Beyond vicarious storytelling: How level telling fields help create a fair narrative on migration

Abstract

Life stories play a crucial role in migration discourses: they serve as testimony in journalistic work, form the core of ambassadorial storytelling by NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and inspire collaborative projects initiated by writers seeking to express their solidarity. However, this article argues, drawing on migrants’ experiences for such purposes also creates an ethical dilemma: speaking about–or even for–rather than with migrants assigns them a passive role and tends to recycle existing narrative patterns and templates. Starting with a generic distinction between what we call stories of migration (various forms of self-expression granting migrants full authority and control over their narrative) and narratives on migration (external perspectives, e.g. academic, economic, political, and legal approaches, where lived experience doesn’t matter), we explore the extensive middle ground of hybrid forms between these two extremes–i.e. different kinds of vicarious storytelling–before discussing their ethical implications. We further show how the idea of the level playing field, a key concept in economics, can be used in transdisciplinary research projects to establish level telling fields (LTFs), i.e., communicative spaces characterized by a fair dialogue on an equal footing for all participants.