Performing Ethnography and Diaspora: Irish Women Migrants and the Lived Archive
My practice-led research uses photography, moving image, and archiving to explore the experiences of Irish women migrants in the UK. In this piece, I look at both the performance and performativity of ethnography and diaspora from an Irish migrant perspective. I use performance in its broadest sense, to describe the embodied, social acts through which people express who they are. Performativity, following Judith Butler’s definition, is about how repeated actions shape and create identity, rather than just showing it.
In ethnography, as Quetzil Castañeda points out, both the researcher and the participant take part in these performative exchanges that influence how knowledge is formed. My own approach to ethnography focuses on engagement and collaboration with participants. It goes beyond collecting data to include emotional, relational and performative moments of connection between researcher and participant.
Performativity of ethnography
I will discuss the performative aspect of ethnography through the work of anthropologist Quetzil E. Castañeda, who distinguishes between “gathering data” as in surveys, questionnaires, sampling and “doing fieldwork” which is grounded in immersion. Castañeda argues “ethnographic fieldwork can be understood metaphorically as an analogue of invisible theatre, in other words, ‘as’ a kind of interactive performance and art form similar to street theatre;” therefore fieldwork is inherently performative. The researcher engages in close collaboration and engagement with the participants in both the research and the representation. This process can be seen as a co-performance, between participant and fieldworker; audience and performer.
Castañeda says that the audience of the “theatre of everyday life and in ethnographic fieldwork, [emerges] with the active agency and participation of spectators who choose to observe, listen, interact, dialogue, engage, and disengage with the activity in the very moment of its enactment and temporality of performance.” This is true for all ethnographic fieldwork. The participants are briefed before the ethnography begins and must give express consent to the researcher to conduct the fieldwork. Fieldworkers do not impose themselves on the subjects, rather “members of the subject community exercise their agency and control over the extent to which they engage the fieldworker and participate as subjects.”
Castañeda says that fieldwork is inherently performative in that it “involves extensive staging, that is, preparation of both physical, ‘non-natural’ stages or sets for the experiment and elaborate, strict scripting of roles.” In other words, the fieldworker must set up the “stage” for the participants to perform the experience within.
Performance of diaspora
The performance of the migrant in the diaspora is also a useful topic to explore within this context. The term diaspora is used here to describe not only geographic displacement but the affective and cultural negotiations of belonging that arise from it. Within the Irish context, diaspora functions as both a lived experience and a performative process of identity-making.
Marc Scully points out that identity formation in the diaspora is fragmented and socially constructed. He suggests that viewing identity through the lens of diaspora opens space for more mixed and flexible forms of belonging namely identities that don’t fit neatly into one national story. In this sense, diaspora can be seen as a way of understanding identity that isn’t tied to one place, but instead exists in a shifting, in-between space. This idea of diaspora as something beyond national borders was reflected on by then-President Mary Robinson, who described it as “an added richness of our heritage that Irishness is not simply territorial.”
Breda Gray’s research into Irish women migrants sheds some light on how the Irish in England see themselves. For example, the cultural forms associated with being Irish are often considered to be a hallmark of the older 1950s generation, who attended Irish clubs and functions, but one of her participants who migrated later justifies this performance of Irishness by saying, “we never did this at home.” In contrast, within my own fieldwork, I found the Irish women I interviewed very in touch with and aware of this specific performativity. Aoife Whitford, who emigrated from Cork, says that “what I find now is an Irish network is great to have because it gives you that foundation over here of expats to link in with.” The performance is almost a requirement when around these older Irish migrants in spaces such as The London Irish Centre or Irish pubs.
Performativity in Artistic Research
My involvement with Extant has deepened my understanding of performativity within both artistic and ethnographic practice. I have witnessed how performance can operate as a methodology for exploring identity, embodiment and memory beyond the visual register. This experience has encouraged me to think more expansively about how knowledge is produced through the body, through sensory experience and through acts of collaboration. It aligns closely with my own artistic research, in which photography and moving image function not only as tools of documentation but as performative acts in themselves – sites of encounter that embody gesture, touch and relational exchange.
The collaborative ethos at the heart of Extant’s practice – rooted in accessibility, embodiment and co-creation – resonates with the participatory principles of ethnographic performance. I recognise in a shared commitment to process: to creating spaces where meaning emerges through dialogue rather than observation. Working alongside Extant has made me more attentive to the ethics of representation and to the importance of centring lived experience and agency within any act of creative or ethnographic performance.
Conclusion
Through examining the performativity of ethnography and diaspora, this article has explored how Irish women migrants negotiate identity through acts of representation, collaboration, and storytelling. Castañeda’s framing of fieldwork as a form of invisible theatre suggests that ethnography is less about observation than about participation. Similarly, the diasporic experience, as articulated by Scully and Gray, reveals identity as an ongoing performance situated between the personal and the collective, the national and the transnational.
By integrating visual practice with ethnographic engagement, I aim to produce a “lived archive” of Irish women’s migratory memory – an archive that is not fixed but continually re-enacted through collaboration, emotion, and the performance of belonging.
Working with Extant has expanded my understanding of performance as not only a conceptual framework but a lived, embodied practice central to disability justice. Extant’s work demonstrates how performance can reclaim narrative authority, foreground sensory experience, and challenge normative ways of seeing and knowing. In this sense, my exploration of diaspora and ethnographic collaboration finds new resonance: both seek to reframe whose stories are told, and how they are made visible. The company’s commitment to accessibility and co-creation continues to inform my own research and artistic practice, reminding me that performative methodologies are not merely representational tools but vital acts of resistance and reimagining within disabled and diasporic communities alike.
Aisling Keavey, Thinker-In-Residence, November 2025
References
References correspond to sources cited in order of discussion.
1. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, p. 25
2. Castaneda, Quetzil E. 2006. “The Invisible Theatre of Ethnography: Performative Principles of Fieldwork”. Anthropological Quarterly 79 (1): 77. doi:10.1353/anq.2006.0004, p. 77
3. Ibid
4. Ibid, p. 84
5. Ibid, p 78
6. Pink S, Doing Visual Ethnography (Sage, 2007) p 22
7. Scully, M., 2012. The tyranny of transnational discourse: `authenticity’ and Irish diasporic identity in Ireland and England. Nations and Nationalism, 18 (2), p.194
8. Robinson, M, 1995 Cherishing the Irish Diaspora; On a Matter of Public Importance: An Address to the Houses of the Oireachtas http://sites.rootsweb.com/~irlker/diaspora.html
9. Gray, B. Women and the Irish Diaspora, 2004, pp. 109-110
10. Aoife Whitford, in conversation with the author, February 2019