Encountering Vulnerabilities through ‘Filmmaking for Fieldwork’

Introduction

This article considers the potential of observational and participatory filmmaking research methods for International Relations (IR). We discuss what audio-visual encounters with the everyday can bring to our understanding of how politics works in the seemingly apolitical instances of everyday interactions. Drawing on primary research from our project ‘British Born Chinese’ this article discusses the promise and limitations of a documentary film as a form of research practice and an aesthetic output to expose the arbitrariness, limitations, and epistemic violence of the textual identity-driven research concerns in IR. Reflecting on the documentary film as a methodological practice of doing and presenting research, and thus generating new kinds of knowledge and understanding, we discuss the extent this method fulfils the promise of ‘a critical project of IR’ with particular reference to the politics of belonging. ¹ Our contention is that ‘filming for fieldwork’ is a valuable research method for IR, because it is effective at exposing arbitrariness and limitations of identity-driven research practices, and highlighting the vulnerable nature of all those involved in the research experience, including the audience.

Our research project is part of a growing body of scholarly work advocating the practice of ‘transdisciplinarity’, ² ‘undisciplinarity’, ³ and ‘cross-disciplinary translation’ ⁴ calling for curiosity-driven ⁵ and experimental research methods in IR and social sciences research more broadly. These kinds of research point to the impossibility of divorcing thick descriptions of the practice-oriented and theory-generating forms of scholarship from the socio-philosophical position held by the interpreters and producers of knowledge. ⁶ In addition to the indivisibility of theory and practice, image-based research practices such as photography and filmmaking expose and explicitly face ethical concerns, particularly those related to the issues of consent, duty of care, and problems of representation. ⁷ Our ethical stance in pursuing a filmmaking project concerned with mundane observations of daily life has stemmed from the belief that expressions and manifestations of everyday life present us with a more ethical potential to depart from the structures of representation and epistemic violence associated with them and help to evoke multiple interpretations and alternative solidarities. Such a project speaks directly to the critically-minded and experimental forms of research in IR concerned with exposing new perspectives on how the international and personal intertwine, and shape the way we engage with politics and go about our daily lives. ⁸

We first locate our project in the recent audio-visual interventions in IR by introducing several prominent documentary films made or produced by IR scholars and discuss their methodological positions, contributions, and limitations. Then we provide an overview of the methodological and ethical positions which our own ‘filmmaking for fieldwork’ method posits in particular and its critical potential for IR. We discuss our project and highlight how our work on a documentary film exploring the everyday lives of two British boys of Chinese backgrounds goes against the grain of the assumptions in some prominent IR research on diaspora and migrant groups. We consider the performative and disruptive potential of observational and participatory filmmaking as an innovative research practice to shift the analytical focus from identities to generating proximity and shared understanding of vulnerabilities. Rather than focusing on difference as a defining factor driving identity politics, we highlight the extent to which the racialised forms of categorisation condition how our research participants articulate their positions in British society and develop their responses and strategies to cope with everyday racism.

Audio-visual Experimentation in IR

Since the IR aesthetic turn of the early 2000s, scholars have not only considered the role and power of aesthetics as a source of academic knowledge of the international, but also contributed to the production of new forms of knowledge about it. ⁹ In recent years, IR scholars have turned to audio-visual technologies to produce their own non-textual analyses of IR and made distinctive contributions to public and scholarly debates. This section engages with some of these audio-visual interventions.

Cynthia Weber’s ‘I am an American’ project is a daring political engagement with the terms of the US citizenship debates in the post 9/11 context. Weber unpacks the patriotic message of the American nation epitomised in the Advertising Council’s ‘Out of Many One’ public service announcement through a powerful filmic deconstruction of the advert and its celebration of ‘diversity patriotism’. ¹⁰ Her video portraits mimic the official advert in such ways that they undermine the voiceless, anonymous, and impersonal formulations of the American citizenship in the original advert. Her project is attentive to contradictions and incoherencies in how citizenship is obtained, enacted, and performed. The effectiveness and power of the videos lie in their representational style directly confronting the limited and problematic message of the Advertising Council’s production. Yet, the project is less effective in conveying the everyday, less pronounced and obvious experiences of citizenship, and what being American means for the project participants when they do not have to say it out loud. ¹¹ The films do not reference any ethical issues encountered in the production or post-production stages. The struggles, power position and vulnerability of Weber as a scholar-filmmaker are not alluded to from within the films. Consequently, we are left wondering how power relations played out in the project. The vulnerable nature of a project such as this was revealed when the very aim of the project was compromised by Phil Simcox, the founder of the Minuteman Project, who attempted to use his video portrait from Weber’s project in his electoral campaign.

Der Derian’s films, Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic and Project Z are informed by his long-term research into the ‘military-industrial-media-entertainment network’. ¹² Like Weber’s ‘I am an American Project’, Human Terrain also tells a personal story, this time of the American PhD student Michael Bhatia who joins the Human Terrain programme and is killed during one of the operations aimed to negotiate an inter-tribal argument. Through a juxtaposition of the rationale of the programme and the human costs of counterinsurgency, Der Derian exposes the ill-conceived aims and tragic consequences of the programme. We get a strong sense of Bhatia’s confusion against a feeling that the filmmaker and the authoritative interviewees know exactly what is going on, and that gives a feeling of omniscience to the viewer. Project Z features world-leading policy makers, military strategists, and scholars drawing attention to a series of seemingly unrelated events which he refers to as ‘a cascading series of related dates’ leading to ‘the final global event’. The documentary postulates that the consumers of the events through mass media are zombified into complicity of the waged war on terror. Informed by Jean Baudrillard’s ideas of simulacra, Der Derian’s films are a carefully crafted simulation, explicitly exposing the poverty and shortsightedness of the Human Terrain Project and the zombified and depoliticised nature of the military-industrial complex’s engagement with the post-Cold War events. The films are expository, and highly analytical products engaging with the central concerns in International Politics: war, security, militarisation, and terrorism. There is no doubt that the Human Terrain Programme was flawed or that we are all potentially zombified objects of the military-industrial-media-entertainment network. Der Derian places himself in the film as an interviewee and his role as a filmmaker, negotiator of the situations, and interviewer is not exposed. The two films are outward rather than inward looking. They expose problems with world politics, tell the viewers what is wrong with the dominant discourses, policies, and institutions around us. Weber, on the other hand, draws the viewer close to the complex realities of citizenship experiences of her subjects and she allows the ambiguities that they engender to ‘speak’ through the film. However, because the film is essentially a ‘set-up’ to prove a point, rather than an open-ended exploration, we begin to doubt the authenticity of the testimonies and the complicity of the subjects.

William A. Callahan’s ‘Uncle Chuck: the Shanghailander’ is an autobiographical exploration of the Western presence and lifestyle in early 20th century Shanghai. Through a series of archival encounters and family interviews, his film is a personal journey to discover the past in the present, not only in his family, but in the history of the Western colonial presence in China, and its legacies today. Callahan’s documentary film is subtle and very carefully touches on the legacies of colonialism, the ‘century of humiliation’ in China, and his own family’s role and complicity in this history. Searching for the house owned by his great uncle in Shanghai, he interrogates the ‘extra-territorial’ rights of colonial powers on Chinese soil, which made them exempt from Chinese law and sovereignty. Callahan’s own struggles in finding his familial house in Shanghai show that even well-connected Western professors can’t go everywhere they would like to in China. His humble and clumsy appearances in the film, akin to Michael Moore’s self-references in his productions, are well choreographed attempts to reveal the difficulties, searches and struggles encountered in any research undertaking. Although a very personal and intimate journey, the film recounts the history of China’s violent opening-up, semi-colonial dependence on the West, and the establishment of the free trade order and the modern international system in Asia.

Callahan’s more recent film ‘Toilet Adventures’ is a series of audio-visual testimonials recounting the experiences of Western and Chinese people using toilets on their first trips abroad. Part of a larger project exploring first encounters with the Other in China and the West, this film more than the others poses explicit ethical questions arising from the filmmakers’ examination of the subject matter. Callahan directs himself sitting on a toilet and introduces his film in a particularly effective ‘breaking the ice’ moment that enables him to engage the audience with his ideas of how people make sense of personal encounters with the uncomfortable in a foreign context, and their implications for international politics. On another level, the film narrates many unique historical details about the ‘politics of shit’ in China, and the ideological role that toilets play in modern societies.

What distinguishes the filmic interventions above is that these films exploit audio-visual technologies as a form of representation and a powerful medium to communicate scholarly interventions in new and creative ways. However, they do not consider and make explicit the role of the camera as a primary research tool, and the role of the researcher/filmmaker in navigating this research process. The films are heavily reliant on interviews, which are guided and directed by the researcher/director with the intention of leading to answers to specific questions around their research agenda. Aspects of the research process, including self-reflexivity, doubt, open-endedness, and the confusion of the researcher/filmmaker are less apparent in these projects.

Yet, what would be the potential of a filmmaking method if it were employed not only as a means of representing the outcomes of the work, but also as a critical research tool representing the ethico-political positions of all those occupying the filmed space? We outline some of the ways that we have attempted this in our recent research film project ‘British Born Chinese’. We argue that the potential for a self-reflexive, participatory and observational approach to filmmaking for fieldwork in IR is in its ability to divert attention from the problems attributed to institutional structures, identities, cultures, and beliefs, to the realm of shared experiences of vulnerability. Our filmic intervention, in particular, seeks to convey how the categories of identity which we operate with are imbued with meaning, performed, problematised, confused, rejected and then taken on again and again are limited sources of knowledge. In this way our film is made ‘sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience’. ¹³ In particular, we draw attention to the unique ability of a filmmaking method to articulate moments of confusion and ambiguity in human action and in how we formulate structures of meaning and perform our identities. Our approach does not aim to transform the filmed material into a coherent visual narrative, but primarily seeks a contextualised, personal account which speaks not only to the experiences of the filmmakers and research participants, but also aims to evoke related experiences in the audience.

‘Filmmaking for Fieldwork’ as a Research Method

The ‘British Born Chinese’ documentary film project was informed by ideas developed in the observational school of visual anthropology ¹⁴ alongside elements from more interactive and reflexive modes of filmmaking. ¹⁵ One of the leading proponents of this type of filmmaking, David MacDougall, summarises it as, ‘observational film-making was founded on the assumption that things happen in the world which are worth watching, and that their own distinctive spatial and temporal configurations are part of what is worth watching about them’. ¹⁶ This approach holds that care should be taken not to overtly direct action nor to use any technique that may obscure activities as experienced by the research participants. ¹⁷ In developing the idea for a film about Chinese migrant experiences in Manchester we wanted to develop a method that would allow us to get close to our subjects and emphasise their narratives over the ideas that we ourselves brought to the project as researchers and filmmakers. We adapted this method to ensure that we were also represented in the film as agents in the creation of the story.

In the discipline of Anthropology there has been much discussion concerning the epistemological and ethical grounds for filmmaking as a ‘way of seeing and doing’ research. ¹⁸ Anthropologist Jason Throop notes ‘the importance of employing methodological strategies that complement the collection of explicitly retrospective assessments [the narrative building and meaning seeking that give form to experience]…with strategies such as video taping and/or systematic observation of everyday interaction that focuses upon capturing the often pre-reflective, real-time unfolding of social action’. ¹⁹ From Throop’s point of view it is not important that the story tells the ‘whole truth’ but that it conveys the experiences and relate those to others by drawing the audience into a network of emotional proximity. Similarly, Jackson prompts us to see beyond the conceptual frameworks people operate with by pointing out the limitations of ‘fixed and finite meanings, usually of a conceptual kind’, and the need to look at ‘the action of meaning making’. ²⁰ This is important because, in Jackson’s words, ‘human life cannot be reduced to the conceptual language with which we render it intelligible or manageable’. ²¹ In order to understand ‘life as it is’ we sometimes need to put things together that don’t make sense in a rational way. ²²

Our use of filmmaking as a research method was aimed at the careful gathering of material with its relationality intact, combined with the imaginative use of narrative technique in the edit suite. ²³ Observational, participatory and self-reflexive cinematic techniques which we call collectively ‘filmmaking for fieldwork’ present us with an opportunity to record complex real-life moments before these experiences have been further narrativised through the process of reflection. These recordings are then available throughout the editing process for further exploration and can be included in the final narrative as a means by which to involve the audience in a sense of the original ‘experience’.

Due to the dramatic potential of human enactment, a filmed narrative is particularly good at representing moments of crisis illustrated by things hard to define in words, such as ambiguity, uncertainty, and confusion that frequently occur in human interactions and life experiences. Victor Turner has called this process the ‘social drama’, whereby a sequence of social interactions of a conflictive, competitive or antagonistic type, may provide materials for many stories depending upon the perspectives of the narrators. ²⁴ If a filmmaker preserves the ambiguities inherent in the social drama by carefully recording social interactions, then an opportunity arises to use this material as a continually present basis for analysis throughout the making of film. The difference with written accounts is that in a written text, ‘we systematically remove the personal and the experiential in accordance with our anthropological paradigms; then we reintroduce them so as to make our ethnographies more real, more alive’. ²⁵ In filmmaking, ‘sentences’ are being cast as the film is being recorded and if the personal and experiential are removed then they cannot be replaced in any meaningful way later on. The potential of the visual narrative is then in its power to convey what words cannot express – the ‘immense remainder’ in the words of Michel de Certeau. ²⁶ The ethnographer and filmmaker, Richard Werbner has suggested that when filmmaking is undertaken before the writing then the continuous re-engagement with sensorous moments of fieldwork helps to develop a more evocative and situated written analysis. ²⁷ Werbner is suggesting that the written work becomes more genuine through its ability to evoke a feeling of related understanding, or empathy, in the audience, and this is achieved by constantly referring back to recorded field notes that preserve elements of the complex sensory environment in which they were created.

We do not posit that the film camera and the microphones present us with an entirely new or better way of doing fieldwork. The camera and microphone are tools, but in the hands of a researcher they become a method. The equipment, with the consent of research participants, legitimises the researcher’s intimate involvement in actual experience and it also allows us to record complex moments of multivocal fieldwork that can be used in the final edit of the film to evoke a sense of participation for the audience. This process is of course partial, and ‘imperfect’, but the process does work differently to writing. Writing field notes requires a reformulation of experience as it is happening to become the conceptual narrative of a field diary, and for this reason it happens slowly, often on the margins of the activity and is dependent on the researcher’s ability to conceptualise what is happening around them. A camera and microphone, on the other hand, work at the speed of light and sound, not only representing what is happening around them but preserving the embodied (re)actions of the filmmaker. The ability to move closely and intersubjectively in the field of action at the moment of recording, encourages a form of accountability not only in the moment of filming, but also in the audience who experience the film through the very images and sounds created in that moment. Experience is important as without it, Geertz notes, ‘cultural analyses seem to float several feet above the ground’. ²⁸ Through detailed, close and personal material, we start to see why people are acting in certain ways, what their repertoires and strategies are, so that we can then start to understand how they reinforce and challenge their ways of being in the world.

Ethical considerations about representation, responsibility and a duty of care to the research subjects are a core part of the filmmaking effort. Filmmakers have a duty of care to take on the responsibility for the consequences a documentary film may have upon the lives of those who appear in it. Our ethical approach in the ‘British Born Chinese’ project evolved as a relational form of dialogue between the filmmaking team, our research participants and our collective imagination of a potential audience for the film from the very start of the project. ²⁹ Throughout our two-year engagement, we developed a rich relationship with our research participants. It was not a one-way, but complex reciprocal relationship between the film crew and the research participants. Our subjects were in control of the degree to which they wanted us to enter into their lives, and this power dynamic also determined the narrative direction of the documentary film. This was particularly apparent when we showed our participants the film that we made at the end of the first phase of the project. From that screening the central theme of bullying emerged, to our surprise, as our subjects’ favourite theme. This revelation opened up a new direction in our approach to the research as it became clear that we needed to involve our participants more actively in the filmmaking process, if we wanted to produce a nuanced portrait of the personal experiences that illustrate their everyday lives.

‘British Born Chinese’: from Diasporic Identities to Vulnerabilities

Andy and Elena started working on the project in early 2013, and at the initial planning meeting we agreed that we needed to identify potential characters who could work with us as guides to the places and communities that we hoped to understand. We approached Jenny Wong, the director of Manchester Chinese Centre, whom Elena knew from the previous research on Chinatown. ³⁰ Jenny is a first generation migrant from Hong Kong’s New Territories. She arrived in the UK in the 1970s and since then has dedicated her life to working with the Chinese migrant community. At a meeting with Jenny in January 2013 we discussed a very broad idea of making a film about Chinese youth in Manchester. She was excited by the prospect and asked whether the Centre could collaborate with us on the film and also use the footage to publicise their work. Jenny had a clear idea about a film that would represent and celebrate the Centre’s work, whereas we had an open-ended research agenda around questions of migrant identities, communal space, and time. According to Shapiro, the ethics of an encounter is shaped by the need to ‘provide space for people who claim a collective coherence to tell an effective identity story’. ³¹ However, our first meeting revealed a certain inconsistency of ethics. We needed to negotiate a way that would ensure the academic integrity and rigour of our work but that would also allow Jenny and her Centre’s members to tell their stories on their own terms.

The story of the Chinese migration and community centre which Jenny seemed to have imagined for the film resonated with recent publicly available visual narratives about the communal life, celebrations, language training, and cultural performances of migrant communities. These focus on depicting a coherent, linear, and stable account of their collective stories. ³² The same approach is strikingly palpable in the prominent IR studies of, particularly, diasporic identities, which became a popular research topic in the late 1980s when Gabriel Sheffer first proposed to consider the role of diaspora as a new field of study. ³³ With the promise of diaspora research to counter traditional state-centric research and the dichotomous understanding of politics, ³⁴ its role in IR has been defined as ‘transnational transporters of cultures and as manifestations of “deterritorialised communities”’. ³⁵ Furthermore, diaspora in IR has been referred to as quasi-political units, ³⁶ semi-autonomous actors, ³⁷ and ‘political proxies and independent variables in homeland-host-land exchanges’. ³⁸ In other words, diasporas across IR studies have been predominately understood as identifiable entities with their own collective will and coherent identity. ³⁹ Groups of migrants with prominent links to their country of origin and their manifestations in long-distance nationalism, transnationalism, various celebrations of national identity, economic and political lobbying on behalf of the homeland are interpreted through the national badge attached to them. And although the stratification through various non-nationalist categories of distinction (class, gender, sexual orientation, gender, age) is acknowledged, the analytical purchase of diaspora in IR hinges on the assumption of the possibility and plausibility of a coherent national identity. How the issues of identity are negotiated, appropriated, performed, and perpetuated in the cultural-relativist explanations and dominant stereotypes has been largely left aside from the central concerns of IR scholars working on diaspora research.

We set out in search of our characters on a rainy Saturday morning in February 2013. It was a Chinatown clean-up day, an initiative that Jenny had started three years earlier before the annual Chinese New Year celebrations intended to encourage children and parents from the Centre to engage more eagerly with voluntary community work. From 270 children registered at the school no more than 10, mostly boys, came to clean Chinatown on that day. Jenny was evidently disappointed and expressed to us her concern about the low priority of charity work in Chinese migrant families. Jenny had a seemingly coherent agenda and spoke about the need for ‘integration into the mainstream’ and generally better socialisation of Chinese people into British society through voluntary and community work. Jenny also often referred to her desire to pass on knowledge of Chinese culture and language to the next generation of British Chinese children.

However, in a two-hour filmed interview with Jenny, which we undertook in order to better understand and record the origins of the community centre, a rather different narrative of how the Manchester Chinese Centre was formed emerged. Rather than simply an attempt to bring people together who share common language, culture, and traditions, it became apparent to us that it was the feeling of helplessness and loneliness that Jenny herself had experienced as a young migrant girl in a new country that drove her to do community work. As a little girl, Jenny grew up in an agricultural setting of the New Territories in Hong Kong and she attributes her early education to a Chinese People’s Liberation Army border guard stationed near her family home, who taught her how to read and write. This seemingly altruistic act inspired Jenny in a life-long passion for education and work with young people. The second crucial episode in her life was when, as a young migrant in Northeast England, she lost her job in a restaurant and realised that she was penniless and potentially homeless in a very strange land. At that critical moment in her life Jenny promised herself to set-up a community centre aimed at working with and protecting Chinese migrants and young people.

The type of the community organisation which arose from Jenny’s original idea was not only informed by a particular version of Chinese culture and tradition, but also by the politics of multiculturalism which conditioned funding allocation to UK community organisations working with migrant groups in the 1980s and 1990s. In Shapiro’s words, the discourse on multiculturalism and the integration strategies which it informs are aimed ‘at domesticating alterity to a frame of understanding that allows for the violent appropriation of the space of the other’. ⁴⁰ The multicultural frame does not only essentialise individuals as belonging to a ‘cultural group’, a common critique of multiculturalism, but also reifies culture itself to the exclusion of all other modes of explanation. Although Jenny’s particular desire to belong in a strange environment found an expression in her efforts to set up and run a Chinese community centre and supplementary school, her desire to belong is not a particular trait of her being Chinese. Jackson through Hage contends that the meaning of collective identities is ‘inextricably connected to the experiences of individual subjects’, as ‘the national imaginary operates with both “we” and “I” forms’. ⁴¹ Stuart Hall’s discussions of identity resonate with that of Jackson’s deliberations on belonging as he describes identity as ‘formed at that point where the unspeakable stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture’. ⁴² Most poignantly, Judith Butler argues that ‘one can give and take recognition only on the condition that one becomes disoriented from oneself by something which is not oneself, that one undergoes a de-centering and “fails” to achieve self-identity’. ⁴³ The epistemic violence inherent in the demands for a coherent self-identity and the failure to achieve it contributes to a sense of shared vulnerability of not being able to be completely recognised. For Butler, this shared sense of vulnerability which ‘cannot be thought without difference’ provides alternative grounds for imagining community. ⁴⁴

Our main characters, Dan (aged between 11–13) and Kevin (aged between 12–14), schoolboys born to Chinese migrant parents in Manchester, shared this sense of vulnerability. We met Dan and Kevin on the Chinatown clean-up day. It soon became apparent to us that Dan’s and Kevin’s relationship with Jenny and their involvement with the Centre would provide us with a unique opportunity to see a sense of ‘becoming’ before vulnerability had become fully strategised into a way of ‘being’. We sensed that through working with the boys and understanding their lives, we would get a better insight into the self-ascribed collective category of British Born Chinese, which they readily associated themselves with. When we asked them if they would be keen to be in the film, they replied nonchalantly, that they didn’t mind. We needed to secure the boys parents’ permission for us to work on the film, and so I asked Jenny to arrange interviews with the boys’ parents either at the Centre or at their homes. To our surprise, both parents owned take-away restaurants. Circumstantial events conspired to lead us into an exploration of some of the deep-seated stereotypes about the prevalent occupations of Chinese migrants in the UK. At the same time we were presented with an opportunity to explore the potential of audio-visual methods to look beyond dominant representations and into a world of experience. The boys’ status as the representatives of the second generation of Chinese migrants in the UK provided us with the potent ground to explore their attitudes to ethnic and migrant identity categories from their in-between positions of being Chinese and British at the same time.

Our filming sessions started with public events organised by the Manchester Chinese Centre around Manchester during the 2013 Chinese New Year celebrations, such as a Wishing Tree charity event for Christies’ hospital, a party for the homeless in Manchester and the Manchester Chinese Centre’s community celebrations for the Chinese New Year. All these events seemed to illustrate a recognisable public face of the hardworking Chinese migrant community with their vibrant costumes, lively music, Chinese food in abundance and cultural performances. Rather than undermining the dominant stereotypes, these ‘representative’ events of a Chinese community organisation tapped into the general perception of what Chinese identity is and how it is expressed. Our film crew, consisting of three members, was too cumbersome in a crowded environment to explore relationships in an intimate and nuanced way. At this point the ‘public events’ became an obstruction for us to go beyond what we already knew, and we started looking for intimate moments, concerned with the ‘manifestations of everyday life’. ⁴⁵ We sought the boys’ and their parents’ permission to shadow them over the course of several days, and began working towards gaining permission to film with them at their schools. During public celebrations we were an object of everyone’s attention, at home it seemed that the camera and sound equipment were not barriers to our closer observation of our characters’ social world any more, but witnesses and confidants to their inner worlds.

On another rainy day in February our three-person film crew, aided by a supportive local police officer, were setting up our equipment opposite a Victorian school in Manchester to film a scene with Dan and his mum. We carefully filmed Dan leaving school with his mum and climbing into their car, ensuring that we had set the camera to a shallow depth of focus so as not to reveal the identities of non-consenting participants. Andy, acting as camera operator and film director and Kieran Hanson, recording sound, travelled in the car with Dan and his mum, and Elena followed in her own car. Once home, we asked Dan to go about his usual after-school routine, and we told him that we would work around him. Dan changed into his ‘Manchester United’ bathrobe, went to his bedroom to do school homework, and then we started talking to him. During this short testimony Dan confided that he felt isolated and lonely at school and that he was often the subject of racist remarks. This opened up a new development trajectory for the film in the first stage of the project which both Dan and Kevin were pleased to see at an early test screening, where we showed them what we had developed from this initial filming. The following dialogue extracted from the transcript of the interview with Dan conducted in phase one, where we were still searching for a subject for the film, shows how we used filmmaking to explore the issues that we encountered to build a picture of what we would later turn into the subject of our film. Parts of this interview appear in the final cut of the film.

Transcription of the spoken word in our film was essential to our research approach. Whenever we revisited our recorded footage to make a verbatim transcription of sections of the film we were interested in, we were surprised about the actuality of our subjects’ words as compared to how we remembered what they said. Experience can be confusing and it seemed that we were filling in the gaps to our ‘knowledge’ so that we could continue to act in our subjects’ worlds. For this reason we chose to transcribe and carefully log all of the footage, regardless of which bits we intended to use. We aimed to preserve confusion and paradox and present a sense of it in the final cut of the film, so that the audience could also share in the development of meaning from this primary fieldwork experience. What distinguishes this method from the other approaches to filmmaking in IR discussed earlier in this paper is the scrutiny of the recorded moment and attention to the (in-)balances of subjectivities between researcher and protagonist.

Throughout our two-year long engagement with the boys in various contexts, we did not catch any explicit instances of racism in relation to them or their family members on camera. Yet we did witness racist comments when Kevin was socialising with children local to his home, in the predominantly white, working-class area of Denton in Greater Manchester. The theme recurrently came up in our conversations with the boys, and during the exchanges we had with their parents, and Jenny. Jenny’s interest and enthusiasm for our project was partly driven by her need for Manchester Community Centre to be recognised and celebrated as the community organisation representing Chinese culture, and contributing to the integration of the Chinese migrants into local society. Beneath this were concerns that she could not voice concerning deep-seated racism ingrained in the society that she and her family had personally encountered. Jenny was keen for us to capture every aspect of the Centre’s activities, not to miss anything so that the viewers of the video could appreciate better what the Centre contributes. This was a constructive strategy of care that Jenny had developed to deal with the difficulties she had experienced and it arose because of her vulnerability and not despite it. When we showed the results of phase one of the film to Jenny, our characters and their parents, the main concern that Jenny had was that the ‘film’ tended to focus on the pain. In her opinion, there was no sense of collective fun and community spirit. Yet, when Elena asked if Jenny and others could relate to the boys’ experiences of racial bullying, there was a silent acceptance that racism exists, and that most Chinese people they know experienced it, and that they had to learn to live with it and get on with their lives. Dan and Kevin, in their youth, were not ready to accept bullying with the resignation and humility of their parents.

The public pronouncements of the death of multiculturalism in Europe have been characterised as a contemporary manifestation of racism, because of their failure ‘to incorporate the experience of racism and the struggle for equality and justice that anti-racism involves’. ⁴⁶ It is futile to negate and discard racism as not relevant in Europe, because its history is intimately fused with the expansion of colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism. ⁴⁷ Cultural and ethnic identities became incorporated into a range of governmental practices, and because of the silent denial of the experience of racism, the racialised are left with no appropriate vocabulary to adequately describe their experiences. As a result, as Lentin observes, ‘the struggle for equality and justice therefore becomes indeed a fight for the recognition of cultural identity’. ⁴⁸ Yet, as Geroge Yudice notes, ‘identities’ have become ‘incorporated into a range of governmental mechanisms’ as performative and serving a particular function, not only for the performers, but more importantly for the ‘state institutions and media and market projections that shape, respectively, clients and consumers that require these identities to be performed’. ⁴⁹ Both culturalisation and racialisation are imbricated in the ‘management of life’ in such a way that they work far beyond reigning political and cultural ideologies at the level of everyday social relations. ⁵⁰

As one of the characters in the 2014 book The Life of a Banana by P.P. Wong, the first British born Chinese novelist to be published in the UK, observed: ‘times have certainly changed, but not as much as we might think. Even today, Chinese people on British TV speak in broken English and are ridiculed for their accent. There are few characters of well-spoken Chinese doctors, Chinese lawyers or heaven forbid a Chinese politician on British TV’. ⁵¹ P.P. Wong’s novel, based on her own experiences of growing up in London, tells the story of a 12-year old girl, Xing Li, her teenage brother, and their extended family. It unequivocally and powerfully resonates with the issues our research participants shared with us, thus obscuring and making redundant the binary between fictional and non-fictional narratives. Lai Ker, Xing Li brother’s life strategy is to have a thing called ‘Chinks Have Mouths’ or CHM. If a Chinese person doesn’t have a mouth they will be ‘ignored by society’. ⁵² The meaning and examples of CHM in the book are ‘standing up to white boys, cracking jokes mid-lesson and putting fingers up at racist sales assistants in posh shops’. Xing Li’s challenge throughout the book is to develop her own distinctive and effective CHM. The same concerns have been preoccupying our research participants in Manchester.

Personal and International

At the start of our project Daniel and Kevin might have been influenced to become part of our research film because Jenny, an influential figure in their lives, suggested that they do so, but as the project developed they soon took ownership of the themes that they wanted us to develop further. We demonstrate this in the film, towards the end, when Dan and Kevin take the film equipment to conduct their own interviews in Manchester city centre. The participatory element of our project relied on asking our subjects to help develop the content of the film, practically and conceptually, and in the dialogical approach to interpreting the filmed material. Our filmmaking team trained Dan and Kevin in basic cinematographic skills and left a camera with each of them for a week to capture whatever they thought was interesting and important to them, which we included in the final cut of the film. Afterwards we watched and discussed their filmed material with them. It was revealing that their so-called ‘Chineseness’ was not what they chose to focus upon. In spite of being fluent in Chinese and Cantonese and speaking Cantonese at home with their families, they recorded their diaries in English, and the most important aspect of their life revolved around their everyday routine, hobbies, and family. Playing computer games and watching TV were their favourite hobbies. The issue of identity was not self-reflected upon in their diaries, but it was evoked in response to Elena’s provocations and questions during recorded discussions with the boys about their filmed footage. The identity themes emerged as relational forms of response and practice that related to a more deep-seated sense of vulnerability. Other than this important detail, both diaries covered material that could speak to the experience of any school pupil and their parents.

As shown in the final cut of British Born Chinese, Elena watched Dan’s filmic diary with him and discussed the main topic of his interest, his hobbies. The following dialogue is taken from the transcript of the filmed material progressed.

What is revealed through this dialogue is that Dan’s rationalisation of his commitment to Chinese culture is an expression of his fulfilment of what he perceives as his parents’ and wider society’s expectations of him based on how he looks, his parents and where they came from, rather than the activities that he finds enjoyable. Yet, it is not to underestimate our own role in suggesting a particular language for expressing Dan’s engagement with Chinese culture (as an ‘obligation’). In leading and directing the research project in our roles as researchers and filmmakers we have contributed to conditioning how Dan and Kevin positioned and presented themselves in front of the camera. This was particularly apparent in how the boys approached the diary exercise and in how they interpreted their filmed diaries for us.

The elder of the two boys, Kevin, filmed a computer game that he later admitted was something that Chinese boys like playing rather than a game he himself prefers to play. When we queried Kevin about his choice of the filmed scene, he unreservedly declared that he thought we would be interested in seeing what games Chinese kids, rather than he, liked to play. As with Dan’s rationalisation of why he is learning various aspects of Chinese culture, Kevin’s response to our request to film his daily life was conditioned by his relational position to us as researchers, and his interpretation of what we expect to get from a (typical) Chinese boy, rather than from him as an individual. ⁵³ In both cases the category of British Born Chinese was evoked as a performative practice conditioned by the racialised language adopted as a governmental and biopolitical order in the Foucauldian sense as a ‘way of thinking, reasoning, and calculating’. ⁵⁴ Xing Li, the main character of ‘The Life of a Banana’ astutely summarises this social predicament for British Chinese:

I start to daydream about what it would be like to grow up in a country where I am not seen as different. Somewhere where I am popular and don’t have to explain my name or that I am Chinese. It would be a really cool place where Asians and Jamaicans are just seen as doctors, school girls and business women. Not “the Chinese doctor”, “the Asian school girl” or “the black businesswomen of the year”. It would be a country where I was not seen as “ethnic” or “exotic” but just “me”. That would be great! ⁵⁵

The main limitation of the filmed diary was in how this activity was interpreted by the boys as a requirement of the research project. Dan’s and Kevin’s choices of what to film were influenced in part by their perception of what might be important for us as researchers to learn something we had collectively called ‘British Born Chinese’. In short, there is great scope for a subject to ‘act out of the ordinary’ when the references to their own lives are altered by a direction imposed on them by the filmmakers. Interventions are necessary to unsettle sedimentary truth, but they should be contextualised and counter-balanced by allowing the subjects to act in ways that also refer more directly to their everyday lives. There is perhaps less opportunity for characters to ‘act out of the ordinary’ when they are presented with aspects of their habit forming everyday lives. By engaging in the everyday and including ourselves in our research project as part of the story we hope that a more contextualised representation of our subjects will allow space for cinema goers to participate in the project and develop a shared understanding of the subject matter. It is in our ability to carry complex moments of fieldwork through to the final film that perhaps demonstrates what a filmmaking method can do that a written approach cannot. By attempting to balance the subjects’ stories with our own we may go someway toward countering the epistemic violence that academia must be wary of when it is operating at the level of ideas that transcend the lived realities of its subjects.

When we first presented this research project at the Millennium Conference in 2014, one of the questions from the audience addressed whether the very name of our documentary film ‘British Born Chinese’ contributes to imposing this category onto our characters, and how Elena’s own position as being part of a ‘Russian diaspora’ has affected the development of the project. Elena’s first reaction to this question was to distinguish herself as ‘not Russian’, but rather as Belarusian. While perhaps we did not reflect enough on how our own positions and team dynamics (consisting of one foreign sounding woman and four white British men) influenced the development of the documentary film, in that particular situation Elena’s reaction was conditioned and shaped by the ethnic terms of identification directed at her. However, it does point to a more fundamental epistemic violence which we exercise not only at the institutional level, but more profoundly at the linguistic level in our every day encounters. The question is perhaps not whether one can avoid epistemic ambiguities, as this is surely part of the language with which we attempt to communicate with one another, but how one can self-reflect, recognise and resist the violence that can result when inequalities outweigh multi-vocalism. The power of the visual narrative is to make such violence visible, to point to its limits and contradictions, and recognise our stakes in these relations. If the category of ‘British Born Chinese’ exists only in relation to the claims made by those who demand (self)recognition, we do not have a choice but recognise the dependency of such claims on the legacy of colonialism and exploitation in the history of International Relations.

We called our film ‘British Born Chinese’ as a provocation, and a starting point to think about the contested issues and limited spaces left to racialised subjects to express the issues of belonging. The film narrates how the boys negotiate the limited spaces left for them to express their differences. To return to the text of ‘The Life of a Banana’ one last time, Xing Li is baffled by why her late mum told her to be proud to be British Born Chinese: ‘Mama said being a BBC makes me special. But I don’t feel special. Most of the time I feel strange’. ⁵⁶ Kevin, from our film, on the other hand, thinks ‘BBC is a cool name’. The experiences and faces of the boys call for responsibility on our part as filmmakers and cinema goers, more than viewers, to recognise their difference, but they also refuse to be fully understood as coherent subjects.

Conclusion

We began this article by outlining three recent approaches to ‘visualising’ IR and then set out our own approach in contrast to these. Key to this discussion has been the potential of an approach, normally associated with ethnographic filmmaking, for research on diasporic identities and broader issues of the international in everyday encounters. We argued that audio-visual methods of observing, listening, documenting and participating in the ways people think and act with each other reveals the inconsistencies, ambiguities and un-certainties hidden within structural representations. The potential of a filmmaking approach to represent and explore IR lies in its possibility to connect subjects, filmmaker and audience through a shared understanding of the emotion, frustrations, confusion, and struggles of everyday life. Through this crisis of encounter, we hope to see beyond the differences that have seemingly divided us and recognise a common sense of vulnerability that many people sense in becoming and never quite feeling at home in their own skin.

Our aim in producing a film about British born Chinese is not to speak to the experiences of the second generation of Chinese migrants in a totalising way, but to approach an understanding of how two young people negotiate and interrogate everyday family and social pressures, misunderstandings, frustrations, and injustices. We hope to show the pervasiveness of embodied politics of racialised identification in how people articulate and perform their identities. Dan and Kevin resort to Chineseness not as a way to express their difference, but as a strategic subject position of distinction in the conditions of racialised discourses in British society. Elena’s response to the fellow academic’s characterisation of her as a member of ‘Russian diaspora’ was triggered by the same impulse to differentiate herself from an association with such a community, but the framing of the question bound her reply to nationalist terms which she was not comfortable with.

Respect for difference is difficult to achieve through representational practices such as documentary film that run ‘the risk of transforming the participant into an object of knowledge, de-contextualised and re-presented within an alien context’. ⁵⁷ However, when we emphasise the explorative and shared dimensions of documentary filmmaking then a new kind of understanding becomes possible where knowledge no longer needs to make sense in a rational way but rather points to the contextualised experience of others. ‘The examined life is re-examined, self and other reassessed. This is the very stuff of International Relations. Other ways of thinking and feeling, creating and recreating’. ⁵⁸ Danchev’s observation about the relevance of art for IR also applies to the documentary form. The potential of filmmaking to undo structural representations and identity-driven research is in its ability to powerfully connect an audience to the contexts in which the work was made and to carry the ambiguity of fieldwork through to the final presentation of the film.