Doctoral Researcher University of York University of York York, England, United Kingdom
Abstract: This paper discusses the use of CBPR in critical heritage studies and raises important methodological issues concerning academic activism and researcher’s positionality vis-a-vis immigrant communities. Focusing on contemporary immigrant and refugee communities in York, England, the paper explores how these communities contribute to and interact with the official heritage story of York while striving to preserve their own cultural identities. Over the past fifty years York, a mediaeval English city, has served as an important site of the English heritage industry, emphasising that country’s Roman and Viking pasts while erasing cultural contributions of marginalised communities. The paper demonstrates how immigrant communities challenge and complicate this official heritage narrative - and the homogenous idea of Britishness. Methodologically, the paper explores visual ethnography as a practice of academic activism that seeks to support immigrant communities as they develop a sense of belonging in York. The paper also demonstrates that collaborating with vulnerable communities, communities with whom the author shares an identity, is not without challenges. The author’s immigrant identity informs her work and ties her directly to the results of this ethnographic process as her drive to find solutions to issues of inclusion, representation, accessibility, and emplacement shapes the project. Furthermore, the paper recognises the challenges and emotional labour of community work and discusses how, through shared experience, the researcher and community can collaborate on a redefinition of research. The project is conducted in collaboration with the York Civic Trust and is funded by the White Rose College of Arts & Humanities.
Narrative: This paper explores the potential of collaborative ethnography to redefine and decolonise research in identity politics, community heritage, and migration studies. Focusing on contemporary immigrants in the city of York, England, this research project examines how these communities contribute to and interact with the official heritage story of York while striving to preserve their own cultural identities.
As one of Britain’s most attractive tourist cities, York naturally is full of souvenir shops. Dozens fill the city centre, perching on street corners and bursting out onto the pavements, so passersby find themselves tripping over racks of keychains, kitchen towels, and kitschy postcards, all displaying illustrations of one or another great cultural site. One shop, Fabrication, sells assorted York-themed gifts by local artists, including a series featuring a comical image in railway poster aesthetic: an illustration of a street resembling the central medieaval street, Low Petergate, with such shops as “Ye Olde Trinkets” and “Craft Mead.” An elegantly dressed couple walks down the street, three female Asian tourists pose with a selfie stick, a group of women on a bachelorette weekend are visible in the background, and in the foreground, two drunken individuals are slumped against York’s historic walls. Over this dynamic - and somewhat chaotic - scene looms the York Minster, York’s cathedral. The caption, in big, bold letters, reads, “Death by Heritage.” Illustrator Jack Hurley explains his interpretation of York: “...part genteel mediaeval gawp-athon, part theme park for some fantasy projection of a Britain that only exists in fiction” (Hurley). While Hurley’s illustration of York is comical on the surface, the image - and Hurley’s words - capture an important issue, that of the imagining and shaping of York as one of the focal points of the British heritage industry. That imagining attempts to offer a historically cohesive, unproblematic - therefore one-dimensional and largely fictional - account of the idea of Britishness.
Jo Littler explains this concept of British identity: “white (and often upper- or middle-class) Englishness is used to define [Britain’s] past.” But, Littler points out, “British heritage is the heritage of a nation of nations, shaped through waves of migration and diaspora, wide-ranging histories and contemporary flows of globalisation. Not that you would necessarily know this from a cursory glance at many of its key sites and symbols” (Littler,1). When considered alongside Littler’s assertions, Hurley’s “Death by Heritage” postcard ceases to be a comical, tongue-in-cheek scene of a quaint English town. Instead, it emerges as a critique of the process of erasure. The postcard image conspicuously omits from its selection the ethnic restaurants and Turkish kebab stalls in York’s historic centre, and the Polish supermarkets and Traveller’s sites at the city’s outskirts - all important heritage spaces. Furthermore, the postcard stresses that non-white people (represented by female Asian tourists) interact with British heritage only as consumers and are not seen as heritage producers. This project offers a radical redefinition of ‘Yorkness’ and of York’s heritage, a redefinition shaped by York’s own contemporary and diverse residents through collaborative ethnography.
The field of ethnographic research encompasses a wide range of practices.. Sociologist Alex Rhys-Taylor employs the senses of taste and smell to conduct an ethnographic study of how identity is transmitted in a London market. Others like Marina Svensson use walking as a methodological device in studies of tangible heritages of urban landscapes. Archaeologist and activist Rachael Kiddey, similarly uses the cityscape in her work of collaborative counter-mapping to document the heritage landscape of homelessness in York and Bristol. Inspired by these creative methods, this ethnographic project examines the heritage and culture of immigrant communities in York to understand what “belonging” means in the context of a heritage city.
This project is grounded in feminist and anarchist philosophy. According to Kiddey (2020), these theories are essential to an ethical practice of ethnography as feminism maximises the potential for self-determination through mutual learning and knowledge-sharing practices. A feminist approach allows for free participation and creates the space for open debates about knowledge production. In Go Home? The politics of immigration controversies, the Mapping Immigration Controversy team situates their anti-racist feminist research agenda towards positionality, considering the researchers “role in the research environment and generation of data, alongside the people [they] are studying” (Jones et al., 116). This approach requires recognising that “the way we understand and interact with the world is informed by things other than our professional selves.” These include the more commonly accepted identifiers such as gender, ethnicity, age, and class, but also “accent, the way we dress, the ways we talk to other people, the political and ethical views we hold” (ibid, 116). Positionality recognises the presence of any one of these traits will influence our own approach to and interpretation of research. Elena Vacchelli argues that the positionality of the researcher and research participant and the interrogation of hegemonic, Western and Eurocentric frameworks, what she calls “the locus of knowledge production,” contributes to a decolonisation and feminist framework of embodied research (Vacchelli, 2). Approaching research through positionality and embodiment shifts the focus from traditional means of knowledge production towards feminist and decolonised knowledges.
This project attends to the voices of York’s immigrant communities through a multi-step process: through focus group discussions and individual interviews, participants are invited to collaborate on a visual project to disrupt York’s exclusive heritage narrative. The focus group sessions were conducted at York’s “Our City Hub,” a space for immigrant residents at the York public library in the city centre. This collaboration is ongoing and the form of a visual product is still evolving. However, two directions for this visual work have emerged: a Zine featuring stories and images of immigration and identity in York, or a documentary short about community organising and the experience of placemaking.
This paper is divided into three parts: an exploration of how collaborative research can decolonise knowledge; a narrative of co-creating visual products to share research with new audiences; and a reflection on working with vulnerable community members as an individual who shares in their immigrant experience.
