Participatory training in disability and migration: mobilizing community capacities for advocacy

Introduction

Canadian media is paying increased attention to the situation of immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and migrant workers with disabilities. Meanwhile, pioneering work over the last two decades (Dowbiggin, 1995; Menzies, 1998; Harris, 2003; Baynton, 2006; Groce, 2005; Waldeck and Guthrie, 2007; Soldatic and Fiske, 2009; Chadha, 2008; Hanes, 2009; Mirza, 2010; El-Lahib and Wehbi, 2012; Soldatic et al., 2012;), has supported what may be considered an ongoing, second wave of research into this area (Mirza, 2014; Joseph, 2015; Pisani and Grech, 2015; El-Lahib, 2015; El-Lahib, 2016; Spagnuolo, 2016a; Spagnuolo, 2016b; Spagnuolo et al., 2018; Spagnuolo, 2018; Reaume, 2014). What was once a neglected issue that existed on the margins of both disability and migration studies is gaining important momentum. Contributing to growth in this area is the productive application of transnational and postcolonial orientations to disability studies. More and more scholars are now dedicated to exposing the different meanings, causes, and experiences of disability and disablement in the Global South, as well as among marginalized groups in the Global North, all while unsettling dominant assumptions generated by white disability studies (Bell, 2006).

Within this generative moment, the present authors are engaged in the development of a participatory training program aimed at improving the settlement experiences of immigrants and refugees with disabilities living in Canada. Our work is motivated by the reality that, despite noticeable growth within this sub-field, immigrants and refugees with disabilities remain marginalized in many ways and excluded from social, political, and economic opportunities. Perhaps the strongest testament to the marginal social and economic status of these communities is the fact that Canada’s immigration act continues to reject applicants on the grounds of ‘excessive demand’ (El-Lahib, 2015; El-Lahib, 2016; El-Lahib and Wehbi, 2012; Spagnuolo, 2016b; Spagnuolo et al., 2018). With these discriminatory practices as our point of entry, our team launched a community-research partnership in 2016. As the cornerstone of this project, we designed a transdisciplinary and participatory training program for front-line service workers in the immigration and settlement sector, which explored the intersecting forms of oppression at both structural and individual levels.

During the first phase of the project, we partnered with Across Boundaries, a community organization that provides mental health and addiction services to racialized people living in the city of Toronto, Ontario. Front-line service providers at Across Boundaries work directly with community members, including many recent immigrants and refugees. Management staff contributed to the design and organization of two-day pilot session that helped introduce the new training program, while front-line service providers contributed as participants during the sessions and focus groups. Everyone involved in the project had the opportunity to provide feedback through discussions that immediately followed the final day of training. Insights from these focus groups will inform future stages of the project and allow our team to gauge the appropriateness of our methodology. In this article, we begin this reflective process by unpacking our approach to participatory training, explicating our theoretical assumptions, and linking our values and theories to praxis.

Central to our pedagogical values are insights derived from constructivist grounded theory, intersectionality, and anti-oppressive theories, as well as the potential for transdisciplinary developments that merge critical theoretical studies with community-based work and direct-action research. Above all, we sought to mobilize these approaches to support a learning environment that has the potential to better prepare service workers for allyship and for taking on an activist role in their encounters with marginalized community members. In this article, we outline key characteristics of our training sessions, explaining how we attempted to operationalize participatory knowledge production while seeking to inform and embody anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-ableist practices. We also discuss the importance of intersectionality in articulating experiences of disability and migration; we go on to describe how this model was applied in the research and preparation stage of the project, as well as during the training sessions.

However, before we can explore these disruptive possibilities and the need for such transdisciplinary work, it is helpful to situate our project within the existing literature by identifying key problems that scholars have positioned at the nexus of disability and migration. The first section of this article is therefore dedicated to this task. This literature review pays particular attention to power differentials that have been revealed through experiences of migration and disability, and to the ways in which researchers have engaged with these dynamics. There has yet to be any comprehensive investigation of scholarly approaches to this topic, let alone their relation to practice. To help fill this gap, this article discusses major research strands that relate to disability and migration and methodologically situates our training project with reference to key problems identified in the literature. We begin with a thematic overview of key studies on migration and disability before moving to a more focused analysis of how these approaches can support the emergence of a critical framework. We finish by looking at work that is currently taking place around us at the community level that we can build upon as we work to further our program.

Historical, categorical, and intersectional approaches to the research

Our discussion of existing research is particularly concerned with the Canadian context, with some attention to different layers of the immigration and refugee experience in other major receiving countries. Alongside the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, Canada has long been a major immigration destination (OECD, International Migration Database). For this reason, it is perhaps not surprising that most studies on migration and disability tend to focus on the policies and practices of Canada and these other three nation states. Throughout our literature review, we suggest that researchers working from the perspective of these four receiving countries tend to look at one of the following issues, sometimes taking a combined approach, but more often providing in-depth information about a single area: the targeting of disabled people during immigration screening practices, discriminatory immigration legislation, historical and/or contemporary case studies illustrating the monitoring techniques applied against disabled migrants, and settlement experiences of disabled immigrants or refugees. As we will see, our pilot program was designed to facilitate awareness and spark reflection on these four inter-related aspects of transnational power dynamics, with the goal of preparing service providers for a more advocacy-oriented role in their clients’ lives.

Interestingly and perhaps indicative of the interdisciplinary quality and relatively early state of this sub-field is the fact that many of the studies included in our survey do not reference one another. So, despite their common concerns, many research contributions appear to build from distinctive roots. Within this cluster, wide distances can be found between policy studies that are set in different geographic regions (such as Canada or the United States) and historical time periods (such as the early twentieth century or the early twenty first century), between studies organized according to legal frameworks and policy domains, and perhaps most significantly, between studies that centre the intersectional quality of lived experiences and those that emphasize more categorical factors. Conversely, postcolonial readings of immigration practices form a more recognizable and self-referential subset of the literature, offering a more holistic and intersectional analysis of disability and migration that is enhanced by its cumulative quality.

Screening processes have been a pressing concern for scholars focused on disability migration, with various studies drawing attention to interactions that occur between medical discourses and practices that work to exclude disabled migrants from citizenship. Departing from public health scholarship that tends to name disability alongside disease as a prohibited trait – a move that conflates health issues with disability without theorizing these links, emphasizing the social dimensions of impairment, or problematizing the systematic targeting of disabled people as a group (see Kraut, 1994; Markel and Stern, 1999) – disability historians have centred disability identities in their analyses of medical screening. Baynton (2006; 2016) analyzes records of inspection processes at Ellis Island and other ports in the Northeast region of the US and reveals how inconsistent and prejudicial assumptions made for highly subjective encounters between medical officers and disabled migrants.

While Baynton (2006) also discusses evidence of disabled people resisting inspectors’ decisions, highlighting the importance of agency and an individual’s particular situation, he found that inspections tended to reinforce the devaluation and undesirability of disability. His study concludes that exclusions based on nationality and race alone have led to a false periodization of immigration policy. However, Baynton’s separation of disability exclusions from exclusions based on race or nationality suggests that he does not fully conceptualize disability in relation to race and racism; instead, disabled migrants are presented as categorically distinct from racialized migrants, and although the role that disability plays in devaluing racialized groups is recognized, his narrative tends to present disability as a ‘master category’. For example, while Baynton includes numerous case studies of Jewish migrants, he appears to overlook the role that anti-Semitism played in their medical exams.

In a related study that focuses exclusively on Ellis Island, Dolmage (2011) provides a nuanced reading of disability and race as co-constructed categories, though he is attentive to their distinctions and is careful ‘not to conflate or compare, and never to deny the particularity or complexity of either race or disability’ (2011: 29). Dolmage’s work encompasses a more intersectional orientation, while Baynton’s approach reflects an anti-discrimination reading of inadmissibility that raises critical questions about disability as a category. Hanes’ historical policy work on Canadian immigration regimes (2009) provides invaluable information about the legislative targeting of disabled people, raises critical points about these official exclusions, and provides an important foundation for research into Canadian immigration practices and their effects on disabled people. Broad in scope, Hanes’ study covers the first Immigration Act of 1869 – passed just after Confederation – all the way to the 2001 Act. As will be discussed in the second pat of this article, the trends that Hanes outlines shape historical understandings of ableism that informed our training program. Writing around the same time as Hanes, and with a similar focus on disability as a singular category, Chadha (2008) presents a focused policy history that considers the political debates surrounding the formation of different immigration acts between 1859 and 1927, demonstrating that disability was a central concern to many lawmakers. In addition to these insights, Chadha’s study exposes the collaboration between Canadian medical and political officials, and in this way, helps link inadmissibility policies and practices to broader histories of disability.

Other historical research focuses on confinement and deportation to anchor disability migration in lived experiences that take place beyond ports of entry. For example, Menzies (1998) draws attention to how racism interacted with psychiatric systems to justify the confinement of Chinese immigrants in Canadian asylums. Similarly, Dowbiggin’s study of the prominent Toronto psychiatrist C. K. Clarke (1995) investigates Canadian practitioners’ professional investment in medical deportation, while Spagnuolo (2016a) builds upon these arguments to show how psychiatric diagnosis facilitated extra-legal deportations of immigrants who had already met Canada’s residency requirement. Spagnuolo’s focus on the Toronto asylum as a deportation centre draws together issues of forced and unpaid inmate labour and perceptions of dependency, showing how political economy interacts with eugenic discourses to shape the interpretation and application of law and policy.

In a recent full-length study that traces the history of collusion between criminal, psychiatric, and immigration systems, Joseph (2015) discusses the processes by which racialized immigrants living in Canada become psychiatrized, criminalized, and deported. Joseph’s research contributes to anticolonial and critical race approaches to disability migration that capture complex and inter-related aspects of marginalization and intersecting realities of ableism and racism. Mirza (2010; 2014) holds a similar interest in experiences of confinement, looking at current practices of warehousing refugees both within receiving countries and outside of them in refugee camps. She argues (2014) that in most cases, disabled refugees are less likely to be selected for resettlement, while these warehousing situations have disabling effects and, quite notably, ‘create conditions that make more people disabled’ (2014: 221). Throughout her study, Mirza emphasizes the adverse effects of uneven power relations between governments and organizations based in the Global North, on the one side, and refugees from Global South countries on the other. Approaches such as these, which situate oppressive processes in immediate and urgent realities, compliment the transformative and intersectional work we seek to accomplish through participatory training with front-line workers. More precise understandings of the many paths to exclusion, as shown by Mirza, Joseph, Spagnuolo, Menzies, and others, will help prepare front-line service providers to support affected communities.

Several scholars working in an Australian context delve into such pathways to forward an anti-colonial critique that forefronts how white settler colonial ideals have supported the targeting of disabled and racialized immigrants for detention. Soldatic and Fiske (2009) use case studies to explain how racism and ableism co-construct the perception of illegitimacy and signal out certain individuals for detention, even though they are in fact ‘lawfully’ present in Australia. Taking an in-depth look at disability inadmissibility and settlement in Australia, a slightly later study by Soldatic et al. (2012) presents a detailed case study of the migration experience of a child with a disability who has been deemed a burden by the Australian state. The authors’ analysis narrates the impact on family stability as well as the strategies these families devised and the informal supports they used to respond to discrimination and the absence of disability and health services. This research draws upon work by Mirza (2010) and El-Lahib and Wehbi, (2012), and forms a complimentary body of scholarship that centres the role of neocolonial and neoliberal motives in shaping migration.

Centring colonial and neocolonial processes in their own work, El-Lahib and Wehbi, (2012) show how Canada’s admissibility requirements, which discriminate against immigrants with disabilities through the requirement that individuals cover the costs of any ‘excessive demand’ they pose on the state, disproportionately affect applicants from the Global South, who are less able to afford these privatized costs. In a related study, El-Lahib (2016) provides a close reading of Canadian immigration policy discourses, drawing out how these are framed as an opportunity for the so-called worthy. He draws upon first-person interviews with immigrants and refugees to expose how such opportunities are circumvented by disability, race, and colonialism, and how they serve to enhance the assumed superiority of the Global North over the Global South.

In keeping with this Canadian context, Spagnuolo (2016b) asks how immigration selection and appeal processes are weighted against applicants from the Global South. Her comparative analysis of several legal cases revolving around the inadmissibility of children labeled with intellectual disabilities reveals prejudicial attitudes towards racialized disabled people as well as against racialized mothers of disabled children. Much like El-Lahib’s findings, this research is concerned with how colonialism structures notions of admissibility. Work by Pisani and Grech (2015) is also dedicated to analyzing these processes, demonstrating how disablement and poverty result from uneven North–South relations and how these are correlated factors that work together to motivate migration. They call for further research into these dynamics by disability scholars and by those studying migration.

Situating our work: transdisciplinary discussions and the helping professions

What emerges from this survey is the impression that any challenges to dominant approaches to disability studies tend to draw strength from anticolonial and postcolonial frameworks, as well as from intersectional frameworks developed through the Black feminist movement (Combahee River Collective, 1977; Crenshaw, 1989). This anticolonial body of scholarship addresses underlying and closely entwined assumptions around race and disability. The results of this research compel us to investigate the situation of disabled migrants through an intersectional framework that forefronts racism and ableism and that is equally attentive to the role that imperialism and colonialism play in shaping these experiences. The content of our pilot sessions was geared towards a transformative exploration of these systems and related individual experiences; these exploratory discussions modelled a participatory form of knowledge production, built upon an anti-oppressive framework.

As previously mentioned, we centered five broad problems in the discussions that took place during our training sessions. Each problem extends on the themes identified through the above survey: Canadian immigration policy as settler colonial practice; historic discrimination against disabled and racialized migrants and citizens; the precarious and marginalized status of racialized and disabled migrants in Canadian society; the many routes to expulsion and deportation for racialized and disabled migrants; the complicity of everyday practices and the helping professions in shaping negative settlement experiences for disabled and racialized migrants. During our sessions, these problems were unpacked through loosely-structured discussions, where facilitators and participants offered both historical and current examples for the group to reflect upon. Discussion topics invoked transdisciplinary knowledges, merging ideas from historical research, theoretical study, front-line interactions, and direct lived experience. The key outcome we were hoping to achieve through this approach was the enhancement of everyday practices of resistance on the part of service providers. To meet this goal, we felt it was necessary to link structural and individual experiences by identifying the characteristics and interconnections between oppressive systems, and the many ways in which these connections surface through lived experiences. An important aspect of this work involved reflecting on the roles of various institutions – including government, university, and non-profit organizations that shape the helping professions – as well as our own roles within these institutions. This tier of the training content focused on the actions of facilitators and participations and brings us to the subject of the settlement service sector, and the research knowledge that underlines our efforts to improve interactions that occur within that context.

The nature of settlement services has been under scrutiny for some time. The need to critically analyze this work from an intersectional perspective is made evident by the ongoing marginalization of many groups, including disabled migrants who are Black and racialized people with disabilities, as well as their exclusion from disability movements and support systems. Despite the growth of scholarship demonstrating the marginalization of disabled immigrants and refugees, there remains an absence of appropriate services and supports to improve the situation of these groups here in Canada. In fact, a survey of the service landscape conducted at an earlier stage of this project demonstrates the glaring gaps across different provinces and territories (Kusari et al., 2019). There are, however, welcome signs of progress. Currently in Canada, there is a small network of advocacy and service groups working to reverse these trends by promoting needs-based solutions for migrants with disabilities. Notable among these initiatives is a two-year partnership (2011–2013) between the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) and the Ethno-Racial Disability Coalition of Ontario (ERDCO) (http://ocasi.org/ocasi-and-erdco-roundtable-accessibility). Out of this partnership, OCASI has developed an Accessibility Initiative to provide settlement sector workers with knowledge of disability legislation, such as the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA).

Recent studies on service provision and settlement (Khanlou et al., 2015; Munroe et al., 2016) have yet to fully problematize how dominant values and norms in receiving countries reflect neocolonial processes and tend support policy regimes that exclude particular groups. Since part of the solutions we are promoting through our training program depend upon cultivating the role of allyship in everyday practice, and especially in service delivery, we quickly realized that any training would need to account for more than the simple absence of appropriate settlement services. As well as considering the needs and experiences of disabled migrants, we hoped to link the effects of service gaps to the deep roots of eugenic thinking, colonial processes, and the technologies of power and differentiation that work to regulate disability, race, and other categories of difference. While striving to articulate these problems through the content of our training, we also aimed to embody anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-ableist practices through participatory methodologies – thus linking theory and praxis to create a firm foundation that closely reflects our project’s values.

Applying an intersectional lens to our discussions of transnational experiences of disability oppression also illuminated a broader range of problems that went beyond the specific experience of migration. Relevant here are earlier examples of research into disability, immigration and parenting that focus more explicitly on power dynamics. For example, at the outset of their study, Balcazar et al. (2012) point out that Latino families with disabled children living in the US face worse rates of poverty than their white counterparts. While examining the experiences of Latino immigrant fathers of disabled people, they present a justice-oriented framework that centres realities of multiple oppressions and forwards grassroots solutions. The responses described by Balcazar et al. (2012) came about as a result of direct experiences with and action against intersecting forms of oppression by affected communities. In response to these findings, we sought to develop a training program through direct engagement with community organizations that prepares service providers to support grassroot action. As the final section of the article explains, a participatory approach to training lead to a clearer picture of how empowering community responses can be fostered in situations involving intersectional realities.

Participatory pedagogy

Equally important to an anticolonial and anti-oppressive agenda is the process through which it is enacted. As we collaborated alongside Across Boundaries organizers to draw attention to oppressive experiences faced by migrants with disabilities, we were attentive to the pedagogical approach that was being built into our pilot program. Alongside our community partner, we crafted a training method that focused on collaborative knowledge-production, self-reflection and reflexivity. Continuous and critical reflection allowed our research team, who served as facilitators during the pilot sessions, to question and address our own power and privilege in the context of the program. Rather than placing ourselves outside of the training, we embedded ourselves within the systems and processes that were under discussion. As a result, the relationship between facilitators/researchers and participants was subject to reflexive analysis and space was built into the program to allow facilitators to undertake this work. This required a high degree of flexibility and at times, resulted in agreement to change the direction of the training.

Similarly, the relationship between participants/front-line service providers and clients was subject to analysis throughout the training session. Most participants self-identified as allies to their clients, explaining the advocacy role they willingly undertake as a result of these encounters. Many had an acute awareness of broader problems in the immigration sector, namely the absence of appropriate settlement services, and were well-positioned to speak critically to these issues. Facilitators shared examples with the group and posed open-ended questions that helped reframe some of these broader issues by highlighting individual and intimate levels of experience. Specifically, as facilitators we were concerned with identifying specific power dynamics that have been described as harmful and unhelpful to marginalized communities – both in terms of research relationships and service provision. In the following section, we will present some of the power differentials that we negotiated and drew attention to during our pilot sessions. The overall goal of our session was to facilitate transformative learning that would improve service provider interactions with migrants, allowing workers to better support efforts of resistance taking place at the community-level.

Since the motivation for our training program is to improve service delivery to immigrants and refugees with disabilities, we designed the sessions to encourage reflection on the part of participants about their own role as service deliverers and their potential to disrupt dominant structures that negatively impact their clients. In encouraging these conversations, we are following existing critiques of human rights approaches to disability and of Eurocentric knowledge production, coupled with a close attention to cultural, economic, settler, and other forms of colonialism (Parekh, 2007; Sherry, 2007; Barker and Murray, 2010; Meekosha, 2011; Grech, 2011; Erevelles, 2011; Ghai, 2012), which demand an analysis of the effects of humanitarian interventions and the work carried out by the helping professions. By exploring this complicity in a conversational group setting, we also sought to reflect on potential allyship. This was facilitated through a grounded theory approach to discussion that allowed us to focus on both the systemic and inter-related underpinnings of oppression, along with insights from local and lived experiences. This approach allowed us to combine both subjective and structural sites of power and foster meaningful strategies for social change through more reflexive interactions.

Constructivist grounded theory – a methodology that will be explored shortly – was selected for its emphasis on mutuality, fluidity, and respect during exchanges between researchers and participants. This approach respects the interactional nature of research and learning by acknowledging that knowledge is co-produced by researchers and participants. Following the insights of Indigenous feminist scholar Tuhiwai Smith (1999), we wanted to distance ourselves from attempts to ‘extract’ knowledge from, or ‘impart’ knowledge to, community partners (1999: 116). Such attempts not only conceptualize knowledge as a priori, rather than mutually constituted, but also tend to distribute power unevenly in an attempt to obtain or enforce truth claims.

These exploitative mistakes were especially important to avoid given that most participants in our project identified as members of both racialized communities and immigrant and refugee communities. Commenting on the violence of research relationships, Tuhiwai Smith explains that research relationships with marginalized groups carry significant historical weight, in the sense that these relationships have been uneven and often harmful towards groups who are not part of the dominant culture. For these reasons, we chose a collaborative design process that enabled a more mutual learning process. Our formal partnership with Across Boundaries was the first step in this process. As Holmes (2016) explains: ‘Community-engaged and controlled research methodologies are well suited for marginalized populations who historically have been left out of research processes’ (2016: 69). We not only applied Holmes’ advice while designing the training sessions with representatives from Across Boundaries, but also during the training sessions. This approach meant that representatives of our partnering community organization took part in all decision-making leading up to the sessions. Through in-person and phone meetings, project researchers and Across Boundaries management met regularly to discuss project goals and to identify outcomes and methods for the training sessions in the months leading up to implementation. It was through this process that project researchers learned that participants – staff who work as direct service providers – bring significant direct and professional experience in anti-racism work.

Recognizing and redistributing expertise – applying constructivist grounded theory

Recognizing the expertise of frontline workers as both professionals who resist racism and ableism and as people with lived experience with racism, we structured our pilot sessions through a participatory method that served two functions. First, to draw upon and recognize existing expertise, and second, to encourage transformative learning through knowledge-sharing on the part of both facilitators and participants. Following Smith, this transformative approach to learning has been found to encourage political mobilization and allyship (1999: 116). Transformations can be brought about by drawing upon front-line workers’ professional and individual experiences as immigrants, refugees, and as racialized people, by learning from other participants’ and trainers’ experiences as disabled people and disability advocates, and by collectively constructing narratives that link these experiences to structural analysis. As Wright, drawing upon Freire, explains (2015), participants in mutual learning environments can be viewed as co-investigators for research projects. A more mutual relationship between facilitators and participants allows for personal knowledge to become valued and incorporated into the training process and broader structural analysis. In Wright’s words, ‘A community-based approach to knowledge production . . . enables participants in a research study to be included as insiders with localized knowledge in each step of the research process’ (2015: 23). Wright further explains that this synthesis encourages participants in their role as ‘agents of change’. The potential for this encouragement further prepares service-providers to take an ally position towards clients and enable broader systemic change.

To summarize, the key characteristics of this training include dialogue and mutual learning, using constructivist techniques to encourage sharing personal and anecdotal stories, linking lived experience to structural issues through discussion, and a loose and fluid facilitation method that does not rely on structured learning. Constructivist grounded theory offers complimentary techniques that support a participatory training agenda and the transformative political goals mentioned earlier. Following key strategies outlined by Charmaz (2014) in her discussion of interview techniques, we began with the assumption that scholars always enter a research space with certain biases, values, and assumptions.

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that we were likely motivated by these ideas, we did not intentionally adhere to a pre-existing theoretical lens or framework. Instead, constructivist grounded theory posits that research interactions can give rise to new theoretical and interpretative frameworks. Researchers who espouse this approach are encouraged to facilitate the emergence of new theories through their willingness to evaluate, change, and adapt existing ideas and even their own research goals as the project develops. Central to this method is the simultaneous collection and analysis of primary data. This means that data analysis takes place during the earliest possible stage of the project, usually during and immediately after initial conversations with participants, rather than reserving this analysis until the end of data collection. We applied Charmaz’s (2014) techniques throughout our training sessions by structuring time for facilitators to pause and reflect upon the group discussions and the goals outlined above, and importantly, to adapt and change direction as needed.

Unlike traditional grounded theory methods, which assign a greater authoritative voice to researchers, Charmaz and many constructivists explicitly acknowledge the constructed nature of research data. Thus, the subjective contexts that encompass the meanings of our interactions with participants were brought to the forefront and explicitly informed consecutive steps in the training sessions. According to Charmaz, a constructivist position has the benefit of allowing us to ‘acknowledge subjectivity and the researcher’s involvement in the construction and interpretation of data’ (2014: 14). Refining Charmaz’s constructivist framework through our knowledge of anticolonial and anti-oppressive strategies, we actively worked to distribute power throughout our interactions with training participants to facilitate the co-construction of knowledge. These interactions took place during two distinct stages of the project: the training session and the focus group session.

Each stage was intensely relational, as training and facilitation and interview methodologies were shaped by the constructivist notion that no researcher can ever achieve the status of ‘a neutral observer and value-free expert’ (Charmaz, 2014:13); but they also require going beyond the mere acceptance of this reality by acting in a way that resists dominant power structures in educational and research contexts. One strategy involves promoting the ‘interconnectedness of knowledge production’, to borrow Edward’s phrase (2013: 152). In her discussion of woman of colour pedagogies, Edwards further explains how dominant pedagogic methods tend to divide students and teachers, as the ‘silencing and colonization of self and Other are imbedded in the process’ (2013: 153). Rather than attempting to reinforce such researcher-participant divides by claiming expert knowledge as the purview of academic status, we sought to forefront expert knowledge that is situated in other locations. This approach avoids what Kempf (2006) describes as a ‘paternalistic western discursive position’ that presupposes that target groups require instruction. The colonial assumption that ‘they’ need ‘civilising’ is akin to the assumption that people must be taught (Kempf, 2006: 133).

Instead of seeking to impose any singular viewpoint, Kempf promotes dialogue through his capacity as an instructor, encouraging ‘a multicentric approach to knowledge and learning’ (2006: 134). According to Kempf, history is not a monologue, but a dialogue. Extending this parallel, teaching that grows from anticolonial insights is a dialogue, rather than a monologue, entailing ‘a continually evolving contestation of perspectives’ (2006: 134). The erasure of marginalized peoples’ knowledge, highlighted by Holmes (2016), in the context of their work on transgender and nonconforming (T/GNC) peoples’ health, also reflects how ableist, racist, and colonial practices have discounted the knowledge of target people. The fact that cults of expertise have cropped up around marginalized groups and especially around disabled groups receiving services from the state, sustains the professional status of members of dominant groups at the expense of self-determination, dignity, and justice of those being ‘helped’. Training sessions geared towards anti-oppressive and collective mobilization in the context of disability migration service provision is thus better aligned with its own goals when claims to expertise are minimized or equally distributed, and when knowledge is more widely recognized rather than hierarchized or undermined.

Final reflections: focus group interviews

The methods described above were intended to parallel and reinforce the anticolonial and anti-oppressive content of the training session. Following our second day of training, we hosted two afternoon focus group sessions with participants to learn about the potential impact of the pilot program. Focus groups interviews provided a more in-depth opportunity for participants to reflect upon the content and structure of the sessions, observe any factors that were missing or overlooked or groups who were excluded from the discussion, draw out any implications, and recommended changes to the program.

Participation in the focus group discussions was entirely voluntary. Focus group members were individuals who had participated in the training and who wished to remain involved in further project discussions. Participants were randomly divided into two groups of equal sizes. Following Redman-MacLaren et al. (2014), no rules were set for ratios based on identifying characteristic such as age and gender. The authors explain that when such careful sampling techniques are avoided, a more bottom-up discussion framework is allowed to emerge. They associate this method with a participatory and decolonizing research commitment, explaining that ‘[f]ocus groups are often designed in a top–down manner, with participants carefully sampled and numbers restricted to a recommended number . . . However, consistent with the participatory and decolonizing approaches, combined with the lived reality of research in the Pacific, the interpretive focus groups, we facilitated a more bottom-up approach’. Each group was randomly assigned a researcher/facilitator, and the two teams held their discussions in separate spaces. Discussions were recorded and researchers took notes about content.

As the above description suggests, the structure of the focus groups was guided by bottom-up interview principles. These principles compliment a constructivist grounded theory technique and were directly inspired by the work by Redman-MacLaren et al. (2014) in Papua New Guinea and their commitment to decolonization. The bottom-up group interview principles are described by the authors as transformative in that they directly tackle the power imbalance between researcher and research participant by ‘devolving power in groups’. This devolution of power was achieved by adhering to a flexible and grounded theory method and refraining from imposing directives or even interview questions on the groups. Instead, only a small number of general and open-ended questions were used to invite feedback on the training session. These questions were posed at the outset to help facilitate conversation. Afterwards, conversations developed organically between participants, with researchers playing a participant-observer role with minimal facilitation.

In their description of transformative focus group principles, Redman-MacLaren et al., (2014) insist that such organic formations should be allowed among participants, who are given as much autonomy from the researcher/facilitator as possible. During our focus groups, we noticed that discussants took the lead in moderating their own session, posing questions to other participants, and encouraging certain lines of inquiry. Participants occasionally requested information from facilitators about the overall project goals and clarification about what the researchers were hoping to learn through these focus group discussions. From time to time, guiding questions were repeated upon request. This style of conversation suggests participants’ own commitment to the project, their investment in improving the training program, as well their recognition of the important role they play as community partners in this process. The results were collaborative and rich conversations that built upon individual insight and a diversity of perspectives and standpoints. These appear to reflect what Kress and Shoffner (2007) describe as ‘mindful wonderment’, an approach that promotes ‘listening and learning’ rather than debate. While participants’ feedback differed in unique ways, the general attitude of the group was to appreciate and acknowledge each contribution.

These small, open group discussions resulted in recorded conversations, which will be coded analyzed during the next stage of the project. According to Charmaz (2014), early analysis is integral to the grounded theory approach, as it provides researchers with a sense of potential directions to explore. These new directions are intended to reflect the categories that emerge during analysis, rather than the initial categories that researchers had in mind when they began the project. In Charmaz’s words, ‘the questions I raise about these codes arise from my reading of the data rather than emanating from an earlier frame applied to them’ (2014: 112). We will then design new guiding questions and project objectives according to these categories; these will be used to shape the next stage of our work by laying the foundation for discussions that can help develop a fuller theoretical framework.

As this work develops, we anticipate that participant reflections will help challenge researchers’ perspectives and assumptions, while further defining opportunities for positive and collaborative interventions among front-line workers and community members who are migrants with disabilities. In keeping with the methodological premise of this work, the participatory development process allows us to learn from each other with the effect of fostering transformative training environments – thus supporting each other in our work to bring about broader transformations of the systemic conditions that have been linked to significant inequities among migrants with disabilities. Such emancipatory goals extend well beyond the confines of any training program, with the need for simultaneous steps to be taken by policy-makers and other actors. Yet the potential that we hope may be offered through this project is suggested by the enactment of alternative values and, regardless of how specific the context, a theoretical awareness of how these values may be embodied and used to inform future conversations and actions.