Disguised as a Recorder: Reflective Practices in Documenting Migrant Women's Stories
The Melissa Network of Migrant Women located in Victoria Square in the center of Athens, is a community space that provides support, education, and creative opportunities for women from diverse backgrounds. From July 2023 to January 2024, Nelli Kampouri, Ioannis Kotsonis, and myself collaborated with Melissa in the context of ERC MUTE in order to realize and facilitate two cycles of workshops focusing on sound and music, as ways to share experiences and listen to one another. The participants, who wish to remain anonymous, came together in these sessions to explore listening and storytelling through sound. Once we obtained their informed consent, our group meetings were recorded. After a collaborative editing process, extracts from these recordings became a series of podcasts, which were aired on the ERC MUTE YouTube Channel in June 2025.
silent leaking
When we began visiting Melissa for the workshops, I was struggling to overcome a depressive episode. The flow of everyday life in Melissa and the way the space felt like a refuge kept me grounded and away from a state of instability and chaos while I was there. It was a small victory to be able to do at least that part of my work.
Now, I find myself at another crucial moment for my mental health, and the only thing that comes organically to me is to immerse myself in the completion of this text that is related to that project. Perhaps, subconsciously, I am trying to restore the bodily state of being among other women for whom uncertainty and resilience are an integral part of everyday life (Biehl, Ghodsee, and Stevenson 2020, p. 15; Kambouri, 2013).
I usually arrived just before we were scheduled to start, allowing myself a moment to settle in. There was always a place to sit, and if not, others would quickly make room. No one there was pretending not to see you; they acknowledged you with a smile. Coffee, tea and comfort food were always available for everyone. I would sit quietly, absorbing the atmosphere, and engage in a slow, out of fashion listening, to feel what was happening around me and let myself be absorbed by it. Αs Grehan (2019) puts it, slow and out-of-fashion listening is a practice that requires the listener to pause, pay close attention to the mode of address, scene, gesture, tone, language, and broader political or social context. It is an act of being fully attuned to the speaker, making room for a range of responses including deep understanding, partial acceptance, dissonance, disagreement, and misunderstanding. This type of listening resists dominant modes of surface absorption, aiming instead for a profound attunement before responding. It is a political act of resistance against the rapid and superficial flow of everyday communication, crucial for acknowledging and accepting differences, and considering the ethics of attunement.
Melissa is a space of being with, and being with is one of the most important forms of care and listening (Biehl, Ghodsee, and Stevenson 2020, p. 31; Voegelin, 2023). It’s a familiar place, a place that is comfortable and comforting, and is often, the in-between space, the interval. (Ahmed, 1999, p. 330). Listening is crucial there. You need to listen attentively to understand (yours or other peoples) individual needs, considering cultural, sociopolitical, and practical aspects (LaBelle, 2018; Sterne, 2012). You need to listen to provide care, assistance, guidance. To mediate with the gynecologist, the lawyer, and public services. To foster connections through grief and pain, support and empowerment, solidarity and friendship, motherhood, couple and family issues, and so many more aspects of life.
I would admit now, as I am always intrigued by how theory can sometimes feel distant from practice, that at Melissa, my theoretical understanding of certain listening practices started to gain flesh and substance.
porous authorship
These varied positionalities between proximity and distance actually created an open space for listening, a space that we might also consider a third space, not yet saturated by already completed and legitimized narratives. Further, this space allowed new stories to emerge. To me, following a ‘shared authority’ ethos was simply about recognizing the narrators as the sole authority of their narrative, the authors of their stories. (Martelly 2018, p. 187)
We gradually gathered in the room where we held the workshop and sat around a large table. Sometimes, someone brought their baby or young child along. We would place the recording device on the table. Participants were assured that their agency would be preserved; they were protected by the consent forms they signed, and no faces would be shown. They had the option to request the erasure of parts of the recordings. But there was also something else. The device on the table did set boundaries symbolically. Its presence gave the impression that it had the power to capture everything, but it also served as a sonic safety net, reminding participants they could protect themselves and their stories from being recorded. It created an interesting combination of the notions of self-censorship and awareness. An off the record space popped up in the sonic sphere.
What would be captured in this device? What might be audible in the recordings?
[●ʀᴇᴄ]
A group of women discussing and listening to each other, making room for everyone’s voice to be heard. Multiple stories that existed before that moment and others that were formed through shared authorship between the group (Martelly, 2018). Very important and intimate personal details, testimonies, and life experiences. Snippets of environmental noise, a multitude of languages and dialects, and some beautiful singing. What might be inaudible are the light steps of the Queen Bee cat walking around the room, tears leaking, mouths hesitating in speech, eyes flashing with frustration, hands caressing other hands.
Voices, names, and languages spoken are integral parts of social and political identities. The tone set, the stories and how they were told, were shaped by the moment and the circumstances, and by who was listening. It matters that apart from us being there, women refugees shared their stories in a group setting with other women refugees from various countries, and that they hosted us in the familiar and intimate environment they inhabit (Gardner, 2023; Haraway, 2019).
pours out of me like a stream
‘I am sorry for talking so much. It's traumatic and hard to talk about, but it pours out of me like a stream, beyond my control. How do you feel when you hear these things?’ 1
As refugees and displaced people, the participants face daily issues critical to their own survival, and they often feel compelled to adjust their way of speaking depending on who is listening and what is at stake. However, in many other contexts, they lack the necessary accessibility, and they are struggling for vocal space (Srigley, Zembrzycki, and Iacovetta 2018; Tiffe and Hoffmann 2017).
Podcasting allows women and other minorities access to broadcast media but with far fewer restrictions. For one, there are no norms regarding how to speak. In general, the more you sound like yourself the better. (Tiffe and Hoffmann, 2017)
In the case of this podcasting workshop their stories were recorded and would be made public. It’s quite possible that the dynamics of storytelling changed when they realized that their listeners would not be limited to those in the room (Srigley, Zembrzycki, and Iacovetta, 2018). Finding the words to speak into the recorder isn't trivial (Biehl, Ghodsee, and Stevenson, 2020).
During the editing phase, while assisting with the technical aspects of sound editing, I reached another critical point in the process, grappling with the delicate matter of handling voices and stories of others. Choosing podcasting as the medium for publishing the recorded stories provided the time and necessary distance for careful editing in collaboration with the participants, allowing us to collectively decide what would be shared and to apply a filter of ethical considerations to the content.
The recordings were grouped, edited and creatively mixed to reflect the topics discussed. We invited participants to provide radio-oriented aesthetic guidance to capture the atmosphere they wished to convey as narrators. The final productions do not conform to the typical podcast format. Instead, we hacked the popular process to effectively capture the essence of our workshop period at Melissa.
Sounds certainly move, but they also transgress, bundle, vibrate, filter, shatter, and penetrate; they may form into powerful cultural objects, recorded, sampled, cut ’n’ mixed according to a project of errant subjects. (LaBelle, 2018, p. 109)
Despite being pre-recorded, podcasting maintains a sense of liveliness, creating a sense of proximity and co-presence between the audience and the content creators (Euritt, 2022). It is important to note that we were documenting a particular moment in history, marked by politics, wars, migration, current life events, and hardship.