From
my experience at the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) and engagement
with literature by other writers who have faced similar, it is clear that at times
research findings and evidence on nationally contested issues like migration
may prove the positive contributions of migration to development and poverty
eradication prematurely, when the audience in question is not ready to hear the
positions that researchers take. In other words, there may be socially entrenched
stereotypical perceptions of migrants, as is the case in South Africa, which
lead the recipients of the message to ignore it. In such instances, targeting a
policy audience alone when communicating research findings and evidence is insufficient
to impact or influence policy because of regressive societal attitudes which
may also be held by policy makers.
There
then arises, today more than ever, the need to tactfully disseminate research findings
in a more decentralised, artistic and aesthetical manner. This may involve
targeting a ‘popular culture’ non-policy audience through art and other forms
of eye-candy such as film, exhibitions and storytelling in order to drive the
facts home. The success of this process depends on creativity on the part of the
research communicators tasked with coming up with a means of enticing and
attracting this non-policy audience. Where this drive is led by the sole
purpose of myth-busting and de-construction of shared societal misconceptions
and stereotypes of migrants, such creativity may yield positive results, even
in spite of the danger of further subjecting those whom we hope to emancipate
with the research, to further stereotypes, which is a common pitfall.
Research
communication is therefore in my view both a profession and an art. A good
example of tackling a sensitive issue successfully is an ongoing research
project at the ACMS titled Volume 44, which is a collaborative
research project on migrant sex workers in the cities of Johannesburg and
Musina. The South African National Aids Council has estimated that there are
153,000 sex workers in South Africa. A large proportion of these are located in
Gauteng, the smallest but most populous province in South Africa, in which both
Johannesburg and Pretoria are located. Sex work is popularly perceived as
migrant dominated, and work conducted by Marlise Richter and Jo Vearey based on
interviews with 1636 sex workers found that just over 85% of sex workers were
migrants. Of these 39% were internal migrants and 46.3% were cross-border
migrants. Volume 44 builds on a 2010 project which sought to highlight the
experiences of migrant women involved in sex work within inner city
Johannesburg through visual medium in the exhibition ‘Working the City’. At
the time of writing, Volume 44 has staged 3 exhibitions: one in Johannesburg 21
May – 27 June 2014; a second in Amsterdam 25-28 June 2014; and the last one in
Bogota in 14-19 July 2014. The exhibition was highly visual and its Johannesburg
launch, for which I organised the publicity, attracted an attendance of nearly one
hundred people from all walks of life: young students, media professionals, sex
workers and academics.
Sex
work in South Africa is not legal, and activist voices are calling for its
decriminalization in a bid to combat the lack of access to health care, stigma,
discrimination and criminalisation under the Sexual Offences Act faced by those
engaged in it. While both migrant and local sex workers face stigma, particularly
at grassroots levels, migrant sex workers are viewed with the utmost hostility.
Therefore, it is only reasonable to assume that advocacy for the protection of
sex workers in South Africa can only yield tangible policy results once social
attitudes that result in stigma have been eliminated, or at least sensitised,
from below.
In
the coming years, researchers will need to learn to adopt popular packaging for
their research communication if their voice is to be heard beyond the ivory
towers of universities. This is especially true with contentious topics like
migration where research positions are often not what receiving communities and
policy makers may want to hear. Volume 44 is an attempt to use photography,
real-life narratives, audio and other forms of exhibitory art to get ordinary
people thinking in a different way about contested issues. The art, complementing
the research findings about migrant sex work, can provide potent weapons to
communicate unwelcome research messages for positive evidence-based policy making,
social transformation and other envisaged policy outcomes.
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