De-victimizing migration: Re-narrating young migrantized lives through transnational participatory filmmaking

Abstract This article interrogates dominant media narratives that frame migrantized people as victims, threats, or exemplary contributors, arguing that such representational regimes reduce the complexity of lived migration and constrain migrantized self-agency. Drawing on empirical material from the transnational research project Life Strategies of Young Migrants in Ageing Societies (LYMAS), the study examines participatory filmmaking (PF) as a methodological and epistemic intervention in migration research and visual representation. Based on participatory filmmaking workshops conducted in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Switzerland, the article analyzes three participant-produced short films that engage themes of ecological practice, collective reflection, and culinary memory. The findings demonstrate how PF facilitates alternative narrative configurations that foreground relationality, process, and everyday practices of belonging, thereby challenging crisis-oriented and instrumentalized portrayals of migration. Rather than presenting PF as a corrective or emancipatory solution, the article conceptualizes it as a reflexive research practice that renders power relations in representation visible and negotiable. The study contributes to debates on media representation, visual methodologies, and migration studies by demonstrating the potential of participatory filmmaking to expand the representational vocabularies through which migration is understood.