Survivors' Voices, Stories, and Images: Survivor-Led Empowerment Through Ethical Story-Telling and Participatory Photography in Kenya

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Researchers from the Rights Lab (University of Nottingham), HAART Kenya and World Reader have been working together for 12 months on a GCRF Network+ project using ethical-storytelling and participatory-photography methods to amplify and empower the voices of survivors of human trafficking in Kenya both within their own country and abroad. We aim to build on the project's success to further our aims of empowering and amplifying the voices of survivors through impactful activity with the Kenyan government, other survivor-researchers, and the general public in Kenya and elsewhere. New ways of doing this have emerged from the aspirations and needs of survivors as expressed in our participant workshops, and from new collaborations with other NGOs. We also seek to build on our new knowledge of how to work remotely with survivors in ethical ways, through innovations we developed during the COVID-19 pandemic; to disseminate this learning more widely among relevant academic and non-academic communities; and to impact on the practice of people working with these techniques and/or with survivors of human trafficking (and other vulnerable groups). In this way, we aim to improve the quality of work being done with survivors, and have a wider impact on the possibilities of participatory research even when affected by exogenous shocks like a global pandemic. We will run further workshops with survivors, following on from the needs they have identified in Kenyan anti-trafficking policy and practice and for their own development as leaders and researchers. We will help them to get their stories and policy proposals in front of Kenyan politicians, and wider Kenyan and international audience. We will support their development as survivor-leaders, and their engagement with other survivors looking to play a similar role in anti-trafficking and anti-slavery research and action. We will also produce a range of dissemination outputs to bring attention to their stories, images, experiences and calls for change in Kenyan and internationally. This has the potential to radically transform the anti-trafficking landscape in Kenya. We will disseminate the arts-outputs created by our survivor-participants more widely in exhibitions in Nairobi, Liverpool, and online, as well as hosting stories produced by survivors in English and Swahili on World Reader's free, global, e-reader platform. We look to increase our impact on public knowledge of human trafficking and the experience of survivors, improving understanding, and thereby tackling the stigma and marginalisation often faced by the women participating in our workshops, and many more survivors around the world.