Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the potential of ethnografiction to counter nativism by enabling readers to step into 'other' shoes and travel through narratives that engage the emotional, sensory, embodied elements of experience, confronting nativist narratives en route.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the potential of ethnografiction (Wulff, 2014) to counter nativism by enabling readers to step into 'other' shoes and travel through stories that engage the emotional, sensory, embodied, affective, temporal, psychological and multivocal elements of experience, crossing multiple imagined borders.

In writing her novel The Invisible Crowd (2017), Ellen Wiles drew upon experience as a barrister and volunteer, as well as in-depth research, to write about an Eritrean asylum seeker. The project had both creative and activist motivations, and the narrative form arose in part out of the prevailing nativist narratives' omission of the phenomenological complexity of asylum seekers' experiences. This paper discusses the writing process and the role of literary ethnographic narratives in the context of nativism.