Newcomer youths’ ethical stances in representing war and forced migration

Abstract

We illustrate how a group of newcomer (refugee) young women of color engaged in filmmaking using stop-motion animation to represent a story of a family becoming refugees in the face of war. We ask the following research question: How did the youth adopt, negotiate, and represent their ethical stances in telling stories of forced migration using stop-motion animation? Our analysis shows that through designing their narratives, and figural and gestural representations of marginal lives, bodies, and interactions, the youth centered axiological dimensions of representing violence, and amplified the ethical complexities experienced by families facing war and violent displacement. The youths’ work offers a necessary counter-imaginary for public education in which representational work through creating animations can become a context for making visible and centering ethical and affective dimensions of their experiences of forced migration that are otherwise silenced and invisibilized by the procedurality of refugee resettlement, and in their schools in Canada.