The Researcher’s Nightworkshop: A Methodology of Bodily and Cyber-Ethnographic Representations in Migration Studies

Abstract

Migrants working the night shift (MWNS) have been invisible to the public eye for far too long. The failure to acknowledge the crucial role played by migrants working in the evening and night-time economy of developed societies is difficult to tackle with classical research tools alone. This chapter offers to novice and seasoned migration scholars a threefold methodological strategy to immerse, inhabit and to bring out of the dark a nocturnal landscape that has been invisible to diurnal people. The researcher’s nightworkshop’s innovative approach provides migration scholars with visual-analytical tools to capture the hidden experiences of MWNS. Theoretically, this chapter considers the broad aspects of representation (reel) and reality (real) of migrants in the public space and in migration scholarship. Night workers, the invisible people of the nocturnal city remain so to scholars, due to the impracticalities of doing nocturnal research (MacQuarie, 2019a). Empirically, therefore, the researcher’s nightworkshop’s strategy offers a solution to the puzzle of ‘invisibility’ of night shift workers. But it also reckons with the fact that to make visible the working lives in the realm of the night is a daunting task for scholars. Readers should interpret the notion of visibilisation with caution, using it as a visual metaphor to expose the factors that alter the night-shift workers’ precarious working conditions. This challenge is addressed here, through efforts that bridge the contingent of night workers, their minds and bodies that share the precarious landscape of nightwork with the researcher – alert and awake via the senses and suffering turned into skills.