. As Catriona Mackenzie et al.[v] put it, building an atmosphere of safety and mutual trust is “challenging but essential for ethical research”. This challenge was palpable in our project, too. The team had to earn trust in a community justifiably wary after years of broken promises and external intrusions. One way of doing so involved transparent conversations about expectations stemming from the project: displaced people often hope that telling their story will tangibly improve their situation, an optimism that researchers may not be able to fulfil. Being honest about what the project could and could not deliver – for instance, that it could document experiences and perhaps influence awareness or policy, but not magically facilitate resettlement or security – was itself an ethical obligation. Participatory initiatives like the Ruptured Atlas project must constantly negotiate the line between amplifying and centring participants’ voices and protecting them from further emotional harm or disappointment. Safeguarding in this context is not a simple checklist, but an ongoing, reflexive process woven into the fabric of research design.
Participatory creative deep mapping introduces additional ethical considerations. Deep mapping as a methodological practice engages with people, their memories, histories and their geographies,[vi] nuancing the intangible and the unmappable details in the form of spatial storytelling and site writing through place-based research.[vii] Ruptured Atlas engages with visualising this unmappable spatiality using art-based ethnographic methods of mapping. By breaking down traditional research hierarchies, our project offers a co-creative space where survivors shape the narrative. However, this also requires constant ethical negotiation. How do we ensure that creative outputs remain true to participants’ intentions? What happens when artistic interpretations differ from lived realities? Zahra Ali’s critical perspective on research ethics[viii] challenges the imposition of Western ethical frameworks on Middle Eastern research contexts, especially in the context of Iraq, highlighting the need for decolonised, community-driven ethical standards. In Ruptured Atlas, the creative methods—collaborative cartography, filmmaking, soundscapes, and oral storytelling—were developed with Yazidi researchers to ensure culturally appropriate representations. Yet, oral history and participatory methods always involve power asymmetries that must be continually interrogated, reflected upon, and negotiated.
[i] Ruptured Atlas project: https://www.sinjaracademy.org/ruptured-atlas-partnership
[ii] Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Third edition. London New York Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
[iii] Sheftel, Anna, and Stacey Zembrzycki. ‘Only Human: A Reflection on the Ethical and Methodological Challenges of Working with “Difficult” Stories’. The Oral History Review 37, no. 2 (1 July 2010): 191–214 (p.193). https://doi.org/10.1093/ohr/ohq050.
[iv] Thompson, Susan. ‘Getting Close to Rwandans since the Genocide: Studying Everyday Life in Highly Politicized Research Settings’. African Studies Review 53, no. 3 (2010): 19–34 (p.30).
[v] Mackenzie, Catriona, Christopher McDowell, and Eileen Pittaway. ‘Beyond “Do No Harm”: The Challenge of Constructing Ethical Relationships in Refugee Research’. Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (1 June 2007): 299–319. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem008.
[vi] Bodenhamer, David J., John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris. Making Deep Maps: Foundations, Approaches, and Methods. Routledge Spatial Humanities Series. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022.
[vii] Rendell, Jane. Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism. First edition. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2010. https://doi.org/10.5040/9780755697533.
[viii] Ali, Zahra. ‘Politicizing Ethics: Decolonizing Research on Iraq’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East44, no. 3 (2024): 418–22.
