Visualising transnationality: how women transcribe the experience of migration using alternative photographic processes
Ransom, Elizabeth (2025) Visualising transnationality: how women transcribe the experience of migration using alternative photographic processes. PhD thesis, University for the Creative Arts.
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This thesis explores the lived experience of transnationality for those who identify as women and those who identify as immigrants through the visual language of alternative photographic processes. As transnationality involves a spectrum of experiences, this research specifically investigates place attachment, nostalgia, memory, and multiplicity in relation to identity and how these key themes are transcribed using experimental approaches to photography such as soil chromatography, photograms, film soup and cyanotypes.
Gender plays a vital role in the experience of transnationality from motivations for migrating to the impact of migration on definitions of self. If we do not take gender into consideration when investigating the transnational experience, then we disregard the valuable conditions that influence hybridity and ignore the challenges women face through migration.
This PhD inserts women’s voices into discourse surrounding transnationality through a mixed methodological approach. By combing interviews and case studies from women who identify as having a transnational identity with autoethnographic research from my own experience of migration I showcase a diverse range of perspectives. I also use practice-based research that involves the creation of three bodies of work all of which use alternative photographic processes to visualise the emotional landscape of migration. This research foregrounds women's narratives and will contribute to the discourse surrounding transnationality and to photographic practice that deals with migration.
In addition to investigating the lived experience of transnationality my research explores how women are using alternative photographic methods to translate this experience. Examples are drawn from my own artistic practice including three key bodies of work Immigration Day (2019), The Woods (2021-2022), and Homesick (2021) to reflect upon my ongoing and continuously changing understanding of what it means to be an immigrant.
Thesis submitted in partial requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham.
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