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My commitment to LGBT rights led me to pursue higher education in order to better articulate the oppression I experienced and witnessed as a queer woman. Throughout my studies, I continued to work with various LGBT community groups and non-profit organizations as a volunteer and community organizer.

I was able to use the knowledge I gained in academia to help queer community 57""organizations write policy briefs and media reports as well as apply for much-needed funding. As I advanced into my Masters and PhD programs, my position as a graduate student allowed me to tap into additional funding resources. I was able to redirect some structural and economic resources from universities and research foundations to support community-based initiatives and arts projects.

Aziz Choudry writes that the relationships activist-researchers have with their participants are multiple and constantly evolving. I assume a responsibility to make sure that my work provides avenues for community mobilization, peer-to-peer support, and social justice advocacy. My academic and activist roles blend into and inform one another with difficulty and uncertainty.

It is an uncomfortable position, and one in which I try as much as possible not to exhibit hubris or entitlement. My commitment to LGBT refugee rights does not remove the entitlement and privilege I have as a white, Western, queer, cisgender, American settler-researcher.

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It also does not remove me from the power inequalities embedded between my research participants and me. As much as my volunteerism and research influence and affect the people I work with, their stories, actions, and authority affect me and influence my outlook on the world. The borders between research and activism are sometimes blurred as I work with LGBT refugees in community support and arts-based research. It is a dialectic relationship that requires a commitment to ongoing discussion and shared authority over the research.

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I served as a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee from fall to summer Rainbow Refugee is a Vancouver-based community group that supports and advocates for people seeking refugee protection because of persecution based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status. I presented the Rainbow Refugee board of directors with my research prospectus in the fall of Rainbow Refugee board members Chris Morrissey and Sharalyn Jordan provided helpful commentary on my research prospectus. Rainbow Refugee agreed to be a community advisor to my project and provided commentary on the finished dissertation.

My experience as a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee gave me valuable insight into not only the in-land asylum process, but also the everyday challenges LGBT refugees face in Metro Vancouver.

As a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee, I contributed to the Rainbow Refugee board of directors and helped facilitate weekly drop-in advisory and counselling meetings for in-land refugee claimants. I worked with in-land refugee claimants to answer their questions about the refugee process.

I supported LGBT refugee members connect to service providers. I provided assistance to them in obtaining housing by talking with landlords and working with Inland Refugee Society and BC Housing when housing emergencies occurred. One of the reasons for this is that there are limited resources in Metro Vancouver to help in-land refugee claimants access information and resources. Rainbow Refugee fills a vital niche, providing LGBT refugee claimants not only emotional and informational support, but also vital social assistance.

It is incredible to see how many resources Rainbow Refugee is able to provide to LGBT refugees as a volunteer-only organization. Figure 2. My position as a graduate student afforded me the opportunity to organize community events to discuss asylum legislation, violence against LGBT refugees, and the cutting of social services for in-land refugees. Rainbow Refugee members spoke at these events and were able to connect with policymakers and other academics to engage in combating legislation, policies, and public sentiment harmful to LGBT refugees. I was also able to apply for several small research-based grants that went to funding community arts projects.

These events included a participatory theatre performance by LGBT refugees on the International Day against Homophobia and several public performances by queer refugee artists. The Painted Stories project brought together 15 LGBT refugees to train each other in group facilitation, storytelling, anti-oppression education, painting, and filmmaking. Through a series of five workshops, the participants created a large mural in which they shared their messages and personal experiences of violence and hope.

Their stories and messages produced a strong counter-narrative to national anti-refugee sentiments and increasing restrictions against asylum-seekers. I participated in the workshops as a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee and provided support to the LGBT refugee facilitators. At the opening of the show, we held a public roundtable of activists, scholars, 62""and academics to discuss the rise of arbitrary detentions of incoming asylum-seekers and the human rights abuses of detention and deportation of refugees in Metro Vancouver.

The art show included a public art campaign in which participants wrote messages of hope and resistance related to migration and asylum on images of the Monarch butterfly.

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These butterflies were movable art pieces that have been used in several protests and campaigns in Metro Vancouver to highlight anti-immigration, racism, and homophobia. The butterflies were most recently used at the Pride Parade. The participatory theatre workshop, the Painted Stories Project, and the Busting Borders art show were just some of the projects through which I created opportunities for public dialogue. These projects not only produced critical knowledge and critique of larger systems of inequality surrounding asylum in Canada, but were also opportunities for LGBT refugees to share their knowledge and creativity with a wide audience.

My experience working on these projects gave me new understandings of the emotional and relational weight of LGBT refugee settlement.

My work as a volunteer and arts facilitator allowed me to expand my research outside the bounds of the research project and before I began to write about my findings. The experiences I gained through volunteering shaped my approach to the research methodology and the final analysis of the collected data. They encouraged me to continue expanding my research outside the boundaries of academia and into projects that advocate for and empower LGBT refugees. Through talking with Rainbow Refugee board members, I initially shaped my project around the settlement stories and participatory photography of in-land LGBT refugee claimants and what happens to them after their hearings.

Jim Thomas describes critical ethnography as ethnography with a political purpose , that is, using ethnography not only to describe the social world, but also to challenge larger systems of inequality. Critical ethnographers unsettle both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions about the role of researchers as the unspoken authority over social reality and knowledge.

Critical ethnographers interrogate power within their research and how systems of power not only determine the relationships researchers have with the participants, but also how knowledge is produced and disseminated. Researchers must be 64""reflexive and challenge themselves to think beyond the traditional confines of qualitative research, moving to a space of possibility, dialogue, and social change Carspecken, Ethnographers must be open, present themselves as research participants, and reflect on their roles.

They need to be mindful of where their theories and paradigms come from and ask what voices, representations, and experiences are excluded or too quickly universalized Madison, My participatory observations as a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee provided much-needed context to the everyday barriers that LGBT refugees face in Metro Vancouver. I chose oral history as a complimentary methodology to critical ethnography in order to explore the particular experiences of LGBT refugees and to engage with them in dialogue about home and belonging.

Oral history is also a social construction that has been and continues to be a central way of knowing the world and transmitting knowledge for many 65""communities around the world. Stories and the meanings attached to them change as they are shared and retold. Oral history is therefore not just a methodology but an epistemology, a way to understand how knowledge is transferred and transformed.

Oral history as a methodology has a long history in refugee and diaspora studies Marsh, ; North, ; Trower, ; Thomson, By doing this, the oral histories of migrants challenge monocausal theories of migration and provide a counter-narrative to the ways in which migration and migrants are understood Thomson, , Refugee oral history confronts misconceptions and one-sided or dehumanizing portrayals of refugees and addresses the imbalance of the under-representation of refugees in public discourse on asylum and migration.

In doing so, oral history not only confronts harmful stereotypes, but also challenges the misappropriation of refugee issues and experiences in harmful nationalistic and imperialist agendas Hickey, ; Hopkins, ; Liam, ; Marfleet, ; Razack, Some oral history projects may pathologized or depicted the narrators as one-dimensional. Likewise, some oral history projects may silence groups or individuals by not recognizing their agency and authority in the research. In my approach to oral history, I draw upon the insights provided by feminist oral historians and Indigenous feminist researchers.

Because feminist research was founded on the ideal of tearing down exploitative and hierarchal systems of power and knowledge production, the search for finding alternative and empowering research practices is still pressing. The poststructuralist turn in feminist scholarship during the s changed conceptions of power dynamics between researchers and participants, painting them as neither monolithic nor stagnant, but rather a discursive process that flows from shifting negotiations, positions, and outcomes.

The feminist oral historian Sherna Gluck writes that oral history is always partial history in which the interviewer will get different partial truths based on positionality. In constantly interrogating power dynamics and my role as an oral historian, I drew heavily on the writings of Indigenous feminist authors. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues that researchers must go further than simply recognizing the effect personal beliefs and assumptions have when interacting with people.

Researchers must understand their underlying assumptions, motivations, and values, and the psychological, discursive, and material effects that their research will have Tuhiwai Smith, , This allows the validity of the 68""research to be defined, reconstituted, and re-authored by the power of the margins.

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Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins argue that the hyphen is often softened when researchers seek mutual understanding in cross-cultural engagement, but that this brings an end to empathetic collaboration. In trying to gain a shared perspective, structural power differences, as well as other differences in perspective and history, are downplayed.

Instead of being softened, the hyphen should remain nonnegotiable as a positive site for productive and empowering methodological work. Empowering collaboration between the researcher and the participants can be achieved through hard-worked dialogue and commitment to understanding difference.

This involves not only a significant time commitment involving multiple of meetings, but a willingness on the researcher to not reach a simple conclusion. The difference between me, as a non-refugee white queer settler, and my participants is always present. Instead of seeing this as a disadvantage or something to be smoothed over, I take the hyphen as an opportunity to poke at and ultimately unsettle my position of power to speak next to LGBT refugees in the final text. I see working the hyphen as challenge for me to expand my research beyond the text to other works of social justice through volunteering and collaboration with the LGBT refugee community in Metro Vancouver.

In designing this project, I wanted another avenue for LGBT refugee participants to express their meanings of home and belonging outside the confines of a sit-down interview and a written text. Freire argued that the visual image was one tool that could be used to enable people to think critically about their community.

Participatory photography can be a mechanism through which the participants can further express themselves and articulate their experiences.

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Andrew Irving writes that visual methodologies like participatory photography are another means of performance in which participants selectively engage with different subjects, memories, and meanings and decide what to document with their cameras. The camera is the tool used to take pictures, but it is the participants who frame the images through certain lenses of experiences and intentions Irving, It is through conversation with the researcher that the participants share their interpretations of not only the pictures, but also the larger social phenomena affecting them.

This process can deepen understanding for both the researcher and the participants. Karin Hannes and Oskana Parylo write that research participants may be inadequately equipped or trained to judge the potential ethical risks involved in collecting images and disseminating them for research purposes. Discussion before, during, and after the photo-taking process is one way for the researcher and the participants to not only address questions and concerns that may come up, but also work together to understand their conceptual frameworks. Researchers should be familiar with the visual material used, the manner in which it was obtained, and the possibilities for interpretation of the finished photographs.

However, as in many other research experiences, everything changed in the thick of the process. I found myself facing much more complicated aspects, situations, and challenges than were touched on in the methodology and theoretical literature. These complicated situations arose from the specifics of the research and my participation in it. Structured interviews with ten refugee settlement workers. Participatory observation as a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee. Extended and multiple oral history interviews with fifteen successful in-land refugee claimants.

Participatory photography with ten of the LGBT refugee oral history participants. The first step in the research involved understanding the political, economic, and social environment LGBT refugees navigate as they go through the refugee process and settle in Metro Vancouver. Before conducting formal interviews with refugee settlement workers, I met with immigration lawyers and refugee settlement workers informally to talk about the refugee process and the challenges in-land refugee claimants face during and after their refugee hearings. I attended several workshops on refugee asylum, as well as training and information classes on immigration housing.

These experiences informed me of the complex social, political, and economic situations in which LGBT refugees find themselves once they make refugee claims in Metro Vancouver.