Migrants on the Margins features the illustrated life histories of four people with whom we worked in 2017 for the ESRC-funded project ‘The Unknown City: the (In)visibility of Urban Displacement’; a segment of the Royal Geographical Society’s (RGS) field research programme ‘Migrants on the Margins’. These thought-provoking comics illustrate the everyday life of those living on the margins in four of the world’s most pressured cities – Harare, Hargeisa, Colombo & Dhaka.
More details on ‘Migrants on the Margins’:
Over the next 30 years more than 1.5 billion people are expected to leave their rural homes and move to cities. That movement will be concentrated in Africa and Asia. Dhaka (Bangladesh), Colombo (Sri Lanka), Harare (Zimbabwe) and Hargeisa (Somaliland) are all experiencing a share of that movement.
Fieldwork photo from Dhaka, Bangladesh by Elettra Pellanda.
We chose real-life stories that reflected, in their local variations, the project’s main research theme – how migration from rural to urban space impacts on individuals and their communities.
Our aim was to increase the visibility of these urban migrants, emphasising the experience of four individuals and their families in each of the cities where research took place. Sabina, Arunachalam, Tawanda and Halgan live, respectively, in low-income areas of Dhaka, Colombo, Harare and Hargeisa.
Fieldwork photo from Colombo, Sri Lanka by Elettra Pellanda.
As part of PositiveNegatives’ participatory methodology, we collaborated with these storytellers to ensure that their narratives were told from their own perspective. We also used alias names to protect their identities.
Fieldwork photo from Harare, Zimbabwe by Laurence Ivil.
We have tried to highlight within these comics, just some of the challenges Sabina, Arunachalam, Tawanda and Halgan face. Their stories reflect and amplify the experience of millions of people who move and live in underserved communities across Africa and Asia, and beyond.
Fieldwork photo from Hargeisa, Somaliland by Benjamin Worku-Dix.