Critical Visual Encounters: Reversing the Gaze at the France-UK Border

This paper offers a reflexive account of a decade of critical visual encounters at and with the border, conducted by researchers and artists with lived experience of forced displacement. It demonstrates the value of creative visual methodologies across sites and borders through long-term, interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing on participatory photo-projects and research-arts initiatives, the paper centres migrants’ underrepresented perspectives on the border. Situated within critical migration and border studies, it advances a visual ethnographic practice that shifts the focus away from typical media portrayals of migrants or their personal experiences of the border to reveal how migrants themselves see, represent, and respond to the violence of borders.