By Paria Goodarzi (see author bio at bottom). This blog is based on work presented at the Unbordered Futures conference at the University of Edinburgh in March.
Image: Collective Resonance (2025), a participatory risograph zine. Photograph by the author; permission granted.
Keywords: Migration; Iranian diaspora; women; belonging; everyday bordering; participatory research; creative methods; social policy
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Over the past five decades, Iranian migration has been shaped by revolution, war and authoritarian rule. Yet these dominant narratives often flatten the diversity of diasporic experience into a single story of trauma and exile. The Iranian diaspora is not a unified community organised around a shared past. Rather, it is lived through shifting relationships, everyday encounters and ongoing negotiation across places.
What happens when we move beyond these narratives and instead focus on how belonging is experienced in everyday life?
From policy categories to lived experience
Policy discourse around migration focuses on integration, identity and belonging as measurable outcomes. Yet these frameworks struggle to capture lived experience, particularly for women navigating social, cultural and institutional expectations.
In my research with Iranian women in Glasgow, belonging does not emerge as a fixed condition. It is unstable, relational and contradictory. It appears in moments of recognition and misrecognition, navigating institutions, and everyday interactions where people feel seen, judged, included or excluded.
These everyday experiences are missing from policy discussions, which prioritise measurable outcomes over lived realities.
To explore these dimensions, I worked over seventeen weeks with Iranian migrant women living in Scotland, from diverse linguistic backgrounds, including Farsi, Kurdish, Gilaki and Azeri speakers. The methods included workshops combining storytelling, photovoice and timeline mapping, reflective interviews, and curatorial methods that culminated in a co-curated exhibition.
Many of the experiences that are at stake – displacement, adaptation, the quiet daily work of belonging – resist being put directly into words, especially in a second language. Direct questions can push people to name painful or politically loaded material before they’re ready to.
Working through materials, movement and metaphor offered a slower and less exposing way into difficult experiences. An object or image could hold what was harder to say aloud, while allowing participants to decide how much to explain. Rather than relying on direct questions, this approach invited participants to express their experiences through creative forms.
When experience becomes form
During one workshop, participants respond to prompts such as: If pressure had a shape, colour, or feeling, what would it be? What shape does freedom take?
The responses were immediate and embodied.
One participant described pressure through heavy, dark marks across the page. Another spoke about invisibility:
“If I am ignored, it feels like being trapped… like prison, but there is always a way out.”
In her drawing, this “way out” appeared as a door, small but present.
These visual responses are not simply illustrations. They are forms of thinking. They allow participants to externalise experiences and reflect on them from a distance. As another participant explained while layering lines across her work:
“This is the pressure inside me… but this line shows how I overcome it.”
As one participant reflected more broadly:
“Sometimes I don’t know how others see me… so I try to show it here.”
Creative practice, in this sense, becomes a way of working through experience, not just representing it.
Gendered expectations in transition
As the participant group consisted entirely of women, gender was not introduced as an explicit topic, but it emerged consistently throughout the workshops.
Participants reflect on everyday expectations placed on women, particularly around care, domestic labour and emotional responsibility. In one conversation, women discussed how even small acts, such as making tea for a partner, are interpreted differently depending on context.
What may be seen as care in one setting can be read as obligation or inequality in another.
These moments reveal how gender norms are not simply left behind through migration. Instead, they are reworked and renegotiated. Women move between different expectations, adapting, resisting and redefining them in relation to their current lives.
This process is often subtle. It does not always appear in direct statements, but becomes visible through creative expression, through repetition, fragmentation and the layering of forms that suggest tension and adjustment.
Everyday bordering
A key theme emerging from this work is everyday bordering: how institutional structures shape daily life.
Participants describe immigration processes, legal status and services not as distant systems, but as part of everyday experience. These appear in moments of waiting, uncertainty and restricted access to healthcare or support.
For example, one participant described relying on medication sent from Iran because of difficulties accessing appropriate care in the UK. This reflects not only a gap in provision, but broader instability, where formal systems do not fully meet lived needs.
These experiences highlight how policy operates not only through regulation, but through embodied, everyday effects.
Creative space as collective space
The workshops are not only individual acts of expression; they are collective environments.
Participants listen to one another, recognise shared experiences and respond to differences. At times, discussions become deeply emotional. At other moments, they shift into humour or reflection. Not everyone participates in the same way, some speak openly, while others remain quiet or step back.
This uneven participation reflects social interaction and emotional capacity. The space is not uniformly comfortable, but it allows for different forms of engagement.
Several participants described the workshops as spaces they “need” not because they provide solutions, but because they offer opportunities for expression, connection and recognition missing elsewhere.
Unbordering through practice
Borders are often understood as physical or legal boundaries. However, they operate socially, culturally and symbolically, shaping who is recognised, who is heard and how identities are framed.
Creative practice can function as a way of un-bordering these structures. Participants can reframe their experiences, challenge dominant representations and explore alternative ways of understanding belonging.
A drawn line, a repeated mark, or a small door may seem simple. These gestures carry meaning. They represent movement, resistance and possibility.
Implications for policy and practice
This research suggests migration cannot be understood through policy indicators alone. Measures such as employment, language and legal status may overlook emotional experience, informal support networks and the everyday negotiation of belonging.
Policy evaluation should consider recognition, social participation and relationships alongside formal integration measures. Smaller or internally diverse diaspora communities may need sustained support to build trust, leadership and organisational capacity.
Integration support should recognise family and intergenerational experiences, not only individual settlement. Participatory and creative methods could be used in consultation, service design and evaluation, offering more flexible ways to express needs that may not emerge through surveys or formal interviews.
Rethinking belonging
Belonging, in this context, is not a stable outcome. It is lived and negotiated through everyday practices, relationships, emotions and small acts of expression.
It appears in how someone draws a line, how a story is shared, and in how one experience resonates with another.
If we want to understand migration, we need to pay attention to these everyday experiences, not only to what policies measure, but to what people feel, create and share.
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Author Bio
Paria Goodarzi is an Iranian-born artist, social art practitioner and PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow. Her research explores migration, identity and belonging through participatory and arts-based methods, with a focus on Iranian and diasporic women’s everyday experiences.